Beautifully Shaded With Red

The most interesting and perhaps most easily found of all the winged fruits are the paired samaras or keys of the maples. Each kind has two seeds protected by veined, thin coverings that expand into appendages shaped somewhat like the wings of a dragonfly. These wings sometimes hang below the seeds as in the sugar maple keys or the sycamore maple. They diverge at varying angles in all the other kinds, slightly in the red maple, and most widely in the Norway maple keys.

Three kinds, the red, silver and sugar maple fruits, grow in bunches with stems all the same length, while the box elder, sycamore, and striped maple keys hang in drooping clusters or racemes. The keys of the Norway maple grow from stems of varying lengths that curve gracefully downward. The silver maples ripen their fruits earliest, and their keys hold the largest of the maple seeds.

The keys of the red maples are the daintiest in form and color and most delicate in texture. I have seen red maples in the woods loaded with keys a light, soft, waxy brown, and others near by with an abundant harvest of these fruits light brown in the seed pocket portion but beautifully shaded with red in the thin part of the wing. After they fall they soon disappear from the ground. "When the yellow woods let fall the ripened mast" is the time to gather fruits of the oaks, the hickories, and the butternuts.

The familiar fruit of the oak, which sits in its unique little cup, furnishes as many different distinguishing points in nut and cup as there are kinds of oaks that produce them. There are just two common ones that have very shallow, saucerlike cups, the big red oak acorn and the smaller, beetshaped pin oak acorn. Both belong in the black oak group. All acorns of this group have broad, thin, pointed cup scales, and because they do not ripen until the second autumn after they form, Nature has provided them with protective, woolly coverings which are just inside the thin shell of the nut.

Scarlet and black oak acorns are satiny and hairy and their cups are often similar in shape, but in those of the black oak the points of the cup scales near the nut stand away from their bases and the nut, while those of the scarlet oak are all so tightly pressed together that the outer row touches the nut. The acorns of the black oak group are much easier to find for they are produced in greater abundance and are too bitter to be pleasing to the taste of animals.