I would like to raise the question to all the real experts in this group to help us in the identification. Which webside is the best for that? In my opinion both the second edition and third edition Japanese Maple books as well as the van Gelderen Maples of the World and the Maples for Gardens: A Color Encyclopedia books would be the most helpful. Personally, I am not seeing any real interest in having the people that are more knowledgeable in Japanese Maples extend themselves online. Most people that have an interest in Maples are not studying the plants that they have but are more inclined to propagate an unknown, albeit in most cases a common Maple, way before they know what they have. From a purist sense that is a huge mistake but today the trend is to see and have a large assortment of Maples and later learn what they are or might be. The chasing of names has led to a glut of misnamed Maples being sold elsewhere and online, so there seems to me to not be a desire to get the names properly affixed to the right plant. Even then for a variety of reasons there will be derision in the ranks not seemingly based on accuracy but more so on personal agendas. Today we have more of motive to place a new name on an old Maple as there is money in it. A Viridis Green Globe is a new, hot name but it is not a new Maple by any means. It was around back in the early 80's but so few of you know anything about that. There was a group of Maples that were considered in the Viridis group and now we have people that are selecting seedlings from these group members of years ago and naming them something new which to me they are not new at all. So, because I have some knowledge in the older Maples my point of view will be automatically sloughed off by the majority as the non-Gospel due to the fact that I am a dinosaur in today's world for Maples. I know what you want and I am the guy that can ID both of your Maples but I'd like to see more input from you about what you have or what you think you have. If I tell you what your Maples are you will not learn from that information but will more likely just move onto the next Maple and the cycle repeats itself. Today, it seems there is no real desire to move ahead but more so to stay at a leisurely pace of doing the same thing everyone else is doing. We do not develop an understanding of the plant we want to grow that way. As far as trying to sort out what we have for a Maple trying to look at various web sites to pinpoint a pic of a possible match to our Maple is a crap shoot. If we knew our plant well enough then we can look at a photo of a Maple and know with better certainty that the photo is not right or is close. We still need to be skeptical as we are seeing only one photo of the Maple online for comparitive purposes and then the photo was used by design. Spring and Fall color pics are common online but we seldom see the Maple after the Spring color changes come about when we can get a better "read" on the leaf shape and structure, the same structure that the leaves will predominately have for most of the growing year. We need to see what those leaves look like so we can compare those leaves to what we are seeing on our Maples to better equate our Maples. There is a reason the Maple Society have not become overly involved in the ID's of this forum. We can all have our thinking as to why it is but I will say that it is better not to involve oneself if there is a chance that we may be wrong and we know enough about the Maple not to want to have to backtrack and defend something we learned years ago. If I say the Maple is Toyama nishiki you can bet I have a pretty solid reason for calling that Maple that but I do not feel I have to tell why I know that name is right for that Maple. That is someone else's job to figure out. When someone makes the response of "how do you know" is when I will wish I had not involved myself and I have to believe there are others that feel the same way. Knowledge comes from experience of growing these plants and from analyzing what we have and there is no better, current substitute for that.
