🍁 Maple
Acer rubrum
Fall color's greatest hits album — though in Florida it's more of a single.
Sun
Full sun to part shade
Days to harvest
N/A — ornamental (decades to full stature)
Spacing
30–40 feet from structures
Soil pH
5.5–7.0
How to grow
In Florida, red maple is your maple — it's native, handles wet feet and heat, and actually gives you a blush of fall color. Plant in fall or winter so roots establish before summer's blast furnace. Dig the hole twice as wide as the root ball but no deeper; maples suffocate when planted too deep.
Water & feeding
Water deeply the first two years; established red maples are admirably drought-tolerant for a tree that also tolerates flooding.
Common problems
- Leaf scorch in brutal heat and drought — crispy edges are the tree waving a white flag
- Girdling roots from being planted too deep or left in the pot too long
- Tar spot and leaf spot — ugly, rarely fatal, the tree equivalent of a bad haircut
Harvest
Ornamental: prune in late summer to fall to avoid the spring sap-bleed geyser. Remove crossing branches and keep a single leader while young.
Nerdy fact: Red maple seeds are samaras — little helicopters engineered by evolution, each one spinning at the exact rate physics demands. Nature's drones, minus the FAA paperwork.