SAPINDACEA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 7 
ACER SACCHARUM, var. LEUCODERME. 
Sugar Maple. 
LEAVEs 3 to 5-lobed, yellow-green and pubescent on the lower surface. 
Acer Saccharum, var. leucoderme. Acer leucoderme, Small, Bull. Torrey Bot. Club, xxii. 367 
Acer barbatum, var. Floridanum, Sargent, Silva N. Am. (1895) ; xxiv. 64. — Robinson, Gray Syn. Fl. N. Am. i. 
ii. 100 (in part) (1891). pt. i. 440.— Mohr, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. vi. 606 
Acer Floridanum, var. acuminatum, Trelease, hep. Mis- (Plant Life of Alabama). —Gattinger, Fl. Tennessee, 
sourt Bot. Gard. v. 99, t. 11 (not Acer acuminatum, Wal- 116. 
lich) (1894). 
A tree, usually from twenty to twenty-five feet in height, with a trunk a foot in diameter, but 
occasionally attaining a height of forty feet and forming a trunk eighteen or twenty inches in diameter, 
and with a rather compact round-topped head of comparatively short and slender branches. The 
bark on the trunk of old individuals, particularly near the ground, is dark brown or often nearly 
black, and broken by deep furrows into narrow ridges covered with closely appressed scales, but on 
younger stems and on the large branches it is close and light gray or grayish brown. The branchlets 
are slender and glabrous; dark green when they first appear, they become bright red-brown and 
lustrous during their first summer, when they are marked by numerous small oblong pale lenticels, and, 
gradually growing darker in their second year, finally become light gray-brown. The winter-buds are 
ovate, acute, dark brown, glabrous, and rarely more than a sixteenth of an inch in length, with accrescent 
inner scales which are bright crimson and very conspicuous when the trees are in flower in early spring. 
The leaves are borne on elongated slender glabrous petioles and vary from two inches to three inches 
and a half in diameter; they are usually truncate or slightly subcordate at the base, and more or less 
deeply divided into from three to five acute lobes which are caudate-acuminate and coarsely and sinuately 
dentate or undulate ; coated below as they unfold with long matted pale caducous hairs, at maturity the 
leaves are thin, dark dull green above and bright yellow-green and coated below with soft close velvety 
pubescence. In the autumn the leaves often turn bright scarlet on the upper surface before falling. 
The flowers are produced on slender glabrous pedicels, and are glabrous or slightly villose and rather 
smaller than those of the northern Sugar Maple. The carpels of the fruit are villose until nearly 
grown, with long scattered pale hairs, but are glabrous at maturity; their wings are wide-spreading 
or divergent. 
Acer Saccharum, var. leucoderme inhabits the banks of streams and rocky gorges, and is distributed 
from the valley of the Yadkin River in Stanly County, North Carolina, to northern Georgia, eastern 
Tennessee, central Alabama, western Louisiana, and southern Arkansas. It was long confounded with 
the variety Floridanum of the Sugar Maple, from which it chiefly differs in the yellow-green lower 
surface of the rather thinner leaves and in their less prominent secondary lobes.’ 
1 Acer barbatum of Michaux was adopted in the second volume almost universally adopted by American botanists as the name of 
of this work as the name of the Sugar Maple and its varieties. the Sugar Maple, and although the identity of Marshall’s species is 
Acer barbatum, however, appears to have been based originally on certainly open to doubt, and the name is not distinct enough from 
two species, for Michaux’s type of his Acer barbatum, preserved that of the Silver Maple, the Acer saccharinum of Linneus, to really 
at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, in Paris, consists of flowering justify its use, it will perhaps be best, for the sake of uniformity of 
branches of the Sugar Maple, a branch of the Red Maple with nomenclature, to adopt Marshall’s name rather than to find another 
leaves only, and a branch with fruit of the Red Maple; and the for the Sugar Maple. If this view is adopted, Acer barbatum, Sar- 
name, therefore, can hardly be used for the Sugar Maple. The gent, Silva N. Am. ii. 97, becomes Acer Saccharum, Marshall ; Acer 
older Acer Saccharum of Marshall (Arbust. Am. 4) has recently been barbatum, var. Floridanum, Sargent, becomes Acer Saccharum, var. 
