A flowering striped maple.
(Flickr user pverdonk, 2013).

The striped maple is a flowering tree, or angiosperm. Interestingly, the striped maple can be either dioecious (only male or female flowers on an individual tree) or monecious (both male and female flowers on the same tree). When dioecious, this maple can also change from a male to a female tree. As an understory tree, it can sometimes get shaded out by other trees. In a last-ditch effort to propagate, the tree will change from male to female and put all of its energy into forming seeds.

Close-up of the yellow-green
flowers. (Flickr user
BlueRidgeKitties, 2013).

The flowers themselves are yellow or yellowish-green and are formed in May and June once the leaves of the tree have fully opened. They are bell-shaped and form in pendulum-like clusters that can be 4 to 6 inches long.

The striped maple samaras.
(Flickr user Homer Edward
Price, 2008).

Like all maples, the striped maple creates winged fruits called samaras but on the striped maple, they are marked by a distinctive smooth depression in the seed body. Only the female trees bear seeds, which form at the end of summer in hanging clusters like the flowers that came before.