These beautiful trees, with their attractive green summer foliage and flaming orange, gold, and red autumn foliage, are shade tolerant and tend to dominate older forests. In young forests, sugar maples grow slowly in the shade of light-loving trees—a sugar maple less than an inch in diameter may be 40 years old. Once sunlight becomes available, such as when a large nearby tree is cut or falls, the spindly sugar maples grow rapidly and may live for longer than 200 years.