You right you right.
Although we are taking about silver maple I have a handful of red maples I'm developing as well. To be honest most of my silver maples are probably red maple silver crosses of varying degrees because they all seem to display red maple characteristics especially leaf shape. All the true silver maples you see in nursery stock doesn't really display the varying leaf characteristics like wild grown silver maples. At times I've almost new I had a red maple then the silver maple leaf pop's up the next growing season to leave me confused
. I've tried everything to discern or Distinguish the two from each other to no good results. Bud shape nope... leaf shape,, big nope.... bark color nope...you could almost Certainly tell the difference when the tree's start to really bark up because silver maple have that Flaky bark that comes off in little strips. But who among use has tree's old enough to see real bark formation besides maybe you..when they are younger Material they might as well be the same tree is how I look at them.
Btw amazing base on that little guy!! Please send pictures of it's development on this thread if you don't mind. I think anyone would be proud to developing a root base like that on any type of maple.
Yeah, the Red x Silver hybrid maples are quite popular street trees in urban and suburban areas in the midwest. They boast the extra cold hardiness of the silver maple plus the red or orange fall colors from the Red Maple. If you are finding seeds or volunteers in an urban or suburban area, it's very hard to say exactly what it is....but you can still use them for bonsai either way!Although we are taking about silver maple I have a handful of red maples I'm developing as well. To be honest most of my silver maples are probably red maple silver crosses of varying degrees because they all seem to display red maple characteristics especially leaf shape. All the true silver maples you see in nursery stock doesn't really display the varying leaf characteristics like wild grown silver maples. At times I've almost new I had a red maple then the silver maple leaf pop's up the next growing season to leave me confused
So I'm pretty sure my tree's are silver maple but they could be crosses with red maple just because of the variation of leaf shape. Most nursery stock silver maples don't have a variation of leaf shape like wild collected silver maples I've been growing. Btw if you look back are the first couple of pages of this post you will see a few of my tree's in leaf I believe.
To me silver maples and red maples pretty much behave the same as far as growth Characteristics. They may grow in different ways like branch structure but how the internodes explode early spring then shorten late summer to less the Centimeters in some cases are same same. Wood is still soft on both tree's and the heal pretty much the same.
