OUR SICK MAPLES

Take a close look at the maple trees, usually by this time on the verge of a glorious scarlet display of fall coloring. Chances are you’ll see ugly black spots across most of the green leaves.

The spots often have a narrow border of bright yellow around them, making the strange sight even worse. Some afflicted leaves have already fallen prematurely. Many have shriveled on their stems. Something seems horribly wrong this fall.

Foresters have seen this infestation before, but not on this scale in perhaps 10 years.

In Augusta, state forest pathologist Bill Ostrofsky knows the disease, why it has struck so heavily this year, how it affects the trees, and what’s the prognosis.

He says it afflicts many sugar maple trees throughout the state. It is a parasitic fungus, technically a version of anthracnose. It strikes after an unusually wet spring, and last spring was really wet.

Mr. Ostrofsky says it won’t affect the trees’ general health, since the leaves have already done most of their work for the year. And it won’t likely hurt next spring’s maple syrup production. But he adds that we’ll probably see “some pretty lousy fall coloring.”

Unattractive as they are, we can be thankful that they aren’t as lethal as earlier plagues that decimated our spruce and practically destroyed our elms and chestnut trees.