japanese maples are grown - cdn.ymaws.com · japanese maples come in hundreds of cultivars, each...

28 JULY 2009 ▲ DIGGER

Japanese maples come in hundreds of cultivars, each offering a unique combination of size, growth habit, leaf shape, color and seasonal interest. The leaves of the katsura Japanese maple (Acer palmatum ‘Katsura’) emerge yellow with an orange edge in spring, then fade to green in the summer before turning brilliant gold and orange in the fall. This specimen will reach 20 feet tall and was grown at Eshraghi Nursery, Cornelius, Ore.

Japanese maples are grown

in so many shapes, sizes and

colors, they’ll fit in almost

anywhere

By Elizabeth PetersenNo wonder Japanese maples are

so popular with gardeners, landscapers and designers. Undemanding by nature and appropriately sized for today’s pri-

vate gardens, they offer aesthetic excel-lence at every turn and an astonishing array of looks, colors and textures.

Growers in Oregon produce hun-dreds of thousands of Japanese maples (Acer palmatum and related species A. japonicum and A. shirasawanum) every year. They supply the U.S. and Canada with seedlings of well-known cultivars, including the popular red A.p. ‘Bloodgood’ and coral-barked A.p. ‘Sango Kaku’.

A tree for all occasions

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It isn’t hard to get growers to talk about plants. The tough part is getting them to narrow down their list of favorites to just a handful. Here are some of the varieties our sources recommended:

Picks

ProsProsfrom the

Joel Johnsoneshraghi nurserycornelius, ore.

Acer palmatum ‘Bonfire’ – this small, upright tree has glossy leaves that emerge bright red and fade to green. it has a nice multicolor effect that lasts all summer. the leaves turn brilliant red in fall. Dense growth to ten feet.

Eagle claw maple (Acer palmatum ‘Kamagata’) – Kamagata’s small leaves with long angular lobes emerge with a red margin on a light green leaf. By midsummer, the color is bright green before turning intense orange and yellow in fall. this slow grower has a soft appearance. Dwarf dense habit to ten feet.

Acer palmatum ‘Kiyo hime’ – Small, star shaped leaves emerge on this vigorous but dense, compact grower. its rich green leaves emerge with bright red-orange margins around yellow centers. its fall color is yellow-orange. Grows to six feet.

Norm Jacobsarbutus garden artscarlton, ore.

Acer palmatum ‘Aka shigatatsu sawa’ – Wider than it is tall, with a strongly horizontal aspect. Color changes from what you see in the photo, through green with white and red highlights, to end in fall with a fire engine red display. it needs a light shade to perform best.

Floating cloud maple (Acer palmatum ‘Ukigumo’) – the “floating cloud” thrives in exposures from full sun to deep shade despite extensive white variegation.

Acer palmatum var. dissectum ‘Tamukeyama’ – A very old red noted for its ability to hold its color in full sun and summer heat, and for its black-purple bark, which gives it a nice sculptural presence in the winter garden, especially in snow or frost.

Some growers lead in innovation too, offering an array of less common, unusual selections for specialty garden centers and collectors.

“There is growing interest and knowledge about Japanese maples, and as customers know more, they demand higher quality,” said Ivria Kaplowitz, key accounts manager for Eshraghi Nursery in Hillsboro, Ore.

Growing westAccording to Sales Manager Joel

Johnson, Eshraghi Nursery grows Japanese maples for retail markets in the Southeast, Southwest, Midwest, East Coast and Canada – “everywhere but Florida,” he said.

The nursery sells 60 different selec-tions, in sizes ranging from a No. 1 con-tainer to a 30-inch box.

“The staples, like ‘Bloodgood’, sell the most,” Johnson said. “Every differ-ent cultivar has strengths.”

According to Kaplowitz, the nurs-ery’s high quality and varied selection result from the extensive experience of co-owner Linda Eshraghi, an excellent grafting manager, and superior hygiene in the grafting houses.

The leaves of Acer palmatum ‘Shishio

Improved’, photographed at Eshraghi

Nursery, initially display a rich hue of crimson

that almost seems to glow. The leaves

mature to a bright green. The tree can reach

15 feet high at maturity.

▲ JAPANESE MAPLES

Jim Schmidtdon schmidt nurseryBoring, ore.

Lion’s head maple (Acer palmatum ‘Shishigashira’) – the lion’s head maple grows slowly and stays compact, to 15 feet by 10 feet. its small, bright green, densely packed leaves curl tightly against the branches and turn brilliant gold with red and pink shades in fall.

Acer palmatum ‘Shaina’ – this tree has small, deeply cut leaves that start out bright red and mature to deep reddish-purple and magenta in fall. upright, with dense branching, ‘Shaina’ stays only eight feet by eight feet.


“Linda sees new plants she likes and chooses for improved color, differ-ent habit or unusual patterns of color,“ Kaplowitz said.

Eshraghi Nursery goes right to the public with its maples, too, at nearby retail garden center Farmington Gardens. Linda Eshraghi helps garden-ers succeed with maples by teach-ing how-to classes, and she recently offered a tour of the nursery that proved very popular. Visitors were able to see the trees and come away with a list of choices for spectacular fall color, excellent winter interest, var-iegated foliage, employee favorites and shady or sunny placement.

Growing eastJapanese maple expert Jim Schmidt,

owner of Don Schmidt Nursery in Boring, Ore., grows for “maple junkies” – collectors and high-end garden cen-ters, he said, especially in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

He agreed that interest in more diverse selections seems to be grow-ing, even though the market is, in his

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words, “flooded with the common vari-eties.” Demand for good, red foliage remains high.

“’Emperor I’ is one of the hot-test things on the market right now,” Schmidt said.

Developed by Dick Wolff of Red Maple Nursery in Pennsylvania and introduced by Don Schmidt Nursery, it has leaves and habits similar to those of ‘Bloodgood’, but grows faster, devel-ops a wider canopy and doesn’t fade to green in the shade.

In Schmidt’s suburban neighbor-hood, there is ample evidence that his enthusiasm for Japanese maples is contagious. Many of his neighbors have Japanese maples in their yards – one or more of them, red and green, upright and mounding, pal-mate and dissected, showing their stuff.


▲ JAPANESE MAPLES

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This as-yet-unnamed Japanese maple cultivar, marked simply “9” on the tag at Don

Schmidt Nursery in Boring, Ore., displays sharply-defined, red and green variegation on

its tiny, delicate leaves. According to nursery owner Jim Schmidt, many plant collectors

love what he calls “the freaks” — the cultivars that display odd characteristics.

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Schmidt gives and gets back too. A few years ago, he found a volun-teer Acer japonicum in a neighbor’s yard, tested and introduced it as ‘Yama kagi,’ after the name of his subdivi-sion, Mountain Shadows. The vigorous, upright tree has large, grape-like leaves that resist burning, don’t turn leathery and produce “outstanding fall color.”

Schmidt lauded Japanese maples’ many landscape uses. “We can replace everything else in the landscape with them,” he said.

Schmidt’s own backyard – which is really more of a maple arbore-tum – proves the point. He he grows around 250 selections, including one of the biggest specimens of ‘Beni maiko,’ a variegated, upright tree with brilliant salmon pink spring growth that fades to mottled green in summer and produces bright red fall color.

Schmidt will host a tour of the all-maple garden when the North American Maple Society visits in the fall of 2009.

Schmidt searches for and tests new selections for commercial viability, while supplying the market with supe-rior plants using “old-fashioned” meth-ods: manual cultivation, hand weeding, rainfall, and little or no chemicals. “We trim everything hard at least once a year,” he said, to produce thick, well-formed trees.

In the greenhouse where he tinkers with maples, cool new variegated selec-tions are coming up the line. “Everyone likes the freaks,” he said, in reference to the desire collectors have for a vari-ety they have never seen before.

One colorful form, named ‘Rainbow’, has “everything people like,” Schmidt said. “(It’s) pink, burgundy (and) upright.”

On display in the gardenAt Arbutus Garden Arts in Carlton,

Ore., co-owner Norm Jacobs traces his passion for Japanese maples to childhood. “I planted my first Japanese


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maples as aesthetic anchors to the food-bearing plants in the garden I created around my parents’ home when I was 15,” he said.

Jacobs and partner Deb Zaveson started their maple collection, display garden and small nursery around 1990, “as we were laying out the garden around our house,” he said. The two work together on “assessing new acqui-sitions for garden-worthiness” and cur-rently grow nearly 100 selections.

The two encourage customers to design with Japanese maples for a vari-ety of uses: as container or landscape specimens, in groupings with varying forms and colors, as understory layers for tall trees and as border anchors.

“I want my clients, whether for garden design or plant purchases, to revel in the unique form and beauty of their selections, not struggle with them,” Jacbos said. “Many of our favor-ite and most popular varieties have been around for a century or more. Excellence is a matter of growing them well and using them appropriately.”

Jacobs’ advice for using Japanese maples appropriately includes the fol-lowing steps:

• Determine that soil and drain-age are suitable, not heavy clay or boggy for long periods, and free of ver-ticilium as well as can be determined.

• Match the wishes of the client for seasonal color, eventual size, texture and foliage style.

• Match the tree’s natural growth aspect to the parameters of the site in terms of exposure to sun-light and topography.

According to Jacobs, a client might like to prune and shape, but most pre-fer that the tree take on the form they envision with a minimum of labor. Most Japanese maples will grow in light shade. His advice is to choose carefully those that will thrive in full summer sun with limited irrigation, or conversely, in full shade.

Since Arbutus also specializes in dwarf conifers, Jacobs would be one to ask about using them in combina-tions with Japanese maples. He said that it can be done, but it requires knowledge of the shade tolerance of conifer varieties, since the natural site for Japanese maples would be the edge-of-the-forest, or in light shade, under larger trees.

▲ JAPANESE MAPLES


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Acer palmatum ‘Tobiosho’ boasts a dense, green canopy through summer, but the colors turn

brilliant in the fall – first gold, then orange and finally scarlet. The color changes start at the bottom

of the tree and work their way to the top until the entire tree is scarlet. The tree was introduced by

Iseli Nursery after production manager Milt Tobie, for whom it is named, selected it in 1982.

Jacobs reported best results with cultivars of Pinus parviflora, P. cem-bra and the native Japanese species, Chamaecyparis obtusa and Cryptomeria japonica. These are most suitable for the light conditions favored by Japanese maples.

Bigger is betterRetired plantsman and specialty

grower Norbert Kinen of Kinen’s Big and Phat Plants in Gresham, Ore. grows around 80 cultivars for his market niche: larger caliper (3-5 inches), artisti-cally sculpted trees.

Maples account for about one third of his business, and red maples are leading the charge. “I still marvel at the demand for red,” he said.

However, he expects that the “appetite for red will gravitate to a wider use of the leaf colors and textures provided by the multitude of luscious cultivars” of other Japanese maple cul-tivars that are not well known in the trade and not familiar to consumers.

Demand for weeping forms seems to be down a little, but “people are getting more moxie about using a wider range of cultivars,” said Kinen. “As designers and consumers get edu-cated, the market will improve.”

A favorite of Kinen’s is ‘Germaine’s Gyration,’ which he called a “stiff-armed weeper.” “It is extremely beauti-ful when it first comes out in spring and as the leaves change color during the seasons,” he said.

In the garden designDarcy Daniels, owner and prin-

cipal of Bloomtown Garden Design in Portland, Ore., “turns to Japanese maples again and again.”

“I like plants to deliver, and they do,” she said. “I love them for the color, texture, and fall color they bring to the garden.” Not only that, but she also appreciates that they are “garden-sized trees, suitable for many of the smaller, city gardens that I work in.”


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Daniels looks for choices that produce a tree-like effect, a graceful canopy that won’t overpower a small yard. A “good long season of interest includes foliage colors, winter outlines and pleasing textures,” she said.

While she is grateful for the diver-sity of choices that exist today, Daniels would like to see growers “give us something more for new effects” for “gardens that people live in.”

So many choicesDespite the huge selection of

options among Japanese maple culti-vars, every grower and designer has favorites. Sometimes, everyone agrees on the best of the best. From the sourc-es for this article (Johnson, Schmidt and Daniels), here is a list of selections named as underutilized winners or sim-ply superior choices.

A. palmatum ‘Mikawa yatasu-busa’ – Daniels called this striking, slow-growing dwarf a “dearly loved” selection that stays tiny and is great for containers or small, tight spaces.

Schmidt mentioned the “natural artistic structure” of the green tree, its irregular branching and leaves that overlap “like shingles on a roof.” Johnson stressed the large, overlapping leaves that make it “quite unusual.” (Three votes)

A. shirasawanum ‘Autumn Moon’ – Daniels recommenbded this small shirasawanum cultivar, calling it “light and bright to illuminate the gar-den.” According to Johnson of Eshraghi Nursery, it is “similar to ‘Aureum’ in leaf shape and habit, (but its) leaves are yellow tinged with bronzy-orange, becoming more prominently orange-red in fall.” (Three votes)

A. p. ‘Seiryu’ – This widely avail-able tree, the only upright green lace-leaf, has a delicate look from finely textured foliage. It grows strongly, but won’t outgrow its space. ‘Seiryu’ devel-ops excellent red-orange fall color. (Two votes)

A. p. ‘Ukigumo’ – According to Daniels, this Great Plant Picks tree, also known as the floating clouds maple, “lights up a shady corner.” The varie-

▲ JAPANESE MAPLES


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gated upright, a favorite of Schmidt’s, has “outstanding” white leaves flecked with green and pink. “Shade produces a nearly pure white leaf,” he said. In the fall, it boasts pumpkin orange color. (Two votes)

A. p. ‘Orangeola’ – This weep-ing laceleaf earned awe from Daniels for its showy, orange displays, starting bright orange-red in spring, fading to rich red-green in summer and burst-ing into fiery orange-red in fall. “Heavy shade encourages a deep green cast,” Johnson said. “ (It has) a long lasting, vibrant display and branches that cas-cade nicely.” It matures to 8 by 7 feet. (Two votes)

A. p. ‘Oshio beni’ – Daniels chose this tree for “red leaf with stat-ure.” “It catches the light, so it does not create a dark hole the way some red cultivars do,” she said. According to Schmidt, the tree has “excellent, wide branching and bright, scarlet fall color.” (Two votes)

Getting the word outTo help plant buyers find sources

for their material, specialty growers noted the value of using the OAN’s Directory & Buyer’s Guide. Schmidt uses it as his primary marketing tool and considers it “very important” to his business.

Norbert Kinen of Kinen’s Big and Phat Plants in Gresham, Ore. agreed. “I get calls from the OAN Directory & Buyers Guide over and over again,” he said.

The calls come from other nurs-erymen, experts who source plants, brokers and landscapers, as well as landscape architects and garden design-ers, whom he views as “the key people carrying out the evolution of wider pat-tern of cultivar usage.”

Elizabeth Petersen writes for gardeners and garden businesses, coaches students and writers, and tends a one-acre garden in West Linn, Ore. She can be reached at [email protected].


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