![]() ![]() They made everything from fish traps, snowshoe frames, bows and arrows, to furniture, salmon tongs, stir paddles, implement handles, baskets, and oil containers with the branches, and used poles made from the trunks to hold down roofing. But where it really shined was in the utilitarian properties of the wood. Besides eating the sap, both fresh and dried (it is, after all, a maple), they treated polio and dysentery with a mixture of its charcoal, and water and brown sugar (the wood for these therapies had to be harvested in the early morning from the sunrise portion of the tree). The indigenous people of the PNW had a multiplicity of uses for this plant. Acer circinatum (Vine Maple) with an as yet unidentified ensign scale insect One the day these photos were taken I found 2 species of Syneta beetles, numerous weevils, crane flies, syrphid flies, a couple bumble bees, spiders, aphids, and my first ever scale insect, an ensign scale I’m dying to profile, if I could just get a confirmation on its genus. I don’t know if it’s the sweet sap on the leaves or if they’re merely a convenient landing strip, but it’s rare that even a cursory examination of their leaves fails to turn up a bug or ten. ![]() Still, now that my brush-busting days are mostly over (and when I do leave trails I move at a snails pace, using bug-spotting as an excuse for my simple lack of vitality), I’ve grown very fond of vine maple. Add some blackberries to the mix (a very common thicket partner in the lowlands of sw Washington) and you could bleed to death before reaching the other side. I must admit to having had something of a love/frustration relationship with Vine Maple in my former days of traveling cross country in the woods and avoiding trails, because they are often a sprawling tree with thin branches that may intertwine with conspecifics and other shrubs (which is where it gets the name Vine Maple), and a dense thicket of Vine Maple, hazelnut, and alder is virtually impenetrable. Like other maples they have samaras, seeds that are contained at the base of a wing, which twirl down when ripe, often filling the air during the blustery days of fall. Vine maple is more closely related to the Acer palmatum clade of maples in Asia than it is to the other maples of our region. They provide food for dozens of invertebrates, as well as browse for various mammals, and cover for prey species. Bigleaf Maple ( Acer macrophyllum) get all of the press because they are huge, beautiful, shade providing, moss and lichen and licorice fern covered trees that are a substantial habitat unto themselves, but their understory cousins Vine Maple ( Acer circinatum) are an almost equally important component of a healthy mixed forest. ![]()
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