Acer Species, Amur Maple, Siberian Maple, Tatarian Maple

This small tree of northeast Asia is pretty with several cultivars available. Some cultivars are large shrubs and some bear a bright red ...Read Morefall color while the mother species is usually bright yellow. It has been occasionally planted in the Chicago, IL, area since the 1970's. Most bigger nurseries sells some there, used more by landscape architects than the general public. Sometimes it is used as a sheared hedge. I have not seen it escape cultivation in Illinois so far, but I certainly can believe that it has escaped cultivation in WI & MN, that are more similar to its native Siberia and north China, so that it is another Asian invasive plant.

The Wisconsin and Minnesota DNR's consider this species invasive, and Connecticut has placed it on its list of potentially invasive plant...Read Mores. It has naturalized in 4 provinces and 15 northeastern and midwestern states.

We planted a hedge of Amur maple after seeing one with beautiful red fall colors. It's about thirty-five years old now. The individual ...Read Moretrees tend to lose large branches and leave gaps. The fall color is short-lived and quite variable from one tree to the next. When the weather is right, the hedge is spectacular, but most of the time it is just a fairly nice hedge. Now that Amur Maple is being considered an invasive plant in Minnesota, we'll probably start replacing it with something else.

we have four of these in our Denver tree-lawn and they are beautiful small trees, especially in fall; we prune ours up with a single trun...Read Morek and branches above head height; they have served well to punctuate our plantings along the street

however they have suffered numerous breaks from spring snows; ours are about 20 years old and i wonder if they normally decline after that — we've had four seasons of drought and a very hot summer, and despite regular watering ours show a lot of dead branches; they also sucker extensively so one needs to prune both the trunks and the lower branches diligently or you'll have a thicket