Hiawatha Sugar Maple

By Doug and Jeryle Grimm

When I was a little boy, my dad and mom would load the family in the car and off we would drive to the city of Hiawatha, Kansas which to us was a big city—its population then was less than 4,000. We went to view the beautiful sugar maples in the fall of the year. This was the only outing I remember taking on an annual basis, other than maybe a fishing trip to a nearby farm pond on an evening after the milking chores were finished.

Now for a farm boy growing up with this mental idea of the beauty of a city, it was quite a shock as I grew older to learn this is really rare and not the normal landscape of most cities. But as milking cows, raising crops, marriage, a family and the cares of life press upon one’s soul, these childhood ideas are often buried deep in the search of finding the ends of life and making them meet. As our children began to grow up, and we have seven of them born to our marriage union, we began to see that if they were all going to stay at home on the farm, this farm was going to do more than raise corn, beans, wheat and livestock. We looked into several other options, and chose to put up greenhouses, entering the hydroponic tomato business. As this business grew and expanded into bedding plants, perennials, shrubs, trees, a landscaping business, nursery production and an arboretum, we began to attend tradeshows to increase our understanding of the various aspects of our new business.

We think it was January 2003 when we were attending the Western Nursery & Landscape Association meeting in Kansas City when the speaker, Don Shadow, made the comment that “you people in the Midwest do not have a sugar maple that will consistently give you good fall color.” We mostly all agreed. Some years we have nice fall color and some years we do not. A flashback in my mind to my childhood days and the following 40-plus years said, “Whoa, why do these trees in Hiawatha give such beautiful color every year?” So after the meeting I visited with Don and he was very excited to hear about some sugar maples in the Midwest that really did consistently turn beautiful colors of reds, oranges and yellows every year. So we went home and discussed this and thought about just how unusual this really is, and put a plan together.

The first step of this plan was to meet with the city council and ask them if we could prepare a ballot, distribute it to all the local businesses for people to have the opportunity to nominate what they thought was their favorite red fall-colored sugar maple. This was a unanimous council decision as they felt it was a good way to promote the City of Hiawatha, known for its beautiful maples. This board decision and idea was picked up by the Associated Press. There were twelve trees nominated.

Then throughout the next several summers—and something I still do today—I paid closer attention to these trees, observing for leaf scorch, leaf tatter, pests, dark green summer leaves and early development of fall color. I was just generally looking to see how healthy the trees were. After the first summer, there were two trees that appeared to have outstanding summer leaf quality. Then we watched with great anticipation to see what their fall color would be. We certainly were not disappointed, as we learned the residents of Hiawatha knew their trees very well, and they had nominated the nicest trees in town.

The following summer we received help from Steve Briebeck from Clinton, Oklahoma who helped us graft 325 buds onto “Caddo” sugar maple rootstock that he had raised and brought with him. We thought this would be the beginning of great success. But the following spring, we discovered that only one of those buds survived and 324 of them died! We learned this was just the beginning of many failures. But being a true farmer at heart—farmers don’t give up easily—we grafted about 50 more the next year, of which 100 percent died. The Kansas climate in July and August is not a good environment for buds to settle into their new home. So we thought we should ask a couple of larger nurseries to help graft these trees. Well, we are very grateful to live in a state with a land grant university, Kansas State University. So we sought their assistance in helping us propagate our sugar maples. They had a professor who said he had a graduate student looking for a research project, and they would love to research how to tissue culture sugar maples. So we took some tissue down to the laboratory and learned a little bit about how they tissue culture a plant. This was very interesting and in a few months we had hundreds of tiny little bonsai sugar maple trees growing in test tubes. They were about and inch and a half to two inches tall, absolutely the cutest little trees you ever did see! We would stop in at the University every few months and check on their progress. What we were all looking and waiting for was the bottom end, which had callous growing on it, to send out some roots. After nearly two years of growing in the test tube and remaining sterile, they looked just like they did at the beginning – no roots. Well, the graduate student moved on and so did the professor that helped with this project, and somehow or another, all of our test tube babies got lost. No one knew anything about them anymore, where they went or what happened to them. It was another major low in our dream of developing the beautiful Hiawatha sugar maples!

At that point we had kind of given up, exhausted about all the things we could think of on how to propagate this beautiful tree. Then one day at a landscape meeting in Wichita, Kansas, Keith Warren from J. Frank Schmidt Company of Boring, Oregon, was presenting on how they introduce new trees to the industry. After the meeting was over, just by chance, we crossed paths. Keith, being a very observant man with sharp eyes, noticed my name badge and said “Hiawatha, Kansas” and stopped me. He said he remembered reading an article in an Associated Press news release about some small nursery in Northeast Kansas that was trying to propagate a beautiful sugar maple. He was wondering if we knew anything about it. Well, I could hardly believe my ears. I told him, I did know something about it and I was the one that had worked on this a couple years earlier but had given up. His statement was, “We are experts in being able to propagate plants like that, and if you would be willing to send me some scion wood, I would like to see what kind of luck we would have.” So we sent them some scion wood off the two best trees that had been nominated.

A year and a half later, Jeryle and I flew to Oregon. We were able to see our trees growing and doing very well in Oregon. However, the following year, they decided one of the trees came down with a fungal disease on the West coast which it did not get in the Midwest, and so they were no longer interested in the one tree. We flew out again the following year to observe once again and my, it looked so nice. But, Keith informed us that you can’t introduce a new tree, if it is only as good as what is already available on the market. And so the exercise of patiently waiting to see if something would ever materialize to set this tree apart from other sugar maples continued.

Then it happened. In December 2007, there was a severe ice storm in a large area of the Midwest of which it appeared Hiawatha, Kansas was the center of the storm. Many of the old beautiful oaks, maples, gingkos and elms were damaged, some beyond salvaging. The morning after the storm, I drove to town to check on the trees. I viewed the devastation of so many trees, power lines, and power poles. There were over 1,400 poles snapped off in our small electric coop area and many homes were out of electricity for almost two weeks before power returned. As I got closer to the sugar maple, I could see the tree next to it which was also a sugar maple, had half its branches on the ground, broken off. It was a very sad site. Then upon arriving at our favorite tree, it was standing perfectly with a huge load of ice, bending all of its branches to the ground, but not one major limb broken, and only a few small twigs on the ground. It seemed almost unbelievable that this tree we had been trying for so long to propagate and had admired its beauty for so many falls could hold up under such an enormous load of ice. I took a picture that morning and sent it to Keith at Schmidt’s, expecting to hear some good news immediately. But no response came.

Then in June 2008, I was planting some balled and burlapped trees in Falls City, Nebraska, and as I was using a walk behind mini-skid steer, I hit an underground cavity. All the dirt went into the cavity instead of coming to the surface. So while I waited for the city officials to decide what to do about this, I sat down on the porch of the house and awaited their decision. They finally decided, fill the hole up with dirt and plant the trees. Later it was noted that this underground cavity may have been part of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War days.

But while I am waiting for their decision to be made, my cell phone rang and it was Keith calling from Oregon to tell me how much he had appreciated the ice storm pictures of our sugar maple and that he had not responded because they wanted to get a more accurate count of just what percent of the buds they actually graft would “take” and become new trees. So he had waited until June to get that information as they had nearly 100 percent success with 100 buds that they had grafted the summer before. He informed me at the time that the ice storm pictures obviously had proven this tree to be an exceptionally strong tree, and that they would now need to name this tree and begin its commercial introduction into the trade. We suggested naming it Acer saccharum “Hiawatha” with the common name of “Oregon Trail” since the Oregon Trail passed through Kansas very close to this tree. After all these years, we are grateful this tree is now going to be available for all to plant and enjoy its rich fall color and summer dark green healthy leaves.