McLean sugar bush and shanty

Maple Syrup from Wikipedia

Does it harm maple trees to tap them?  What is the best time to make maple syrup?  These are the usual questions asked.  A young tree should not be tapped for too many successive years.  In the case of a mature tree, the incision will close over in a season or two and no harm results; the sap collected from the tree is veritably a mere drop in the bucked.  The time for tapping trees depends on the season.  Warm days following sharp nights from about mid-March to early April is the usual time in the Toronto area.  The sap is temperamental and sometimes does not run when think it should.  It will run in February on a warm day. (Sauriol, Remembering the Don, p. 33) 

Buried with them under the Eglinton extension, is the memory of many and many a hike.  Beyond Tanager Hollow, stretched the slopes of the valley so restfully named Wild Flower Paradise, then the remnants of MacLean's sugar bush, where cuold be seen the foundations of the dwellings where the Martin brothers once lived, and almost alongside of it the vestiges of Maclean's maple sugar shanty.(Remembering the Don, p. 111)

The making of maple syrup in the Don Valley and MacLean's sugar bush are synonymous.  As a career conservationist I have seen many stands of hard maple over the past 40 years but none finer than the ancient hard maple trees that graced... (Tales of the Don, p. 79)

Gone too are the days of Chris Stong, who claimed he was the greatest coon hunter of all times, who caught raccoons in MacLean's sugar bush whose pelts provided fur coats that ladies no longer wear. (Tales of the Don, p. 185)

The calculated stops were the Milne Woollen Mill, which was later demolished but which should have been left, and the MacLean's sugar bush and shanty. (Tales of the Don, p. 175)