Two Trees' Double Beauties

     Though unrelated, red maple trees and Bradford pear trees beautify many lawns and streets with their lovely flowers in spring and striking colored leaves in autumn.  Both these kinds of deciduous trees are commonly planted in those human-made habitats in the northeastern United States because of their many beauties, including shapes, summer foliage, spring blossoms and fall leaves.
     The native red maples are well-named, and attractive the year around.  They have innumerable red blooms from about mid-March to almost the middle of April and red seeds that helicopter away from the trees in late May.  Some of those seeds are eaten by rodents.  Red maple trees also have red petioles on their leaves in summer, red foliage in fall and red leaf and flower buds through winter.  But red maples are most striking with their beautiful red blossoms in spring and breath-taking red foliage in autumn, giving us double beauty each year and reasons they are planted on lawns.
     Red maples are native to and abundant in wooded swamps and the moist soil of bottomland woods.  In spring the many red flowers of these lovely trees color their canopies red, while spring peeper frogs and American toads peep and trill in ponds and pools below them.
     The alien Bradford pears have multitudes of white blossoms during late March and much of April.  Those blooms are often swarmed by pollinating insects that sip nectar and transfer pollen from flower to flower.  Each fertilized flower produces a brown, berry-like fruit, many of which are ingested in fall and winter by rodents and berry-eating birds, including starlings, American robins and cedar waxwings. 
     The birds digest the fruits' pulp, but pass the seeds in their droppings all over the countryside, the method, by which Bradford pears escape cultivation.  Some of those seeds sprout and, in some places, their saplings form pure  thickets of themselves, which produce more fruits that feed rodents and birds.   
     In November, Bradford pears have breath-taking maroon and red foliage, including on lawns where they were planted, and in abandoned fields and along expressways, places where birds perched and pooped.  And where the land isn't plowed, cultivated or mowed, allowing the growth of the trees to beautiful maturity in the "wild".
     I've seen  a few pure, dense thickets of Bradford pear trees in abandoned fields in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  Those stands are beautifully white with flowers in April, and regally maroon, with some red foliage, in November. 
     Red maple trees and Bradford pear trees are attractive to us and beneficial to several kinds of wildlife.  And the pretty pear trees are gradually becoming part of the landscape in this area.