This is a possible Acer sieboldianum grown from a young seedling which I mentioned in another thread a while back. The history is that a family member went to a UK gardening show and brought back a small pot with five "Japanese maple" seedlings in as a gift. This was one of them. I wanted to post some pictures and see if anyone had any thoughts one way or another... I tried using the vegetative key downloaded from the maple society website but the plant fails the last stage as the petiole is not clearly pubescent. However the alternative with glabrous petioles is A. circinatum which it does not look like to me. According to Peter Gregory's 2004 article on A. sieboldianum these plants lose their pubescence as the summer progresses and the foliage ages so I might just be too late and missed it. I will check the foliage next spring. Also need to check the flower colour in spring, should be white/cream if correct. The foliage looks a bit beat up due to the drought. The plant lives in a container at my brother's house and he is often away for several days per week so may not always get watered often enough. The samara angle is variable, some are quite curved, almost like a horseshoe but many others are flatter, certainly within the 130 to 160 degrees angle mentioned in the Gregory article.
Ah, I have the same problem with some of my seedlings. Sometimes the tag gets lost, sometimes I don't really know what I sow, and then, what's what ? A very useful document. I keep a copy in a file named "DendroDiv", for I also have a couple of other docs about trees in general. For those interested, it's a .pdf file that you can find there : https://maplesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Key_Acer_JDL.pdf There's also a "key" for maple cultivars : https://maplesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/JapaneseMaplesClassKey.pdf Of course, it's just a tool that should be used carefully before "identifying" a tree, but it's definitely a useful tool. A+K
It could be, I think you need to see the red sepals to be sure. The axillary tufts are very visible in spring, but not so much now. The petioles on mine are still pretty hairy, and the hair at the leaf base is much thicker, but that all seems within natural variation. Nice you included some pics of the bud scars, they look pretty much right. The bark is certainly the same.
Thanks for the positive words. Yes, will definitely reserve judgement until I have seen the flowers. Looking for red sepals and cream/light yellow petals with 12-20 flowers per multi-branched, drooping inflorescence. Hopefully I will remember to show some pictures here next spring. One positive is there were no other Japanese maples flowering in this garden this year, and as far as I can tell none of the immediate neighbours have any, so if the tree turns out to be true to type the seeds have a very good chance of being true to type also.
I found an old picture of this maple from when it was much younger and smaller, so thought I may as well add it to the thread. This is the fall colour from 2009:
