Autumn Blaze Red Maple Trees

Acer x freemanii Autumn Blaze: Bareroot Red Freeman's Maple Trees in Standard Sizes

This hybrid maple delivers a long-lasting shock of red and orange colour in autumn that punches through the landscape, and looks superb in a stand of mixed trees with yellows and oranges. Autumn blaze has a lovely upright, egg shaped canopy that naturally suits a medium-sized garden or woodland, and look good when planted along and avenue. It's a sterile tree that makes no seeds.
It can reach a height of about 20 metres in ideal conditions, but 12-15 is typical.

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're 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's 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: 20m
• Soil: Any well drained except shallow chalk
• Spectacular, long-lasting, orange-red Autumn colour
• No seeds to sweep up
• Drought tolerant
• RHS Award of Garden Merit
• Bareroot delivery only: November-March

Growing Autumn Blaze Maples

Suitable for most soils except shallow chalk (unlike our native maple, which loves it). It's hardy, and drought tolerant when established. It'll 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're close to horizontal where they come out of the trunk, and weak branches have narrow crotch angles, so they're upright: 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.

History & Trivia

It belongs to a group of hybrid maples that are very popular in America. They occur naturally wherever Red maples and Silver maples grow close to each other, but the parents of most cultivated varieties were crossed and selected in 1933 by Oliver M. Freeman (1891-1979) at the US National Arboretum in Washington, and in 1969 the hybrids were named in his honour by Albert Edward Murray.

Autumn Blaze was selected in the 1960's by nursery owner Glenn Jeffers in Ohio, and it has won at least two Tree of the Year awards there. Registration code Jeffersred.

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.