Firefall Maple is a wonderful home grown hybrid maple tree that is right now reaching it’s peak of beautiful red fall color.  The University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum partnered on a tree breeding project that combined the best traits of Minnesota’s Autumn Spire Red Maple with the strong branching and refined appearance of the Bebe Cutleaf Silver Maple.

The result is Firefall Maple – a very hardy, fast growing shade tree with strong, storm resistant branches, brilliant red fall color, classy cutleaf foliage, more compact size than Autumn Blaze Maple, and a tree that is seedless, making it lower maintenance.

Here at Knecht’s – we currently have Firefall Maple available in larger balled and burlapped sizes, and also in handy light weight nursery pots in several sizes.

The week of October 9-16 – should be the best time to check out Firefall Maples as they display their lovely red fall color.

Sometimes our customers express a desire for seedless shade trees.  Happily we are able to carry a nice group of shade trees in our inventory that produce no seed litter, or very reduced infrequent seed crops.

In addition to Firefall Maple, there are several other hybrid maples that are not only seedless, but are fast growers and have beautiful fall color.  Celebration Maple is a seedless shade tree that has very uniform branch structure, resists storm damage, has a narrower crown width and fall color that varies from yellow to orange with some red.

Sienna Glen is another seedless maple from a Minnesota origin that develops a dense and uniformly round shape, grows quickly and also has a mix of yellow, orange and red fall color.

Autumn Fantasy maple grows fast and straight, and has burgundy/red fall color.

Other good hardy seedless or mostly seedless shade trees include Espresso Kentucky Coffeetree, his Majesty Corktree, Skyline, Sunburst and Northern Acclaim honeylocust.

For a mostly seedless medium sized ornamental tree you may want to check out the Snowdance Japanese Tree Lilac that can grow well in a variety of soils, including clay, as long as the clay is in a location that has good drainage.

At this time, we are not recommending seedless ash trees due to the invasion of the Emerald Ash Borer insect that is killing millions of ash trees across the Midwest.