Maple Sugaring: Keeping It Real in New England (Garnet Books) by David K. Leff

Author:David K. Leff [Leff, David K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan
Published: 2015-10-05T21:00:00+00:00

The Bolduc brothers with an old friend

Flaming fall color has probably been the maple’s greatest attraction and economic value ever since tourism’s rise in the late nineteenth century. Garnering such attention is good for syrup producers, who can sell the tree’s sweet essence to tourists eager to take home a memory of the gaudy display. But for sugarmakers, perhaps it’s the leafless, skeletal winter image presaging sapping season that carries the most allure. Especially beautiful are open-field trees with their thick network of ascending branches above a stout trunk rising to a symmetrical oval crown. It’s then that the bark, evolving like a human face with age, is most evident. At first smooth and dark gray, as they age trees develop rough vertical ridges and grooves, which become long picturesque plates that peel away from the trunk on mature trees.

While questions of an afterlife for humans are filled with controversy, maples harvested for their wood can become generation-lasting products with beauty that will command the respect even of those who don’t know the difference between cane and maple sugar. Valued for being hard, close-grained, and durable, maple wood is used in flooring, furniture, bowling alleys and pins, musical instruments, basketball courts and dance floors, wooden spoons and rolling pins, as well as baseball bats. It’s particularly valuable and attractive when the grain is distorted, creating tiger, flame, or bird’s-eye patterns. Spalted wood—irregularly discolored by fungi—is much sought after for bowls and other decorative objects. Dotted and streaked from years of sugaring, taphole lumber is becoming increasingly popular for decorative uses.

Historically, maple wood played an even more important role for gunstocks, ship interiors, butter molds, spinning wheels, and carriage-wheel spokes. In the early industrial era, textile shuttles and spools were of maple, as was wooden type for printing. For its compact, long-lasting energy value as firewood, maple has always been esteemed by those who heat with wood or simply enjoy the warmth and ceremony of a fire.

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STEVE BRODERICK is a sugarmaker who knows trees and how to explain their wonders to landowners and the public at large. A lanky, bearded, and bespectacled man with pale blue eyes and a quiet, sympathetic voice, he spent thirty years as a forester and educator with the University of Connecticut cooperative extension. When Steve talks trees, people listen. He has marked woods for thinning, advised landowners on timber stand improvement, and taught classes on land-use regulation, forest management, and a popular introductory course on maple sugaring. His first experience of sugaring was as a toddler on his great-uncle Harold’s Wilmington, Vermont, dairy farm, and as a young man he tapped the ancient maples on the Brooklyn, Connecticut, town green, boiling outside with sap from up to thirty trees. Later he fabricated a homemade evaporator from a 275-gallon oil tank perched on its side and cut on top to fit a pan made from a folded sheet of stainless steel. Living at the time in a town where a lot

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