The Sugar Maple is botanically called Acer saccharum . The bark is light gray to gray-brown and becomes deeply furrowed and rough with age . The overall length of the bud can be from 6 to 12mm long and medium to dark brown in colour. It is 2-3 inches wide in places and exposes the inside natural wood of the tree. BUDS The terminal bud is narrow and pointed with 6 to 8 pairs of slightly hairy scales. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. …but the bark on mature trees becomes furrowed with large flat scales that seem to vertically peel off the tree. When I finally learned to identify sugar maple bark I called it “the bark that looks like nothing else.” Not easy to explain. Red maple barks peels off easily (left) while sugar maple bark resists peeling, even when it looks like it will come off (right). Sugar maple is relatively deep-rooted, with many extensively-branched laterals [30,36]. at the location and the soil should be sandy to loamy. Twigs are a shiny, reddish-brown . Sugar maple is monoecious or dioecious . Dear sir or madam, I live in NW Washington, DC. The leaves are lobed and the flowers are yellow. I do not see bugs in the crack or bore holes. The bark of a mature sugar maple can be somewhat scaly. Other maple species can be used as a sap source for maple syrup, but some have lower sugar contents and/or produce more cloudy syrup than these two. The tree likes Sun to half-shade,brown leaf margins indicate a lack of water. In maple syrup production from Acer saccharum , the sap is extracted from the trees using a tap placed into a hole drilled through the phloem, just inside the bark. Acer nigrum (black maple) is a species of maple closely related to A. saccharum (sugar maple), and treated by some authors as a subspecies of it, as Acer saccharum subsp. Red vs. Brown twigs and buds One, a Sugar Maple, has a 4-5 feet vertical crack in the bark of the tree trunk. I have two 18-20-year old Maple trees in my back yard. Bulls-eyes found only on red maple. It has been used in the treatment of coughs, diarrhoea etc. Sugar maple is long-lived and plants can survive for 300 to 400 years . The Tree is a deciduous tree, it will be up to 40 m (131 ft) high. The twigs are shiny green to reddish brown in colour and slim. Herb: Sugar Maple Latin name: Acer saccharum Synonyms: Acer saccharinum Family: Aceraceae (Maple Family) Medicinal use of Sugar Maple: A tea made from the inner bark is a blood tonic, diuretic and expectorant. nigrum.. This makes for a lot of variation and can be quite confusing.