Armstrong Red Maple, Large Trees

Acer x freemanii Armstrong: Bareroot Freeman's Maple Trees in Standard Sizes

Acer x freemanii Armstrong, is slender and upright, similar to Acer Celebration, with brilliant gold and orange leaves in the autumn. With its narrow canopy, this is an ideal tree for a fairly small garden or avenue planting, and it looks wonderful in a mixed wood.
Older trees will spread out a little, becoming slightly egg shaped, but this can be corrected with some gentle pruning. The autumn colour is simply awesome.
Armstrong Maple trees can reach a height of about 15, maybe 20 metres.

Browse our other Maple varieties, or all of our trees.

Delivery season: Maple trees are delivered bareroot during late autumn and winter, approximately November-March inclusive.
Choosing a size: Small trees are cheaper, easier to handle and more forgiving of less than ideal aftercare, so they are best for a big planting project. If instant impact is your priority, or if you are only buying a few plants for use in a place where it is convenient to water them well in their first year, then you may as well use bigger ones. All our bareroot trees are measured by their height in centimetres above the ground (the roots aren't measured).

Features:

• Height: 15-20m
• Soil: Any well drained except shallow chalk
• Gold and orange Autumn colour
• Drought tolerant
• Bareroot delivery only: November-March

Growing Armstrong Maples

Suitable for most soils except shallow chalk (unlike our native maple, which loves it). It is hardy, and drought tolerant when established. It will have the best autumn colour in a sunny position (acidic soil also helps), but tolerates partial shade well.

Semi-regular pruning of mature trees will help to prevent branches falling off in storms. Strong branches have wide crotch angles, meaning that they are close to horizontal where they come out of the trunk, and weak branches have narrow crotch angles, so they are almost upright where they leave the trunk: removing the worst of the latter every few years will keep the tree in top shape.
With young trees, all you need to do is to maintain a single leading stem and prevent a double leader from forming.

Did You Know?

The Freeman maples, Acer x freemanii, are naturally occurring crosses between Red Maple and Silver Maple. The ones in cultivation were crossed by Oliver M. Freeman in 1933 at the US National Arboretum in Washington DC.

One Newton G. Armstrong discovered this variety by chance in Windsor, Ohio in the 1940's, noticing its unusually upright habit. His brother Norm was an arborist and friends with Edward Scanlon, owner of Scanlon Nurseries and founding member of the International Plant Propagators’ Society, who cloned it and began selling it by 1951.
Neil Armstrong may or may not have been the first man on the moon (we aren't going there, in either sense), but he was certainly an Ohio native, so it's not unlikely that he was related to Newton and Norm. 

Standard trees are measured by their girth in centimetres 1 metre above ground level: their trunk's waist measurement. Unlike sapling trees and hedge plants, standards aren't measured by their height, which will vary quite a bit both between and within species.
So, a 6/8cm standard tree has a trunk with a circumference of 6-8cm and an 8/10 standard has a trunk 8-10cm around. This measurement makes no difference to the tree's final height.
On average, standard trees are 2-3.5 metres tall when they arrive, but we cannot tell you precisely how tall your trees will be before we deliver them.

Notes on planting Armstrong Maple trees:
Armstrong Maple trees will grow well in any fertile soil. They like heavy clay and although they are also happy on chalk, alkaline soils will reduce the quality of their autumn colour.

Prepare your site before planting:
It is good to dig over the site where you plant a tree several months in advance. Kill the weeds first: for tough weeds like nettles, brambles and ground elder, you will usually need a weed-killer to get rid of them. When you dig the soil over, remove stones and other rubbish and mix in well rotted compost or manure down to the depth of about 2 spades.

Watch our video on how to plant a tree for full instructions.
Remember to water establishing trees during dry weather for at least a year after planting.

Tree Planting accessories:
Prepare your site for planting by killing the weeds and grass with Neudorff WeedFree Plus.
You can buy a tree planting pack with a wooden stake & rubber tie to support the tree and a mulch mat with pegs to protect the soil around the base of your tree from weeds and drying out.
We suggest that you use mycorrhizal "friendly fungi" on the roots of all newly planted large trees: if your soil quality is poor, we strongly recommend it.
You can also improve your soil with bonemeal organic fertiliser and Growmore.