DECIDUOUS TREES. 
345 
white and the green surfaces of the leaves with a sparkling pleasant 
effect. It is a tree for large grounds and wide streets, and must 
have ample room. Forty feet is the least distance apart that silver 
maples should be planted in streets, and no more than they will 
completely fill in twenty years. The head of the silver maple does 
not break into good masses of light and shade until it is old, and 
in the mean time the projection of its numerous spreading branches 
scatter the light on a great number of small points, and develop 
no broad, deep, or well-defined shadows. 
The silver maple is not quite so early in leaf as the sugar 
maple ; the leaves are not of so beautiful a green, nor so generous 
in quantity, nor so warm in their manner of reflecting the sunlight, 
nor so brilliant in autumn. As a lawn tree for the class of grounds 
treated of in this work, it cannot be considered so desirable as 
many others ; the great size it quickly attains requiring a space for 
its perfect development that may be more interestingly filled with 
trees of smaller size. Of course this objection will not apply so 
forcibly to places where one or more acres is devoted to lawn, nor 
to places where the proprietor wants but few trees, and those 
quickly, nor to those who will make a specialty of the maple 
family alone. 
Red-flowering or Scarlet Maple (Red- bud Maple). 
Acer rubriim . — The three names all characterize the spring and 
autumn peculiarities of the tree. It is covered with small red buds, 
which open before the expansion of the leaves in spring ; and the 
brilliancy of its scarlet leaves in autumn makes it then one of the 
most conspicuous of trees, and constitutes a distinguishing beauty, 
which would, alone, make it a desirable tree. It flourishes best in 
a soil much richer than that which suits the sugar maple, and 
attains its greatest size in ground where its roots can reach the 
moisture of a stream. There are specimens on streams near Phila- 
delphia seventy to eighty feet high, with a proportional amplitude of 
lateral growth, touching the meadow on one side and the stream 
upon which they grow upon the other with the graceful droop of 
their lower branches. On rich uplands it has a compacter growth 
and darker foliage, and becomes a round-headed tree of about forty 
