Shopping for a Japanese Maple Tree in Glorious Fall Color

The free, 8-foot tall, 4-in caliper Japanese maple that my friend arranged to have transplanted to her  garden held on through a year of drought, but finally gave up the good fight during the brutal heat and drought of this recently past August/September.  So I was asked to come along to offer some advice as she set out to purchase a replacement.

She is an incredibly talented interior designer/decorator, an expert with color, scale, form, symmetry and all of the elements of design, and I was lucky to be on the receiving end of her expertise on the room arrangement at our home. Her attention-to-detail extends both inside and outside-- for example, although she calls it “pink”, her house is actually a rosy-terracotta brick that goes very nicely with the purple Loropetalum and other burgundy-leafed plants she has chosen. Her annuals are mainly pink flowered to dress up three beds around the front door.

 So tasked with the idea of finding the perfect Acer palmatum cultivar, first I suggested that we page through my book on Japanese Maples (J.D. Vertrees, second Edition), which helped her decide she did not want a red-leafed tree, nor a dissectum, and she wanted it upright rather than pendulous so she could plant underneath it. 

Then I suggested she accept a Coral Bark maple that I had growing in a huge tub on the patio as a gift, but she hesitated to take it, mainly because it was “already too big”. This narrowed down our search: we needed to look for a maple that reaches only 6 to 10 feet in height.

Next we set out for the nursery. She decided that the huge nursery with the big selection favored by commercial landscapers use was too far away after all, and so we settled for a nearby garden center. Most amateur gardeners look no further than the nearest nursery for their plants. These retailers offer a wide variety of sizes of the most popular plants, and the customer can pick exactly the specimen (s)he feels would look best on his/her property. And some of the nursery employees are knowledgeable about which plants do best in the local area. The main difficulty with local nurseries is often a lack of choice because they tend to stick to the tried-and-true, but that seemed OK for this trip.

After first looking at their huge, pricy maples we found the area with 3-, 5- and up to 15-gallon trees, and what do you know? She immediately chose a red, dissected-leaf, weeping variety known as Burgundy Lace because its leaves looked good. Then we almost settled for a Viridis, another cut-leaf, weeping variety but this time green.  We were two for two on the “unacceptable: weeping dissectum types.  

As we kept looking, my friend was surprised when I examined some root systems by pulling the trees out of their containers and rejecting several with circling brown roots.  I pointed out unnaturally bent trunks and crossing branches, and soon she began to see past the leaves to the overall form and we were on our way. I suggested we did not have to buy a tree right that minute, but could shop other garden centers for a different selection, but “plant lust” was heavy on her.   

Luckily we stumbled across several young Japanese maple trees with an upright habit, and two-toned leaves, smaller and more reasonably priced.  Happy to find some vigorous white roots on one particularly graceful specimen, the label said ‘Tiger Rose’; too new to be in the second edition. Described as pink leaves in spring and gracefully intermediate habit with upright branches and trailing twigs, it was beginning to look like we were close. 

I assured her that a little marginal leaf scorch on a container-grown tree wasn’t that unusual for mid- October, and instead we should look past the leaves to the structure of the limbs and the graceful shape of the tree. Plus the price was lower because it was a smaller tree. Such a deal, she was convinced! After adding some silvery and maroon Heucheras, broad-leaved Dusty Millers and vigorously growing Autumn Ferns, we loaded the plants into her SUV, where she will plant and water them to success.    

Last two photos 'Tiger Rose'