I bought this 7 feet tall Bloodgood maple from my local nursery and planted in late August last year. It was doing well over the winter. It's been over a month now and all the leaves are not opening and some have dropped. I noticed there are still new buds developing. It looks like a second crop of leaves are coming. I fertilized it with Osmocote 2 weeks ago. Weather is strange this year. Snow in February, sunny in March and rain every other day in April. Temperature is below normal. Night time 5 C/40 F and day 12 C/55 F. Just wondering is there anything wrong with my tree. Thanks for your help.
What I see in your pix is the ground littered with the bud sheaths that fall away as the leaves emerge and normal leaf emergence. Maples in spring always make me anxious, especially when spring is as cool as it is this year. Leaves hang limply like they do when the tree has run out of water in the summer. But, it is normal. They will be as they are supposed to be in a week or two, I'm sure.
Looks like the effects of a false spring. Any year in which we (in Michigan) get a warmer than average early spring, I get nervous because if we get a cool, cloudy period after the leaves have started to push, or fruit tree flowers are open, some can't just wait, they need sun to complete the process of using the sap from the roots to convert to sugars and use them to mature. In cool weather, the Bees just park wherever they are and can't do their thing, either. I don't know exactly how long a Bee can stay out in the open in a sluggish state, but it's not forever. The limp leaves are subject to mechanical damage over a couple weeks of winds and rain. I don't know how to characterize the specifics of this kind of bad spring weather into some kind of intelligent statement because the same degree days/photo-period/humidity values that occur before spring gets warm, are just fine. In fact, spring is ~six weeks late this year, here, and this has been a really crumby winter without our traditional above average thaw of a few days in January or February or March. A younger version of me might take that to mean we won't have a false spring killer period in May, but us old guys know better. Mother Nature can be a real B____.
My sugar maples do this every spring. Unfold and look like a half fallen beach umbrella. I think what happens is that they partially inflate from sap in the bud and twig, but don't finish inflating until sap from the roots starts to run.
