In research to improve sugar maple trees, a major difficulty has been to produce clonal material for testing. Even though several workers have successfully rooted cuttings of sugar maple, few of the rooted cuttings have lived beyond the first winter. The problem of severe over-winter losses of rooted cuttings remains to be solved. The purpose of our studies with sugar maple was to develop a method by which superior sugar producers could be vegetative propagated and grown for use in studies designed to improve sugar yields. Because high sugar producers will ordinarily be selected from trees of tapping size, our studies were conducted on relatively large roadside sugar maples. Branches on a couple of young sugar maples less than 2 inches d.b.h. were also treated.
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