For those who could not attend and would be interested to have a quick feedback (waiting for the Maple Society Newsletter). First the bad news: you missed a good opportunity to visit a beautiful country taking advantage of an excellent organization by Brian, Todd, Sue and their Japanese counterparts. I came back wishing I could have stayed longer. Now the good news: you did not miss a lot on the Symposium itself. The presentations were very nice but did not contain a lot of new information. In particular I was hoping for a presentation on Japanese cultivation techniques for maples: while visiting Tsukasa nursery I noticed all maples were potted in what it seemed to me as standard garden soil. Of course standard garden soil there is a sandy mixture which drains very well but, still, quite different from what I have seen in Europe and the US with all the hullabaloo on potting mixes. One thing I learned is that the Japanese are firmly convinced that amoenum and palmatum are two different species (see http://foj.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/gbif/foj/ , the website for Flora of Japan). Apparently the evidence on the contrary is not convincing enough to them. Also they claim that tenuifolium is a different species from shirasawanum. Another surprising fact is that I did not see any maple cultivars in all the parks and gardens I visited (before and with the group). They basically plant the species palmatum/amoenum (which they claim never hybridize in nature), some japonicums and a rare sieboldianum. On the other hand there was always a large choice of flowering cherry cultivars which seem to be the tree in Japan. Without even talking of cultivars, I was truly dissapointed not to see more of the other Japanese maple species used in the parks and gardens. I said to myself that, for that, I should visit the Botanical Gardens, but at both, the Tokyo and Kyoto botanical gardens I visited, the Maple area was simply composed by a bunch of the species palmatum (and amoenum). Gomero
What are they growing at the nurseries? And where are all these cultivars coming from?? This seems very odd, as many of the cultivars have been offered for hundreds of years. You would expect to find a few of them laying about!
Tsukasa Nursery had plenty of cultivars for sale. My comments apply to public gardens and parks I visited. Perhaps private gardens use cultivars more widely but someone else should confirm this point. Gomero
Thanks for sharing that info Gomero. I attended a talk given by Jake Hobson at PHS a few weeks ago. He spoke about how the cultivars are rarely grown and how species maples are usually only grown in very large gardens. He did mention that in modern, very small japanese gardens sometimes smaller cultivars are grown. He spoke a lot about actual Japanese garden practices and plants and how they are quite different from "Japanese Gardens" outside of Japan. An important theme in his talk was that the gardens are expressions of the Japanese landscape and very different from conventional western garden aesthetics. Jake showed slides of gardens from private homes, monasteries, museums, public gardens and parks. Maples did not figure prominently into very many gardens at all.
Gomero, Was wondering if the pots were the same style nursery pots with the same drainage design standard in the US and Europe. Thanks Gil
Gil, It is hard to generalize from just one Nursery we visited. Although it is true that some additional information was gathered at the site for the Symposium (headquarters of the Japanese Nurserymen Association I believe) where there was a large commercial area for professionals lacking their own selling premises to expose their plants for retail sale. The pots I saw where soft plastic (as shown in the pic) with holes in the bottom. I checked some of the pots easing the plant out and I found that, instead of potting up, most of the plants had been root pruned. Gomero
Re: Things you can do to palmatums I'd like to share with the forum some unusual facts on maples I saw during the Japan trip. The first two pics are on shaping and pruning an A. palmatum. This is the first time I see such a hard pruning done on a palmatum. The other pics were taken at a nursery. They show the astonishing size of maples (palmatums/amoenums) that are sold, and a bit of their technique. They prepare the tree for moving several years before by cutting the roots around the tree as can be inferred in one of the pics. You can also admire the cross section of the native soil: a perfect sandy loam. At this nursery it seemed that the smallest tree on sale was at least ten years old. Everything was in the ground, no pots and no cultivars. Except for Tsukasa Maples, which had plenty of grafted cultivars, all other nurseries visited were like this. We asked the selling price of one of those large maples but I forgot the figure, maybe some other participant to the trip could recall this point. Gomero
Gomero, Great pictures. The root ball that is burlaped seems pretty small compared to the size of the trees, especially in pic 6. xman
