Acer x freemanii
Red maples are gorgeous, with their brightly colored leaves and towering growth. Silver maples are appealing because they grow fast and vigorously.
The Freeman or Freeman’s maple, Acer x freemanii, is a hybrid cross between silver and red maples that combines the best of both, which is why it’s an absolute favorite of arborists and growers alike.
You’ll find it along streets, in urban areas, parking lot islands, and parks all over the place.
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Consider me a member of the Freeman maple fan club. I’m guessing, since you’re here, you’re also interested in this fantastic tree.
If so, this guide is going to help you become familiar with the tree and how to care for it, from planting to warding off pests, and more.
Here’s what I’ll cover:
Before we dive into caring for this plant, let’s take a look at its origin story.
Cultivation and History
The original Freeman maple was created when Oliver Myles Freeman hybridized a red maple, A. rubrum, and a silver maple, A. saccharinum, in 1933.
Freeman was a botanist at the National Arboretum who bred native trees to create exciting new crosses.
Not only did he create the Freeman maple, but he also bred a southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) and a sweetbay magnolia (M. virginiana) cross to create the ‘Freeman’ hybrid, which is still popular today.
Freeman’s maple combines the best of both parent species, with strong branch attachment and beautiful foliage in the fall thanks to the red maple, and the fast, vigorous growth of the silver maple.
Depending on the cultivar, they can grow four times faster than the red maple.
Silver maples typically don’t thrive in urban conditions because they’re sensitive to pollution, but red maples are totally fine, and the Freeman’s type takes on the red maple’s adaptability.
There are actually natural crosses of the silver and red maple out in the wild, since Acer trees hybridize easily, but Freeman maples were carefully cultivated to combine all the best qualities of the two species.
The original Freeman maple grows between 40 to 60 feet tall and about half as wide, though many of the modern cultivars stay much smaller.
They generally have an upright, pyramidal form, but cultivars can vary, with some having rounder or more narrow forms. At the center is a strong, straight trunk with gray, fissured bark.
The leaves grow opposite each other and each has a distinctly toothed margin and five deep lobes.
I love watching them move in the breeze because the topsides are medium green, while the undersides have a silvery hue. It gives a kaleidoscope-like effect when the leaves are moving. In the fall, the leaves become bright orange or red with paler undersides.
In the spring, red clusters of flowers form at the ends of the branches. These inconspicuous flowers later develop into seed pods known as samaras.
Samaras are the two-winged, helicopter-like pods that twirl to the ground in the spring and summer.
The original Freeman maple was a male, so it didn’t form samaras, but these trees can also have female parts even if they are listed as male.
Freeman Maple Propagation
As hybrids, you can’t start these trees from seed and expect to grow an exact replica of the parent plant. That leaves you with a few other good options.
You can propagate via stem cuttings, air layering, grafting, or you can purchase a potted specimen to transplant.
Grafting involves taking a branch from the tree and attaching it to a rootstock to grow a plant that combines the characteristics of both parents.
Air layering requires removing the bark to encourage the tree to develop roots, and taking stem cuttings is the process of removing a branch and planting it in a growing medium.
Once it forms roots in the medium, you can transplant it out into the garden.
Our guide to growing maples explains all the details about each different propagation method.
Transplanting
The easiest way to get started is to purchase a sapling from a garden center or nursery.
To do this, dig a hole about two to three times the width of the container the plant is currently growing in.
You don’t need to dig any deeper than the container unless you really want to. Gently remove the plant by grabbing it at the base, close to the soil, and wiggling it out of the pot.
If it really resists, you might want to use a knife or scissors to cut the container rather than risking damage to the roots. Once it’s free, loosen up the roots if they are tightly bound together.
Place the plant in the hole at the same depth it was in the pot – not deeper – and try to guide the roots out and away from the trunk.
Backfill the hole with the removed soil. Water well and add more soil if it settles.
How to Grow Freeman Maples
As is the case with most maples, well-draining soil is essential. Your tree will not thrive if it’s in waterlogged soil. That said, it can tolerate heavy clay and very occasional flooding.
In addition to being well-draining, ideally the soil should be organically-rich and slightly acidic to neutral, with a pH between 5.5 and 7.5.
Any spot with full sun or partial shade will work, though the tree will probably grow so tall that it will eventually surpass nearby trees.
Plant young trees in a location that receives at least four hours of direct sun per day. Six or more is ideal.
Once established, Freeman maples are drought tolerant, but they need regular moisture for the first year or two. Add water when the top inch or two of soil dries out. The soil below should feel like a well-wrung-out sponge.
After that, you can rely on nature to provide the moisture unless you have a long, hot, dry stretch.
Before you feed your plant, test your soil. These trees don’t need a lot of fertilization, so your soil might be perfectly adequate.
Or it might have plenty of nitrogen but not enough potassium or phosphorus, so an all-purpose plant food wouldn’t be the right fit.
Every few years, it’s a good idea to do a soil test and amend according to the results. You can reach out to your local extension office or use a home test kit.
I can vouch for the MySoil Test Kit. You send in a sample to the lab and they’ll give you a detailed analysis that you can access online.
My Soil Test Kit
You will also receive recommendations about suitable amendments. You can pick up a MySoil test kit at Amazon.
Growing Tips
- Plant in organically-rich, well draining soil.
- For young trees, water when the top inch or two of soil dries out.
- Plant in full sun, though a little shade is fine.
Pruning and Maintenance
You don’t need to prune these trees as they maintain an attractive shape without pruning.
However, if you see any broken, diseased, heavily pest-infested, or deformed branches, take them out.
You should use the three-cut pruning method if you need to remove large branches.
This involves making a cut on the underside of the limb about nine inches from the trunk. Make the straight through about a third of the branch.
This cut prevents damage such as bark tearing or ripping as the branch falls away from the tree.
Next, a few inches closer to the trunk, saw through the branch from the top downwards, and you’ll be left with a stump.
Find the branch collar, which is a swollen area attached to the trunk from which the branch emerges.
Trim the stump at the branch collar, not cutting through it, but as close as you can while leaving the collar intact.
Smaller branches can be snipped off using pruners.
Learn all about pruning maples in our guide.
Cultivars to Select
There are lots of cultivars of the Freeman maple, each with unique characteristics.
Some grow smaller than the main hybrid, others have brighter coloration. Here is a selection of a few of my favorites:
Armstrong
If you love the idea of the Freeman’s maple but it doesn’t fit in your space, ‘Armstrong’ might be just what you need.
It’s narrower than the original, growing to 15 feet wide while still reaching up to 70 feet tall. The leaves look similar to those of the silver maple, with deep green on top and silvery undersides.
‘Armstrong’ is ideal for parking strips and lining streets, where drivers and pedestrians can enjoy the orange-red foliage in the fall.
Speaking of the fall display, the trade-off with this cultivar is that though you have a nice columnar shape, the fall display isn’t as brilliant as some of the others on this list.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still colorful, just less so. It’s also a female, so it produces fruit.
The original ‘Armstrong’ was found growing on a farm in Hartgrove, Ohio, though it wasn’t a named cultivar at the time. Newton G. Armstrong took one look at it and paid $5 to make it his.
‘Armstrong’
In 1948, he shared his discovery with Ed Scanlon of Scanlon Nursery and it was released to market in 1949.
It’s hardy in Zones 4 to 9. You can find plants available from Nature Hills Nursery.
If you can find ‘Armstrong Gold,’ it is similar in all ways except that it has bright golden fall foliage and a more dense growth habit.
Autumn Blaze
There are numerous existing cultivars and new ones hitting the market all the time, but the most popular has to be Autumn Blaze®.
Arbor Day Foundation’s Urban Tree of the Year in both 2003 and 2004, Autumn Blaze® was bred in the late 1960s by nurseryman Glenn A. Jeffers of Jeffers Nursery in Fostoria, Ohio.
It was introduced to the market by Poplar Farms of Batavia, Illinois in 1982.
This favorite is hardy in Zones 3 to 8, and eventually grows to 50 feet tall and 40 feet wide. The deep green leaves look similar to silver maple, with super bright red fall coloring that lasts for a long while.
The undersides of the leaves are silvery and the petioles on leaves exposed to bright light will be red, while those in shadier spots will be green. The veins might be reddish as well.
Autumn Blaze® is a fast grower and can add three to five feet each year, with a rounded crown.
In the late winter, new growth develops with a red hue, which adds color and interest to the dreary winter landscape.
It produces samaras and red or green flowers, and while trees are male, some still produce fruit.
Autumn Blaze
It’s resistant to verticillium wilt and leafhopper damage, just another reason that this cultivar nabbed the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit in 2012.
You can find Autumn Blaze® available at Fast Growing Trees in a variety of sizes.
Autumn Fantasy
This 50-foot-tall tree is similar to Autumn Blaze® but it’s considered an improved version, with better branching, brighter, more consistent ruby red fall foliage, and adaptability to a wider range of environments like hot, dry areas and alkaline soil.
It’s even tough enough to grow in Zones 3 to 9.
‘Autumn Fantasy’ has a rounded shape and grows to about 40 feet wide.
The green leaves have silvery undersides and even the young leaves become brilliantly colored in the fall, which isn’t something all Freeman maples can say.
It’s also super fast-growing, adding four feet or more each year until maturity.
‘Autumn Fantasy’
You can find ‘Autumn Fantasy’ available at Nature Hills Nursery.
Celebration
Celebration® is as tough as nails. It’s totally unbothered by the heat and pollution of urban conditions, and is unlikely to break during heavy winds and snow.
That’s enough to have anyone celebrating.
It has an attractive oval form with green, heavily lobed leaves that turn yellow-orange in the fall. When mature, it grows to about 50 feet tall and up to 35 feet wide.
Celebration
Brought to market by Lake Country Nurseries, it grows in Zones 4 to 8.
If you want to start a celebration in your garden you can find plants available at Nature Hills Nursery.
Firefall
Firefall™ was developed by the University of Minnesota to survive the frigid winters in the area and was released to market in 2005.
It’s the result of crossing a ‘Beebe’ cutleaf silver maple and an ‘Autumn Spire’ red maple. Firefall™is a seedless type, so there will be no “helicopters” to clean up in the spring.
Thanks to the genetics of ‘Beebe,’ it has deeply lobed leaves that turn brilliant orange and red in the fall, covering the oval-shaped tree in bright color in Zones 3b to 7b.
Firefall
When mature, it grows 50 feet tall and up to 40 feet wide.
It’s hard to find a better option if you’re looking for an accent for your yard and you live in the colder end of the Acer range. You can find Firefall™ available at Nature Hills Nursery.
Marmo
The Chicago Botanic Garden, the Morton Arboretum, and the Ornamental Growers Association of Northern Illinois joined forces to create the Chicagoland Grows program, and one of their early introductions was the beautiful ‘Marmo.’
‘Marmo’ is an excellent cultivar if you want to grow your tree near a patio or walkway because it doesn’t produce any fruit – which means no mess.
It’s also columnar in shape, growing up to 70 feet tall but just 40 feet wide. This cultivar is fast-growing and adds more than two feet per year.
In the fall, the foliage shifts to a blend of green, yellow, orange, red, and burgundy. Then, in the spring as the new leaves emerge, it takes on a pinkish hue before the leaves turn green.
You can grow ‘Marmo’ in Zones 3 to 8.
Sienna Glenn
Sometimes the best things are happy accidents, like when this tree was discovered on an abandoned farm in Lake Elmo, Minnesota in 1990.
With its pyramidal form and bright red fall foliage, ‘Sienna Glenn,’ also called ‘Sienna’ or ‘Sienna Glen,’ is an eye-catching option.
It has a strong central leader and grows up to 50 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base. The leaves are smaller than most Freeman types, with deep lobes and serrated margins.
‘Sienna Glenn’
During the summer, the leaves are green with silver undersides before changing to bright yellow, orange, red, and burgundy in the fall.
It’s also mostly seedless, so it won’t make a huge mess in your landscape.
If you live in Zones 4 to 6, visit Nature Hills Nursery to pick one up.
Managing Pests and Disease
Freeman maples are generally problem free. As long as you plant them in the right location and provide appropriate water, most of the time your tree will take care of itself without any trouble.
Now, here’s the thing. I hate it when experts say stuff like that because it makes me feel like I did something wrong if my supposedly tough tree is sick.
That’s why I want to add that sometimes issues happen and even the best cared for tree can be visited by pests or pathogens. That’s just the luck of the draw.
If you catch an infestation or infection early on, the chances are good the tree can recover. Let’s talk about the pests you might encounter, first.
Insects
Insect problems are most common on young trees that are still becoming established in the garden.
An infestation can quickly become a serious problem on a tiny little plant. The good news is that it’s usually way easier to kill pests when they’re in a small area rather than on a 70-foot-tall tree.
Cottony Maple Scale
Cottony maple scale (Pulvinaria innumerabilis) and cottony maple leaf scale (P. acericola) love maples and boxelder trees (Acer negundo), as well as white ash (Fraxinus americana), dogwood (Cornus spp.), beech (Fagus spp.), apple (Malus spp.), oak (Quercus spp.), linden (Tilia spp.), elm (Ulmus spp.), and black locust (Robinia spp.).
If you have any of these species in your landscape in addition to your Freeman’s maple, your chances of experiencing an infestation are increased.
The first time you encounter these pests, you might mistake them for symptoms of a disease or some kind of funky growth.
That’s because the insects cluster in large groups and don’t move much. They’re covered in a waxy coating that makes them look more like a cluster of waxy lumps.
Their egg sacs look like fuzzy or cottony white growths. They are circular balls that can be half an inch long and wide.
Cottony maple leaf scale sacs appear on the underside of leaves while the sacs of cottony maple scale appear on stems and branches.
As the sapsucking insects feed, they can cause yellow stippling on the leaves, branch dieback, and even tree death.
You’ll also find sticky honeydew, which is their secretions, all over the leaves and on anything below the tree.
The populations tend to swell one year and disappear another, but if you see a large number of egg masses, assume you’ve got a big infestation and this problem is more than just an annoying nuisance and should be addressed.
Avoid using chemical pesticides, as these also kill the insects that typically keep these pests in check.
Parasitoid ichneumonid wasps, lady beetles, and lacewings all feed on scale. Insecticidal soap is effective against the crawlers, which is the nymph stage of the pest.
Knock off the egg sacs with a strong stream of water. Then, spray the tree every few weeks with insecticidal soap.
Monterey Insecticidal Soap
Grab some Monterey Insecticidal Soap at Arbico Organics in a 32-ounce ready-to-spray bottle.
Leafhoppers
The Japanese leafhopper (Japananus hyalinus) hitched a ride on plants from Asia to North America in the late 1800s and has made a meal of plants in the Acer genus from Canada to Mexico ever since.
While it was originally found on Japanese maples, it will also feed on other species and hybrids, including Freeman.
The leafhopper has a yellowish-green head, a brown body, and translucent wings with rust-brown bands.
The females are about three-sixteenth of an inch long and the males are just slightly shorter.
The eggs, which are laid in the bark, hatch in the spring. The nymphs, which go through five molts, begin to feed on the leaves as soon as they hatch.
After the five moltings, they emerge as adults and the cycle repeats. Depending on the length of your growing season, there might be two generations each year.
When there is a large infestation, you can hear the feeding activity, it can be that intense.
Fortunately, these pests aren’t resistant to pesticides, so any product that contains pyrethrins will kill them off.
Spray the tree once every two weeks while the pests are present using a product like Monterey Bug Buster-O.
Monterey Bug Buster-O
It’s available at Arbico Organics in eight- or 16-ounce spray bottles.
Mites
There are two types of eriophyid gall mites that feed on maples. The first is the bladdergall mite (Vasates quadripedes) and the spindlegall mite (V. aceriscrumana).
You can’t see the white or clear microscopic mites themselves.
Their feeding results first in depressed dots on the surface of the leaf followed by pouch-like green gall formations in the same area.
The mites live in these galls, which gradually turn red, and when the pests mature, they lay eggs, leave the gall, and find a new leaf to infest. Then they hide out during the winter in the bark. In addition to the unsightly galls, they also cause leaf distortion.
Populations fluctuate year to year, with a tree being heavily infested one year and nary a mite in sight the next.
They’re ugly and hard to control, but they’re really just a cosmetic problem.
Predatory mites will help keep the pests under control, and if you’re desperate to stop the symptoms, you can spray the trunk and branches with a product that contains pyrethrin in the spring as soon as the weather starts warming above freezing.
Repeat every two weeks for six weeks.
The goal is to kill the adults as they move from the bark to the leaves as this is when they’re most vulnerable.
Pruning off leaves as soon as they start showing symptoms can also help reduce populations. Put the leaves in a sealed bag and dispose of them in the trash.
Disease
Trees in the Acer genus are susceptible to verticillium wilt, so it wouldn’t be fair to say that Freeman maples are immune, but they are rarely affected by this disease.
Still, be on the lookout for sudden wilting, even if you know that the tree has received enough water. Usually, it won’t be the entire tree that will wilt but a few branches or maybe a section.
Sometimes the tree will drop leaves or have a general sickly appearance.
If you scrape off the bark on the trunk or a symptomatic branch or twig, you will see green streaks. If you see both the green streaks and wilting, chances are extremely high that it’s vert.
If that’s the case, remove symptomatic branches and support the tree with appropriate water and fertilizer.
You don’t need to remove it because the pathogen that causes this disease is already in the soil where it can live without a host plant, so it won’t help to take it out at this point.
However, if the tree is in bad shape, it won’t recover and removal is probably best.
If you decide to plant another tree, it will need to be something resistant like birch (Betula spp.), dogwood (Cornus spp.), ginkgo (G. biloba), crabapple (Malus spp.), red oak (Quercus rubrus), or willow (Salix spp.).
Best Uses for Freeman Maples
As a shade tree for a lawn, or in Japanese, cottage, or rain gardens, it’s hard to beat the Freeman maple thanks to its tough nature and beautiful growth.
The more upright cultivars are perfect as street or parking lot trees.
They will also work for bonsai, and I love to use the branches in cut flower arrangements in the fall.
Since these trees can tolerate both drought and occasionally wet soil, they are an excellent choice for challenging areas where other species will fail to thrive.
Quick Reference Growing Guide
| Plant Type: | Deciduous landscape tree | Foliage Color: | Red, green, yellow, orange |
| Native to: | Cultivated hybrid | Tolerance: | Drought, occasional flooding |
| Hardiness (USDA Zone): | 3-9 | Water Needs: | Moderate |
| Season: | Spring flowers, fall foliage | Maintenance: | Low |
| Exposure: | Full sun to partial shade | Soil Type: | Organically rich |
| Time to Maturity: | 10 years | Soil pH: | 5.5-7.5 |
| Spacing | Up to 20 feet, depending on cultivar | Soil Drainage: | Well-draining |
| Planting Depth: | Same depth as growing container (potted plants), just above root flare (bare root) | Attracts: | Pollinators (when blooming) |
| Height: | 70 feet | Uses: | Bonsai, cottage garden, Japanese garden, lawn, parking strip, rain garden |
| Spread: | 50 feet | Family: | Sapindaceae |
| Growth Rate: | Fast | Genus: | Acer |
| Common Pests and Disease: | Cottony maple scale, leafhoppers, mites; verticillium wilt | Species: | x freemanii |
The Best of Both Worlds
I think plant breeders are like magicians. They have the ability to combine the genetics of two trees to create a hybrid with all the best characteristics of both.
Freeman maples are a prime example. Fast-growing, strong, and with lots of bold color – these trees give you a lot to love.
Are you growing Freeman’s maples? If not, which cultivar will you choose? Let us know in the comments section below!
And for more information about the wonderful world of growing maples, add these guides to your reading list next:
