Maple Tree Flowers

Did you ever notice the flowers in a Bigleaf Maple tree? They're green so they don't really look like flowers. They hang like a cluster of grapes. The actual flowers are about the size of blueberries but they're green. In this photo you can see how big they are relative to the size of my hand.

In this close-up photo you can see some of the detail of the flower. It has pistils protruding and a fuzzy grey ball inside the outer green shell.

Here you can see the whole cluster and how it hangs from the branch. This specimen is a little leggy since it is growing under the shade of a large Douglas Fir tree. Later, in the Summer and Fall, these flowers will turn into those winged seeds that fly like helicopters. As a child I would spend hours climbing in Maple trees and picking those seeds to watch them fly down.