Freeman Maple

Freeman maple is a hybrid, a deliberate cross between red maple and silver maple, engineered to combine the best qualities of both parents. It inherits red maple's fall color and silver maple's growth rate, and in practice that means a large shade tree reaching sixty-five to eighty feet that establishes quickly and delivers reliable fall color in burgundy, gold, orange, red, and yellow. If you have a newer subdivision in Western Washington with young street trees that seem to be growing faster than everything around them and turning vivid colors in October, there is a good chance you are looking at a Freeman maple cultivar.

The value proposition here is speed. Freeman maple gives you shade canopy in a timeline that most large hardwoods cannot match, and it does it with better structural integrity than silver maple, which is notorious for weak wood and included bark. It takes full sun and the heavy soils common to lowland development sites. The trade-off is that it inherited some of silver maple's surface rooting tendency, so it will eventually lift sidewalks and compete with turf. Site it where root space is generous, not in a four-foot parking strip. Several named cultivars are in the regional trade, selected for form and color consistency, and most perform well through the Puget Sound lowlands.