I have this Acer p. grown from seeds I collected at a roadside plantings in Autumn 2006. It was collected from aither a dissectum atropurpureunm type, a ghreen dissecum, or a plain palmatum. The leaves are a bit coarser than the "regular" Acer palmatum, and the central lobe is longer than the others. But the leaves seems to lack colour in some places, although it's in the same mix as other palmatums I have that don't show the same problem. It's true the water here is very hard : at the end of the season, and even the next spring, evergreens have white spots on their needles! Another thing is that most of the leaves seem to feel like turning into a spiral: is it something that might be caused by bad conditions of culture, a virus, or anything else?... I enclose some pictures I took today. I also made a cutting last year, and it seems to have the same characteristics (photo taken in April).
Everything looks fine to me looking at the pictures. Seedlings go thru changes like our young children do so give it a 5-8 years to reach final characteristic maturity. Have fun with it.
No disease after all, just the variations you can find in a hybridized tree. I like the spring colours, though, and its red tones are great in autumn too. I almost lost it for lack of watering. It's recovered after I had to prune irt hard, but I will air-layer it, I think it could be a good candidate for bonsai ;-) On the last photo, you can see the differences with a "plain" A. p. on the left, shlightly behind.
I like the leaf form and have seen seedlings with similar shaped leaves in the past. Just speculation, but I strongly suspect that this particular leaf form might indicate a first generation hybrid between a dissectum and a regular palmatum. Most of the dissectum traits are not expressed due to (presumably) recessive genes, but enough "jagged edge" is seen in the leaves to make this combination seem plausible.
