She senses that an uncertain future lies ahead for this small mountainside. She has felt her sap flowing earlier in the season. Though her limbs are ever more susceptible to high winds and the borers continue to do their work and the woodpeckers will come and then the ants, she will nurture life even as she continues her slow return to the forest floor.Īnd she senses what might be coming for the younger maples that grow around her in the sugar bush.Įvery year there is less and less snowpack to insulate her roots. She is well established and has weathered many changes. Some years, she is more susceptible to fungal diseases that turn the bottoms of her leaves black by late August. Where she has sustained damage, sugar maple borers have found opportunity to work their way beneath her bark. She lost several small limbs in the 1998 ice storm, and then more during Tropical Storm Isaias in 2020. She survived the 1947 fires, which curved and snaked around this mountain on both sides but spared the sugar bush where she grows. Descendants of this family still tap into her bark each winter. They tapped with spigots and buckets and carted vats of sap out of the woods with horses. After this place where she grows came to be called “West Newfield, Maine,” a family of sugarmakers came to the forest.
It is known that she has been tapped most every season for the last seventy years. For a century and a half, she has been a source of sustenance to white-tailed deer, moose, porcupine, squirrels, and snowshoe hare who eat her bark, twigs, and fruit. Her roots are interwoven with mycorrhizal fungi, which in turn weaves her more deeply into the temperate hardwood forest where she grows. She drinks in sunlight.Īt 150 years old, she is a grandmother tree. In the daylight, pressure exerted from the work of her leaves pulls sugared water up her trunk-through the xylem that carries the starch that she stored in her roots last summer and fall-and up to her leaves as they photosynthesize. As the days and nights do this dance-this gentle ritual of warm to cold to warm-the sugar maple’s own dance begins.Īt night, she pulls more water into her roots. At night, temperatures sink back down into winter’s cold, setting down frost by morning and sometimes a fresh layer of snowfall that melts as the sun skims the late winter sky. The sun reflects off the crusted ring of packed snow that is beginning to sink towards the base of her trunk as she begins to wake from her winter sleep.
In mid-March, nearing the spring equinox, the days begin to warm in West Newfield, Maine.
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