Acer campestre Seeds | Field Maple
LATIN NAME: Acer campestre
COMMON NAME: Field Maple, Hedge Maple
Plant Profile
In the British Isles the field maple is the only maple that arrived without help, and its native range there stops at the Welsh border and the Scottish line. Across the rest of Europe it is a tree of hedges, woodland edges and dry calcareous slopes from Spain to the Caucasus. The small, greenish-yellow flowers open with the leaves in upright clusters, and they are worked hard by bees and flies as one of the first useful nectar sources of the year.
The fruits are paired samaras, each with a wing 2 to 3 cm long, and the two wings of a pair are set almost in a straight line, forming a half turn. The arrangement makes the falling fruit spin like a rotor and slows its descent, and the angle is wide enough to separate field maple from the Norway maple at a glance.
Snap a leaf stalk and a drop of white latex appears. The milky sap is common to several maples, and in this species it flows freely from quite small shoots, which is handy when checking a hedge in winter.
The wood is pale cream to buff, hard, dense and close-grained, with a silky surface that takes polish well. Turners and joiners used it for bowls, platters and tool handles, and its toughness made it a timber for cogs and rollers in mills. It also burns long and hot, which is why a coppiced field maple was worth more to a household than to a sawmill.
Town foresters have spent the last few decades looking for trees that will tolerate drought, salt and confined roots, and field maple has come out well. The most widely planted selection is ‘Elsrijk’, raised in the Netherlands for a compact, uniform crown and narrow habit; it now lines streets across Europe, and the plain species is sold for the same purpose.
Science & Biotechnology
Maple foliage is rich in hydrolysable tannins. Acertannin, a gallotannin first characterised in this genus and named for it, occurs in the leaves of several species, and the autumn leaf litter is slow to break down partly because those tannins persist. The compounds are of interest in wood chemistry rather than medicine, and the sap runs sweet only in the sugar maple, not in this one.
Uses & Benefits
On calcareous soils in lowland Britain the field maple is a defining tree of the ash-maple woodland type, growing with ash and dog’s mercury over thin, base-rich loam. The same soils made it a hedgerow tree, and for centuries it was cut on a coppice rotation with ash and hazel, the poles going for tool handles and the brush for firewood.
In the Midlands and southern England the presence of field maple is one of the signs a hedge is old rather than planted in the last century. It layers readily where branches touch the ground, so a hedge line can spread along a boundary without any help from seed.
Growing from Seed
Acer campestre is a small to medium tree, rarely reaching 20 m, with a rounded, dense crown and a trunk that becomes fissured and ridged with age. The leaves are five-lobed and small, usually 4 to 6 cm across, dark green above and paler below, turning a clear butter yellow in autumn. Shoots and petioles exude a milky sap when broken, another useful character in the field.
Collect the samaras as soon as the wings turn brown and sow them while fresh, 1 to 1.5 cm deep in a gritty loam, leaving the pan outside for the winter. Stored seed wants a cold, moist spell before sowing. Thin the seedlings when they stand about 5 cm and line them out at 15 cm, lifting them on when the stems reach 40 to 60 cm.
Plant a hedge at 30 to 45 cm spacing for a stock-proof line or 60 cm for a garden hedge, and clip the sides in winter while the wood is dormant. A two-tier cut, wider at the base than at the crown, keeps the lower branches alive. Watch for aphids in early summer and for tar spot on the leaves in a wet autumn.
Our Take
My own hedge is a mix, and the field maple in it is the calmest plant of the lot: no feeding, no pruning beyond the annual cut, and a good yellow show every October. If you like the family, the Norway maple is the tree for a bigger space and David’s maple the one for bright autumn colour on a small scale. The field maple’s wild partner in the ash-maple woods is European ash, and the two still look well together.
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