If you are in doubt, look at the bark of the tree to make a positive identification. In most cases, the leaves will be enough to help you determine what kind of maple you have. If the leaf margin, or edge, of your maple's leaves appear serrated, it is probably a red maple. Roughly toothed: The red maple has a slightly smaller leaf than most other species, with its most distinctive feature being a rough, saw-like edge.Fuzzy: If your maple tree has a soft white coating on the underside of the leaf, it is almost certainly a silver maple.A leaf from a Norway maple will yield a milky sap from the end of the leaf, while the sugar maple will not. The easiest way to tell these species apart using the leaves is to break a leaf off the twig. Large, 5-lobed leaf: Both the sugar maple and the Norway maple have this characteristic, with the sugar maple leaf having a few large teeth and rounded spaces between the lobes.There is some variation between cultivars of this tree, but most possess this feature to a greater or lesser degree. However, you will note all lobes of this leaf still originate from a single point on the leaf stock and have no stems of their own.

Very deeply-lobed leaves: The Japanese maple is known for very distinct lobing of the leaves, so much so that they almost appear to be compound leaves.

You will be able to easily distinguish between these two species by looking at the bark, detailed below.

Compound leaves: While the majority of maple species have simple leaves, two notable exceptions, the box elder and the paperbark maple, have compound leaves, with three to five leaflets per leaf stock.Looking more closely at the details of the leaf will give you a better idea what sort of maple you have: They grace landscapes throughout the world and most are deciduous, meaning. Most maple species have simple, as opposed to compound, leaves with multiple lobes, the veins of which originate from a single, roughly central point on the leaf. Maple trees belong to the genus Acer, and there are over 100 species of maple trees. You may already be familiar with the distinctive leaf shape associated with most members of the genus Acer.

Types of maple trees leaves