Norway maple maple tree types free#

The soil volume is tiny, and tall buildings loom on either side. On Burnside Avenue in downtown Portland, Oregon, just down the street from Powell’s City of Books, there is a planting of Norway maple that separates opposing lanes of traffic. It is not surprising that such resilient trees can outcompete other species. As an urban tree, however, they fit the bill incredibly well, helping to ameliorate the heat-island effect, manage stormwater, and beautify our paved metropolises. Unfortunately, both have done their job too well, and have escaped cultivation to invade native forests and cause real problems in several parts of the country. Norway maple is also incredibly well-adapted to heavy clay and compacted soils, tolerates pollution, and holds up better to drought conditions than sugar maple.

Norway maple maple tree types free#

Both are relatively free of major pest problems, and transplant well. Norway maple is hardy to USDA Zone 4, making it suitable as a medium to large tree in most of the US. Amur maple is hardy to USDA Zone 2, fitting the bill for a small urban tree in regions short on options of plants from which to choose. Easy for producers to grow, they thrive where other species may not survive. Take the Amur and Norway maples, two resilient species commonly found in our cities. The problem isn’t trees that flourish, but trees that won’t stay where we put them. We should care less about their provenance and focus more on their behavior. We need plants that do well in our cities. If that is the case, how do the non-native and introduced species outcompete them? There also are “native” plants that have become “invasive”: western juniper, for instance, now covers more than 2 million acres of grassland in Oregon, its spread aided by fire suppression.

I often hear that we should only plant native plants because they are best adapted to a site or region. Whether native or introduced, plants that thrive well enough to escape cultivation are doing exactly what we asked of them. We want to punish them with drought, heat, pavement, and poor and compacted soils while still enjoying their shade, beautiful flowers, lovely scent, and fruit. In the city, we want them to survive stress, even to flourish.

We should think, however, about what is it we are asking our landscape plants to do. As someone who works with the nursery industry and specifically with this issue of weedy or invasive plants, it sometimes feels that folks believe all introduced plants are bad, and we should only grow natives to protect our ecosystems. Warm memories aside, these two species are landscape plants turned weeds, which escaped cultivation and invaded large areas across the Southeast. As a kid, I loved playing with the tiny “berries” of the privet and sucking the nectar from the honeysuckle flowers. The summers of my youth in Eastern North Carolina smelled of Chinese privet ( Ligustrum sinense) and Japanese honeysuckle ( Lonicera japonica).