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Alpine flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains

Chapter 37: Aceraceæ Maple Family
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About This Book

A concise field manual that surveys the alpine and subalpine plants encountered along the Canadian Rockies and the Selkirks accessible by the trans-mountain railway, emphasizing distinct regional assemblages and plant adaptations to differences in moisture and exposure. Species are arranged by botanical families with general keys to families and genera; treatments include ferns, conifers, shrubs and the majority of herbaceous flowering plants while excluding grasses, sedges, and willows. Descriptions are accompanied by plates, watercolour illustrations and photographs, and the text relates local taxa to comparable mountain floras while noting characteristic species, habitats and elevational ranges.

Aceraceæ
Maple Family

Trees or shrubs with watery often saccharine sap, opposite, simple and palmately lobed leaves and axillary or terminal, cymose or racemose, regular, polygamous or diœcious flowers; fruit of 2 long-winged samaras, joined at the base.

Acer glabrum Torr. Smooth Maple.

A shrub or small tree 6—30 feet high, 2—8 inches in diameter, smooth throughout except the scales which are densely soft, hairy inside. Leaves round-cordate with shallow sinus, 2—4 inches broad and nearly as long, more or less deeply 3-lobed or parted, the ovate-acuminate lobes doubly serrate with slender teeth; conspicuously veined. Flowers greenish-yellow, somewhat corymbose on short 2-leaved branchlets appearing after the leaves. Fruit smooth with slightly spreading wings about an inch long.

One of the few deciduous trees of the region, growing on slopes with the other forest trees and in the moist valleys.