Hi Forum, Does anyone have any experience in growing maples from grafted host plants? After years of grafting maples I have enough root stock to last me for quite some time. So last year I used only the seeds of my grafted plants for germination. I heard that the outcome will not be true to the species but I wanted to see the results. Sango Kaku was a great germinater,others like Bronze Wing rather poor. So my question is if anyone worked in the same direction and has some background which grafted maples are better to use . Now I have about 20 plants from grafted hosts. The Disectums look definitely like their host the others rather normal. That opens a can of worms. What am I growing? If my little Hagaromo's , Bronze Wing's Villa Taranto,s grow up to look like their hosts can I call them by that name? or does a named variety have to be grafted? Wolf
I have grown seeds from grafted plants and in my (limited) experience some of them grow fairly true to type and others produce a wild mixture. It makes a big difference if the flowers were self pollinated or pollinated by a JM of a different type. Isolated trees or isolated stands of the same cultivar will obviously stand a better chance of breeding true than those from a mixed collection. It is not OK to name the seedlings with the parent cultivar name, the named maple must be propagated clonally. I just call seeedlings of named dissectums "dissectum seedlings" and if I had red barked 'Sango Kaku' seedlings I would call them "Coral bark seedlings" or something like that.
I agree with Maf, it is a lot of fun since the seedlings are quite variable. Concerning hagoromo, I have found systematically a high percentage of its seedlings to have hagoromo-like leaves. Gomero
Yes they should be identified as seedlings, not the named cultivar. With Sangokaku my seedlings have not been as good as the parent in that the Coral colour has not been as intense though the autumn colour is the same. The atropurpureum seedlings likewise vary with perhaps 20% worthwhile. I have attached a picture of a Seiryu seedling which is similar to its parent and also a Linearlobum seedling which has finer leaves than the parent on subsequent leaves, the initial growth more typical of the parent. I had one small Villa Taranto seedling but it grew too slowly to be worth the effort.
