If you're short of the colour red in your cool-climate autumn garden, it's hard to look beyond a maple (Acer).
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Occurring across the northern hemisphere from North America, Europe and Asia and south to the North African Atlas Mountains, from multi-stemmed shrubs to large trees, some with beautifully dissected leaves or attractive bark, many maples produce satisfyingly fiery autumn foliage from russet, orange and scarlet to crimson and purple.
We were in New Zealand during Easter this year and I wasn't expecting to see autumn colour so early, but in Christchurch Botanic Gardens we found a stunning red maple, A. rubrum 'Red Sunset' a spreading dome of large, rich red leaves.
The red maple comes from eastern US, from Quebec south to Florida and Texas and west to Minnesota.
In the east it occurs mainly in river floodplains but in Missouri it grows in drier, rocky uplands.
Everything about it is red: flowers, winged seeds, stems, twigs and its glowing autumn leaves.
It was one of many great plants introduced to Britain by John Tradescant the Younger (1608-1662), the plant hunter famous for being gardener to King Charles 1, surviving Cromwell's Protectorate and staying on a gardener to Charles 2.
Autumn colour starts early, including 'Red' Sunset as I saw, though Stratford Trees Nursery (see below) note that the cultivar 'October Glory' is one of the last to change.
A. rubrum is a medium tree (20 to 23 metres) and fast growing in the right conditions, though slower than the silver maple (A. saccharinum) also from east and central US and with similar silvery undersides to its leaves.
I can vouch for the latter being quick off the blocks: I planted one on our first farm and it was the fastest tree I grew.
The climate may have helped, we were 900 metres above sea level with 600 millimetres average annual rainfall, though this dropped dramatically during the 1980s drought.
I planted another eastern North American, a sugar maple (S. saccharum), at the same time and it was only slightly slower.
It resembles the Norway maple (A. platanoides) in appearance but the sugar maple's autumn colour is more reliable, its leaves turning brilliant gold and then scarlet.
Both are big trees (27m). They are distinguished by their sap: the sugar maple's is the source of lovely maple syrup but Norway maple has milky sap.
Many years ago I planted two trident maples (A. buergeranum) from east China and Japan and they have grown into small (7m to 8m), shapely trees, with pinkish, flaky bark and glossy leaves unfolding pale yellow before turning deep green.
I wish I could be more enthusiastic about their autumn leaf colour, supposedly deep crimson.
Only one of my trees has ever coloured and that was during a rare wet autumn, though friends who grow it say theirs colour reliably every year. Maybe it dislikes red granite soil.
The great thing about gardening on a farm is that there's always space for another tree.
But if you really are forested out, Japanese maples (A. palmatum) have a wide range of small cultivars with fabulous autumn foliage that are happy in pots.
Stratford Trees Advanced Wholesale and Retail Nursery (www.stratfordtrees.com.au) offer a range of maples. Fully illustrated website includes tree descriptions and cultivation requirements with climate tolerances.
