Tree sizes — We have only limited information on 
     
     the size of the maple trees in the island’s forests 
     
     and most of these are qualitative descriptions. For 
     
     Curtis (1775), the maples in the hardwood forests 
     
     of the New London area (as also beech and birch) 
     
     were ”very large”, and much larger than any 
     
     maples that he had ever seen in England”. Walsh 
     
     (1803) noted that sugar maple ”grows tall and 
     
     gross”, while Stewart (1806) stated that the "rock 
     
     or curled maple” [i.e. sugar maple] was ”frequently 
     
     a large tree”. He also said that the maples on the 
     
     island (as well as some other trees) were larger 
     
     than those on the continent. Selkirk (1803) also 
     
     noted that maple (as also birch and beech) grew 
     
     ”to a great size”, while Hill (1839) similarly said 
     
     that the ”several kinds of maple attain to a large 
     
     size”. Bain (1868-1884) recorded ”massive 
     
     maples of a century’s growth” in 1879 ”on the 
     
     rear of Howard’s farm”379, while in 1882 in a list 
     
     of the island’s broad-Ieaved trees he described the 
     
     sugar maple as "a large tree” and the red maple as 
     
     "smaller”m. 
     
    
   
   
    
     However, it is only MacGregor (1828) and Bain 
     
     (1890) who give us numerical values, though 
     
     Bain’s is only for the height of the sugar maple (60 
     
     feet), while unfortunately MacGregor grouped 
     
     together his four ’varieties’ of maple, saying they 
     
     were ”forty to sixty feet in height and eighteen to 
     
     thirty-six inches in diameter”38‘. MacGregor then 
     
     noted that a fifth species, what he called ”white 
     
     maple”, was not as large as the other four 
     
     ‘varieties’m. Thus, the only useful quantitative 
     
     value for the size of the island’s maples is 
     
    
   
   
    
       
     
    
   
   
    
     3” Of the two maples occurring in Great Britain, Acer campestre 
     
     the field maple, is a small tree, while the sycamore or great maple 
     
     (Acerpseudoplatanus), which is a larger tree, though first definitely 
     
     recorded in England in 1578, was not extensively planted until the 
     
     late eighteenth century (Rackham 2003, p. 203), and may not have 
     
     been all that common in Curtis' day. 
     
    
   
   
    
     37" Meacham's Atlas of 1880 (Allen 1880) shows several Howard 
     
     properties in the general area of Francis Bain's farm at York Point 
     
     on the North River, the nearest being that of John Howard at 
     
     Howards Creek. 
     
    
   
   
    
     38° [Bain]1882. 
     
     33' These measurements are acceptable for three of his four 
     
     'varieties‘ (his “rock or curly maple“ and "bird-eyed" maple are both 
     
     A. saccharum, and his “red maple" is probably A. rubrum). 
     
     However, he also includes “waved maple or zebra wood" among 
     
     the four, As noted above, I take this to be the striped maple, a 
     
     species which would never have attained such a size: Farrar 
     
     (1995) gives a maximum height of 10 metres and a diameter of 25 
     
     centimetres for the striped maple 
     
    

    
     332 As noted above, this “white maple" is also likely to have been A. 
     
     rubrum, but probably the form of the tree that occurs in wet lowland 
     
     areas — though MacGregor does not add any information on the 
     
     tree beyond its size. 
     
    
   
   
    
     199 
     
    
   
   
    
     MacGregor’s ”eighteen to thirty-six inches", 
     
     applicable presumably to the maples of the upland 
     
     hardwood forest.383 
     
    
   
   
    
     Habitat and community relationships When 
     
     describing the community and habitat relationships 
     
     of the maples it is unfortunate that almost all of 
     
     the recorders use only the generic name ’maple’ 
     
     with little specific differentiationaa“. It is thus 
     
     impossible from the records to evaluate the 
     
     relative contribution of red maple and sugar maple 
     
     to the early forests of the island, though it is likely 
     
     that in the old-growth hardwood forests it was the 
     
     sugar maple that predominated.385 
     
    
   
   
    
     That maple — and probably mostly sugar maple — 
     
     was an important component in the old-growth 
     
     mixed hardwood forests of the island, is evident 
     
     from several general descriptions of the island’s 
     
     hardwood forestsm, as well as from the 
     
    

    
     387. That 
     
    
   
   
    
     descriptions of the forest at specific sites 
     
    
   
   
    
       
     
    
   
   
    
     383 We also have MacDonald’s (1784) request for the cutting and 
     
     drying of "thick logs" of maple “from eight to twelve feet long", 
     
     though this tells us little of the sizes of the original trees. 
     
    

    
     38“ I note especially that Selkirk (1803), whose source for his tree 
     
     information was the Surveyor General Thomas Wright, and who is 
     
     otherwise very informative on the properties of the different trees, 
     
     makes no mention anywhere of any distinctions within the maple 
     
     genus. 
     
    

    
     “5 In old growth hardwood forest the highly shade-tolerant sugar 
     
     maple is likely to have predominated over the less tolerant red 
     
     maple, and thus in the early records ‘maple' in hardwood forest is 
     
     likely to have been sugar maple. However, the records indicate 
     
     that red maple could also occur on upland sites (see the 
     
     Identification and nomenclature section), though on such sites we 
     
     may surmise that it is likely to have been generally suppressed by 
     
     the three highly shade-tolerant climax species, sugar maple, beech 
     
     and yellow birch. That there is likely to have been a scattering of 
     
     red maple in the pre-settlement hardwood forest is also suggested 
     
     by the predominance that it subsequently achieved, once the 
     
     disturbance and cutting associated with European settlement 
     
     began: it is today the principal hardwood species in the ‘upland 
     
     hardwoods', as well as in the ‘disturbed forests‘ of the island 
     
     (Sobey & Glen 1999, 2004). 
     
    
   
   
    
     386 Stewart (1806) and Johnstone (1822) list ‘maple’ as an 
     
     element ofthe island's mixed hardwood forests in general, and it is 
     
     implied that maples were an element of such mixed forests by 
     
     MacGregor (1828), Hill (1839) and Lawson (1851), while James 
     
     Smith of Lot 20, in giving evidence to the Land Commission 
     
     (1875), stated that "maple and black birch" [i.e. yellow birch] were 
     
     the species typical of "first quality land” in a "wilderness state". 
     
    

    
     387 Curtis (1775) recorded maple in a mixed forest at New London 
     
     Bay (with ‘beech‘, ‘birch‘, and “pine of different quality"); Gray 
     
     (1793): in Lot 13 (with “Pine, Black Birch, Beech and Spruce fir 
     
     trees"); Selkirk (1803): at Point Prim (with “birch etc., [and] a 
     
     considerable proportion of pines etc"), at Pinette (with “beech, 
     
     birch (black and yellow), here and there some pine, spruce etc"), 
     
     and near Wood Islands (with “beech, birch and a very few spruce”). 
     
     Then, in the latter half of the nineteenth century Francis Bain 
     
     recorded maple as a component of the ‘ancient‘ hardwood forest at 
     
     four locations: at Springfield (both sugar and red maple were 
     
     present, with yellow and white birch, beech, scattered solitary white 
     
     pines, and with hemlock, spruce [and] fir in the hollows) (Bain