How to Find Curly Maple Trees
Curly maple trees are desirable for woodworkers. Furniture makers consider curly maple hardwood preferable to other maples for its interesting patina when finished. Curly maple planks are easily identified when compared with other cut maple boards. Identify cut curly maple wood planks by the red-brown wavy grain lines in the plank. Curly maple is sometimes referred to as 'tiger maple' in antique furniture. The curly maple tree can be identified at maturity in a forest. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
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Take your guidebook to the woods. You can identify the maple trees by verifying their kind in your guidebook. Maple trees are deciduous, and their leaves change color in the fall. Maple saplings have a smooth gray bark. Curly maples, a genetic variation of maple trees, are rare. The wood grain is clearly different from other maples, such as silver, black, red or sugar maples.
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Mark the trees you suspect as curly maple with colored tape. Curly maple tree variations occur in only 3-5% of soft wood sugar maples and .5% of hardwood maples. This means for every hundred sugar maples there are at best five curly maples. Recognizing the differences in your maples will protect the destruction of valuable wood products in your wooded lot.
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Survey your wooded lot with the tagged trees. Do not cut down maples to verify their wood. The bark of a curly maple tree shows a variation that indicates the wood has a curly grain pattern, which is that it is more wrinkled than other maples growing nearby. If you find a tree with this kind of bark texture, cut only a limb to verify your guess. Cut curly maples have a clearly distinctive grain pattern that identify them as "curly."
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Eliminate other kinds of trees to thin your woodlot. Thinning or managing the woods requires avoiding the distinct bark patterns of a curly maple. The saplings of curly maples and other maples are relatively the same, but mature saplings reveal the curly bark texture. There may be slight differences in curly maple leaves that appear sooner than the wrinkled bark texture.
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Contact your local forestry service to verify the leaves and bark of your curly maple trees. Trees can be genetically marked with your state forester, so as not to eliminate the rare curly maple saplings. Woodworkers use this curly maple for finishes in tables, cabinets, and turning. Curly maple will yield higher lumber prices.
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Tips & Warnings
It is difficult to assess whether a sapling will mature into a curly maple. Genetic marking is expensive and time consuming. Choosing to conserve mature curly maples may be an easier method than identifying saplings of curly maple.
