Week 12: Sugar Maple, Annika Hansteen-Izora, Walter H. Crockett

Fig. 1. “Tapping the Grove, Boiling the Sap,” from Crockett, How Vermont Maple Sugar is Made, p. 6.

Headnote#

Welcome to maple time, if you live in my corner of North America. The sap of the sugar maple (Acer Saccharum) has been flowing now in most places for several weeks, and the sugar shacks are busy boiling off water to concentrate sugar. Sap runs vary each year in timing and length based primarily on temperature (freezing nights and warming days), though the sap’s sugar content is affected by factors such as the previous summer’s weather. Like with the sap they carry, sugar maple saplings wait to grow until the circumstances are right, and can persist in dense woods for long periods of time until taller trees fall or are removed, at which points they seize the opportunity.

Which is all to say that maple season is a time of contingency and kairos—that is, of indeterminate chances aligning to produce the fullness of time, the ripe moment. Such experiences can feel providential, and we might associate them with, or mistake them for, things like economic opportunity and royal sovereignty, as demonstrated by the first two readings below. But the flipside of contingency and kairos are, as these readings also hint, revolutions (and other “turbulent causes”) and mystery (“certain wonderful chemical processes”). So while maple syrup production might seem similar to the extractive industries that predominate today (fossil fuels, rare-earth metals, digital data, human labor), it is a fundamentally different practice due to the magic of the maple tree—not only its xylem, or sapwood, but the seasonal weaving of nutrients throughout and beyond its parts, from sun and soil to buds and roots through trunk and taps into vats and, maybe, our mouths. Consider this magic, as Hansteen-Izora beautifully writes, among the many “alternative timelines plants offer in their cycles of life and death.” And seize the moment this spring, as the motivational content might say, but also realize that the moment may seize you back.

The maple (Acer) species are part of a large, exciting family (Sapindaceae) known as the soapberries. This family includes the temperate buckeye and horse chestnut—both special trees to me—but also tropical fruit-bearing species such as lychee, longan, rambutan, and ackee.

Fig. 1. “Tapping the Grove, Boiling the Sap,” from Crockett, How Vermont Maple Sugar is Made, p. 6.

Readings#

1. The facts related by learned naturalists, botanists, historians, and travellers, and their reflections on the properties and productions of the North American and Canadian Sugar Maple Tree, here presented to the consideration of the reader, cannot fail to interest every nobleman and gentleman possessed of landed property in England, Ireland, and Scotland, and convince them of the certainty of what is here reported[…] The source here presented seems so promising, that if, from revolutions or other causes, all Europe were deprived of foreign sugars, this tree alone, planted in sufficient number, and properly attended to, would supply all its wants; and it may not perhaps be too much to say, that the time may come when that shall take place, either from turbulent causes, or from experience of its convenience and utility.

“Address,” from E. Jones, Review of Facts And Observations, Made by Naturalists, Botanists, Historians, And Travellers, On the Properties And Productions of the Sugar Maple Tree: the Process of Extracting Its Sap, Converting it Into Sugar, &c., &c. (London: E. Colyer, 1832), p. v.#

2. Of all the sweets that man has discovered in a natural state, or has manufactured by processes of refining or blending, the most delicately flavored, the most supremely satisfying to the utmost refinement of taste, is maple syrup. If the figure of speech may be permitted in these days of an ever widening democracy, maple sugar and maple syrup are the reigning monarchs of the blood royal in the kingdom of sweets. […]

   Maple syrup has been called liquid sunshine. To the hard-headed, unsentimental individual, that expression might seem to be an example of the extravagant exuberance of the typical spring variety of poet; but in reality the expression will stand the prosaic test of the scientific laboratory. The sweetness of the sap stored in the maple tree depends in large measure upon the influence of the sunlight upon the leaves of the maple during the summer days preceding the spring sugar season. In some mysterious manner, known only to Nature, the green leaves, under the direct influence of the sun’s rays, store up starch and sugar, and in the laboratory of the maple tree, drawing moisture from roots extending deep down to the marble and granite foundations of the Green Mountains, certain wonderful chemical processes are performed, whereby the sunlight and the water from the mountain springs, and the wholesome ingredients of the soil which give such a superior flavor to the products of Vermont farms and dairies and orchards, unite to make the maple sap out of which the sugar and the syrup are manufactured, that have made the Green Mountain State famous.

“Vermont Maple Sugar,” from Walter H. Crockett, How Vermont Maple Syrup is Made (St. Albans, Vermont: Department of Agriculture of the State of Vermont, 1915), p. 5.#

3. It is in our best interest to question the metronome of capitalism and the ways it arranges time, both structurally and interpersonally. It’s in our best interest to study the alternative clocks that exist. I’m curious about CP time, crip time, Black and Indigenous frameworks of time, pandemic time, jazz constructs of time in the never-ending riff, how time moves with trauma, how time moves with grief, queer time, the alternative timelines plants offer in their cycles of life and death. It’s in our best interest to offer curiosity around ways we can construct our own clocks.

Annika Hansteen-Izora, “Time is Water,” Annika is Dreaming (May 30, 2022).#

Supplementum#

• Rasheedah Phillips, “Time Zone Generator,” from Time Zone Protocols (2022).

• Joseph Bruchac, James Bruchac, Jesse Bruchac, and Amy Hook-Therrien, Gluskonba and the Maple Trees (Summertown, Tennessee: 7th Generation, 2024).

• Abagael Giles, “Warm Nights Bring Some Anxiety for Vermont’s Maple Syrup Makers,” WBUR (March 11, 2026).

• Nina Foster, “Tradition in Turmoil: Sugar Maple and Climate Change,” JSTOR Daily (March 28, 2025).

Fig. 2. “Natural range of sugar maple,” from Sugar Maple: An American Wood (Washington: Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service, 1980), p. 2.