I could use help to identify this maple tree that was given to me by a friend several years ago. It has been fenced against deer and the horses on the other side of the fence since we planted it, and I don't know if that has caused the columnar shape or if that's it's normal growth type. It has shades of red at all stages of growth, and so I'm leaning towards Red Maple. The leaves are not particularly shiny, however, except when newly emergent. Here are some photos and any help would be greatly appreciated as there are so many maples!


New spring growth


Whole tree view


Spent blossoms?


Fall color

I know nothing about Maple's ... just that I love them! This one grows in Washington state:

Big-Leaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.nwplants.com/busine...

Looks like a Norway maple, but I can't say for certain. One test you can do is pull off a leaf and look at the sap that emerges from the stem. Norway maples have milky sap. Native maples have clear sap.

Hopefully it is a Norway maple, it does look like one, because they're less likely to poison horses according to this Cornell research article "We now expect not only red maple, but also sugar maple and silver maple leaves to poison horses. Similar analysis of Norway maple leaves indicates that poisoning due to the ingestion of leaves from this ornamental tree is much less likely."

http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/p...

I don't know if this is the latest info as I haven't kept up with it since we no longer have horses.

I finally got out to the pasture and pulled a leaf off - milky sap. So I guess it must be a Norway Maple. Thanks for that tip Kent!

Sue - Thanks for the heads up about the problem with horses. It's a neighbor's field and he mostly grows alfalfa in it and just puts them in there from time to time, but I think I'll beef up my fence on his side a bit to make sure nothing bad happens. His mules snapped a branch off last summer and I was planning to do something anyway. I had never heard of maples causing problems like that - you learn something new every day!