Ohio native plants highlighted here are the sugar maple, tulip tree, and eastern redbud. Sugar maple, Acer saccharum, grows 60 to 75 feet tall and 40 to 50 feet wide in mesic woods. It provides food for several wildlife species including mammals and insects, is a key component of breeding habitat for a wide variety of birds, and its twigs and foliage are eaten by white-tailed deer. Native Americans invented the process of maple sap collection and its distillation into maple sugar and maple syrup, and the tree's hard, dense, fine-grained, difficult-to-split wood is used for floors, furniture, veneer, musical instruments, and railroad ties. Tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera, grows 70 to 90 feet tall and 35 to 50 feet wide in mesic woods. Its spring flowers provide nectar for ruby-throated hummingbirds, and its seeds, maturing in summer and persisting into winter, provide food for birds and mammals including finches, cardinals, quail, mice, red squirrels, gray squirrels, and rabbits. Daniel Boone used the wood of this tree for his 60-foot dugout canoe, tulip trees planted by George Washington at Mount Vernon are now 140 feet tall, and once plentiful in eastern America, tulip trees were favored by loggers for railroad ties and fence posts. Eastern redbud, Cercis canadensis, grows 20 to 30 feet tall and 25 to 35 feet wide in dry upland woods. Its flowers attract hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees. The flowers can be eaten fresh or fried, green twigs have been used in parts of southern Appalachia as seasoning for wild game such as venison and opossum, giving it the name spicewood tree in those mountain areas, and Native Americans consumed redbud flowers raw or boiled and ate the seeds roasted.