I just bought an Acer shirasawanum aureum. As you can see below, it's grafted but I don't understand why the bark below the graft is green and brown above. Do you think it's because the scion is a young tree and the graft is coming from an older tree ? Does anybody already practice air layering on shirasawanum ? Does it root easily ? I would like to hide this ugly grafting point.
What do you mean by "+1" ? Does that mean that air layering are easy on shirasawanum and that it roots well ?
"usually they're suppose to match red to red; green to green." -- That isn't the issue here. The rootstock is green Acer palmatum, the typical rootstock used for grafting several of the "japanese" species. The scion is Acer shirasawanum. Different species from the rootstock, but compatible. The green rootstock really shows right now because it is a very young graft. It will change color as it grows and the bark thickens and becomes more woody. Might take a couple of years. Otherwise, I don't see much to criticize.
Yes, I'm sure. Acer shirasawanum seed and/or rootstock is not readily available. Green acer palmatum seed and seedlings are abundant and at a reasonable price. Commercial grafting of palmatum, japonicum, shirasawanum and sieboldianum routinely uses Acer palmatum rootstock.
I remember asking the propagator of my A. shirasawanum 'Palmatifolium' this very question. The answer was that it was grafted on common A. palmatum rootstock. Japanese Maples, 3rd ed. pg. 36: And, from page 97: I read all of this as a rather uncommitted testimonial about the likelihood of success with non-grafted Japanese Maples. Unless someone has specific knowledge about the cultivar in question, I'm guessing that you'll just have to try it and see. Bryan
Why dont they use a simple shirasawanum seedling as a rootstock? Shirasawanum seedlings are not nearly as plentiful as Palmatum or Japonicum seedlings are to graft onto. Palmatum seedlings are good enough but we preferred Japonicum seedlings for our Shirasawanum grafts. The germination rate of success for Shirasawanum is not nearly as good as Palmatum, Buergerianum and Japonicum are either, at least they weren't for us. Some plant failure in rooted cultivars, as they get older, is attributed to their being on their own roots. Quite the opposite is more true in that the rooted cultivars are more likely to fail when the Maples are young as opposed to being old. The reasoning is that when the plant is older it has more of an established root system to sustain it than when the Maple is young and on its own and still developing roots. The juvenile years are the more delicate years as opposed to a cutting grown Maple that is 7-10 years old or older. Failure on older plants is generally attributed to cultural or grower caused issues, not necessarily physiological problems such as the break down of the root systems. Other cultivars, such as 'Bloodgood', root very well and seem to make very strong older plants We felt the same way as seedlings raised from cutting grown Bloodgood was one of our main rootstocks for grafting for red leaved Palmatums, even dwarfs, linearilobums and dissectums. We wanted the added vigor in our rootstock we got from the cutting grown Bloodgood seedlings. Jim
Shriasawanum on Circinatum Susan, Ever seen or heard good justification for grafting shirasawanum on to circinatum. Shirasawanum, especially Aureum, has kind of a bad history for vigor and reliability. Do you think that a grafting match like this would help, especially in an area where circinatum grows so well, our spendid Oregon? Good to see you over here, Michael
Hi Michael, I haven't done much work with circinatum at all. The only time I ever bought circ. seedlings to use for 'Little Gem' rootstock, they were from a "leftover availability list" and I had one heck of a time finding a straight spot to make a cut on them. It certainly wouldn't be hard to collect some seed and have a try at it in the future, though. I do see Jim's point about using japonicum seedlings, -- they do seem to be more vigorous overall than palmatum. Which leads me a bit off the original topic, but has anyone grafted circinatum on japonicum rootstock? We still have a couple of A.circinatum 'Little Gem' grafted onto palmatum rootstock-- one about 15 years ago, and one maybe 5 or 6 years ago. The older one is grafted low and planted up to the graft. The trunk is probably 1-1/2 to 2" caliper on the top, but still only 3/4" below. It doesn't show because of the rootstock being buried, but you have to be careful not to bump the plant because it's way top-heavy. The younger one is grafted about 18 or 20" up and has the same problem, except that it will never survive without a stake to prop up the wimpy palmatum. Obviously, this is one that should be done on it's own species -- but does anyone know if using japonicum instead would yield any advantages? Susan
Many nurseries today still are not growing their own seedlings for grafting. We never could get enough Circinatum seed to do much. If we had plenty of Circinatum seedlings we may have tried grafting 'Little Gem' on Circinatum rootstock to see how it works but with some strong reservations for that particular Maple. Our standard rootstock for Circinatum would have been Japonicum. We probably would not have tried rooted cuttings for ‘Little Gem’ as witches brooms generally do not do well on their own roots. Then again the only Circinatum we grafted was 'Monroe' and we did graft it but on Japonicum rootstock only. We always felt that for most of the Circinatum coming out of Oregon that Palmatum seedlings used for grafting would be just fine. We also felt the best Circinatum plants came out of Oregon so why mess with the standard. If the nurseries there had success using Palmatum for their grafted plants then we would not argue with them. We are a little too warm here for Circinatum. We had ‘Little Gem’ in the nursery but we always had problems with dieback on it. Don Kleim liked 'Monroe' and felt at the time that it was the one cultivar that could better adapt for us here. As always having enough Japonicum, Shirasawanum and Sieboldianum seedlings available for grafting onto was and still is a big problem. Many nurseries today will only graft onto Palmatum due to availability and the fact that many nurseries have not experimented around using various rootstocks to see which can work. Even still I would be hesitant to graft Shirasawanum on Shirasawanum. I just do not see that being a better or more vigorous combination than using Palmatum or Japonicum. I hear you, Susan, about 'Little Gem'. Sometime try grafting it onto Japonicum and see how it works. Still, I'd rather have the low graft as I feel the Maple will live longer than the high grafts will. Reminds me of Pinus strobus 'Horsford Dwarf'. The low grafts can be chewed up and bounced around easier but the high grafts have to be staked and the heads do not fill out as well as the low grafted plants will. The lower grafted plants seem to have noticeably more vigor from the ones I've seen around Oregon, for both the Pine and the Maple. Jim
Jim, Rooted cuttings as rootstock for grafting? It sounds like there must still have been good reasons to graft, or you would have focused on rooting techniques as your sole propagation methodology. Is it because some cultivars really don't do well on their own roots? Or, is it because success rates and/or cost of production make rooting operations less attractive? Or, is it something else entirely? Bryan
< Rooted cuttings as rootstock for grafting? > Seedlings raised from seed from cutting grown parents and then used for grafting. We wanted vigor in our rootstock and one way to get it was for us to grown our own. We felt the seedlings raised from the seed gathered from cutting grown parents provided us with an edge over any hand selected batch of row run seed (seed gathered by hand from a number of grafted Maples, germinated and then either grown in rows or in containers). We felt in trials growing seed side by side and later on by growing grafted Maples of the same variety side by side that our seed gathered from the cutting grown Bloodgood and others were better for us in developing a stronger grafted plant. Cutting grown Maples (rooted cuttings) take a little longer to produce a root system in a nursery than a grafted Maple will. We did both as we wanted to get 5 gallon Maples up in size fast to sell them quick (we sold no one gallons). Then again when people in Japan wanted our Maples they preferred Maples that were cutting grown over grafted Maples. Even some people in the US wanted cutting grown Maples for their stock plants rather than grafted Males. If we want to raise seedlings the cutting grown Maples will be more of a pure line to work with than a Maple that has elements of two parents in its system, the scion parent and the seedling parent. The old Maple bonsai enthusiasts preferred having a cutting grown Maple as they felt the Maple would live longer than a grafted Maple would. After seeing a 200 year old cutting grown bonsai Acer buergerianum I am inclined to agree with their reasoning. Virtually all of the Maples that were imported into the US from Japan and into England, even back in the late 20's early 30's were of rooted cuttings origin (cutting grown Maples). They were not grafted Maples by any means. The old plant purists and the old plant hobbyists were more likely to have cutting grown Maples rather than grafted ones. Even if we look closely in the Esvled site we see some of the older Maples in Holland and in English Gardens are cutting grown Maples. I think they have proven they can hold up over time whereas grafted Maples have not shown to be around as long for us in comparison. It depends on what we want. Do we want faster rooting so we can have a saleable plant quicker or do we strive for a Maple that may outlast its grafted counterparts over time. In our nursery we chose grafted Maples over cutting growing them by 3 to 1 but that ratio was due to the time element but we still had cutting grown Maples for those that requested them but we could not get the latter up to size as fast as the grafted Maples would. Ideally, we do both forms of propagation but most nurseries will only do grafting as their sole means of propagation as it is more cost efficient for them to have a 5 gallon size in 4-6 years rather than a cutting grown Maple in a 5 gallon in 6-8 years, sometimes as long as 10 years depending on the Maple such as some of the dwarf and semi dwarf forms that are not vigorous on their own roots. Once they get some size to them are rather valued plants however to some people. We were not a conventional wholesale nursery which accounts for why we would do both methods of propagation. We left the air layering of Maples to others whom we knew that would only air layer a cutting grown Maple, never would they in particular air layer a grafted Maple. We saved some of the cutting grown Maples just to be seed parents for us to be our rootstock for the grafted Maples. We grew all of our own rootstocks for every type of plant that we grafted. Jim
How do you explain that ? Can you detail this ? How long can a grafted maple live ? What is the difference of airlayering a cutting grown or a grafted tree ?
You got off on the wrong foot with me. I do know that the only thing that Europeans do understand is for someone to be blunt and I can oblige anyone in that regard. Now then: The whole idea of gathering seed from cutting grown parents was to see for ourselves if what we expected to see would indeed come about. What we wanted to see was more vigor in the seedlings we were raising to be our own rootstock. We found that the seed gathered from some of the cutting grown Maples of ours did have more vigor when grown side by side with seed gathered from grafted Maples instead. We wanted to see more vigor in the rootstock which would allow more vigorous growth to the plant once it was grafted. We ended up doing the equivalent of field studies on seedling Maples. There are some Maples on record from the Vertrees books that talk about 'Viridis' being 75 - 100 years old in the late 80's. I am not going to pick out Maples from the Esveld site and say this one is cutting grown and is this age but I will say that there are some cutting grown Maples shown in that web site that are no less than 50 years old. I do think a 200 year old cutting grown Trident Maple speaks for itself. I know of a 100+ year old cutting grown 'Pendulum angustilobum' in Oregon but I am not willing to tell anyone where that Maple currently resides. Essentially we have been grafting Japanese Maples in the US since the early 30's. The oldest grafted Maple that I've seen in the US is about 60 years old and it is in an estate garden. What is the difference of airlayering a cutting grown or a grafted tree ? To the people that have done some serious work on air layering the reason why they would prefer a cutting grown plant to air layer is due to the fact that they pretty much know what Maple they will be getting as a result of their efforts. Air layering a grafted Maple does not guarantee that the plant or plants they will yield will be the same plant as the parent plant they air layered from. How can that be? Real simple, the grafted plant is a composite of 2 plants, the rootstock and the scion parent whereas the cutting grown plant is just one parent plant. Even when we air layer a grafted Gordon Apple we do not necessarily get an offspring resembling the Gordon Apple. Most of the air layered propagated individuals will look close to the Gordon but not all will whereas if the Gordon was a cutting grown Apple instead, then most if not all of the air layered offspring will look pretty much the same as the cutting grown Gordon Apple does. There really should not be any difference with what goes on with a Gordon Apple in this case and a Japanese Maple. I am done with this issue now. Jim
Perhaps to simplify what Jim is saying -- or maybe just to further complicate it -- We often make choices and defend preferences based on a single attribute. I, and most commercial propagators, choose the propagation method that yields me the highest rate of success for the least money. I graft Japanese maples because I am much better at getting them to live, and I can usually find JM scions that are ready to graft about 9 months of the year, while timing is much more limited for good rooting. But that choice is made purely from a production standpoint. If I were looking for purity of strain regardless of profitibility, I suppose I would make cuttings. That is because we assume that the only difference between a graft and a cutting-grown plant is the mode of attachment of the roots. Not so. The rooted cutting has no internal influence but it's own. The grafted scion is living on the rootstock's lifeblood, and we all know how variable the traits of seedling rootstock can be. For landscape ornamentals, the result of grafting a named variety yields a reasonable copy of the named variety because it uses the named variety's genetic code for a roadmap. But it's like having a heart transplant and even though you're still you, there is the influence of somebody elses tissues in your system. Jim also talks about preferring to take seeds from trees grown from cuttings as opposed to taking seeds from trees grown as grafts. The first time he mentioned this, I didn't realize he had been collecting seed from grafted named cultivars to use as rootstock. I guess in my mindset, those seeds are too likely to be "interesting", and I sit on them for observation, while purchasing rootstock seedlings that were collected from SEEDLING grown green species parent trees. I haven't seen any comparison side by side between seedlings from cutting-grown and seedling-grown parent trees, but I imagine that IN SOME CASES the cutting-grown seeds would be superior because they are from a cutting that was specifically selected for enduring traits. However, seeds from a carefully selected seed-grown tree would have the same opportunity for systemic purity and hence be an excellent choice. He may have learned this from economic necessity -- is that possible, Jim? -- because not everyone has the luxury of buying ready-made rootstock, and must make do with what seeds are available to collect, thus putting him in a position to make the observation of the difference. So then... when it occasionally gets mentioned that a cultivar may not be true to the original, it's not necessarily an accusation that somebody lied about identity or was too stupid to know the right name. Sometimes it's that scions of something special were grafted and gained vigor or lost certain traits through association with the rootstock. Then scions were cut from that plant, and gained or lost traits through association with that rootstock. Several generations down the road, the trees are decidedly affected. Usually, generation after generation of grafts aren't grafted off on one another, since most of the grafts wind up as landscape trees and not commercial production trees. But every nursery that has a cultivar got it from another nursery, and so on, so there is decidedly a multi-layer rootstock influence on the continuation of cultivars. In the meantime, resentment flares up in me when threads imply that somehow grafted plants are ethically inferior to cutting-grown ones. It's not just a matter of waiting the extra couple of years for a cutting-grown maple to catch up in size for marketability, it's the unreliability of rooting success that has most of us grafting. If there were nothing but rooted maples available, you'd be looking at double the already ridiculous prices by the time they hit the retail sales arena, simply due to supply and demand. Looking down on grafted cultivars as a slap-dash, get-rich-quick scheme to be avoided is like looking down on Timex because it's not a Rolex. It still gets the job done and allows the masses to be on time. I didn't intend to go on quite this much. Time to change hats and go feed the critters. Registered Angus cattle, registered Oxford sheep. And DON"T get me going about diluted genetics there!! Susan
Hi Susan: < However, seeds from a carefully selected seed-grown tree would have the same opportunity for systemic purity and hence be an excellent choice. He may have learned this from economic necessity -- is that possible, Jim? -- because not everyone has the luxury of buying ready-made rootstock, and must make do with what seeds are available to collect, thus putting him in a position to make the observation of the difference. > Remember our nursery was a direct descendant of the Luther Burbank Nursery. The Experimental part of the Henderson Experimental Garden name was indeed part of our legacy. We brought in plants to grow on that many people said we could not grow. We've seen several examples of Hibiscus in the UBC forum that without Bill Henderson's breeding we may all still have what he started with and that was the white with the yellow center. After many years of trials he had pinks, oranges, reds and bicolors that we all take for granted today when we see them. We've seen several progeny of his creations in this forum and none of you knew who developed them. My part with a plant breeding background was to set up field studies that Don and I talked over. We felt the Achilles heel in Japanese Maples was always the rootstock. Why was it that the top of the Maple did so well elsewhere and yet the roots barely would fill out a one gallon container. Essentially what I did was set up plots to explore our notions that we could develop of line or two or three of seedlings we could use that would develop a root system in concert with the top growth we got that few people could get due to our climate. We selected out a series of promising seedlings that we grew on and monitored to see how they stacked up to the seeds that came off grafted parents. We saw first hand through our trials what we felt was some vigor in the seedlings from cutting grown parents. It is not to say that we could not have developed a rootstock line from seeds gathered from grafted Bloodgood and done almost as well as we did indeed take seed from grafted Bloodgood and used those seedlings for grafts also. It is just that for some of the iffy, hard to grow Maples we wanted the vigor. A case in point is two Maples that have been notoriously dirty for years, ever since one of them came into the US in 1972. 'Shigitatsu sawa' which is not the same cultivar as 'Reticulatum' had a real problem with Verticillium. One way to clean it up was to give it a more vigorous rootstock, which was pretty much what John Mitsch did for 'Red Filigree Lace'. By giving the top a vigorous foot also gave the top more vigor and in time we had a much cleaner Maple than what we first had. 'Filigree' is another Maple that has had its fair share of Vertilicillium and we went from 50% losses by the times these plants were grafted to the time they were 5 gallon size to Maples that had a 75% chance of seeing them get up to 15 gallon size and beyond. If we are talking about grafting them and getting 200 to take in one year and by the time they were 5 gallon size we had 100 left what kind of financial difference are we talking about when instead 150 get up to 15 gallon size? Which number would anyone prefer? Not only that but the people that bought 'Filigree' from us were not losing them now as was not the case before. Does anyone really want to go there when we talk about what losses 'Red Filigree Lace' had going back to the days that William Goddard had that Maple when at best 10% of them might make it up to a 5 gallon size. The losses for many years were tremendous until that Maple got cleaned up and one way to work on the Maple was to give it better feet, so to speak. In the meantime, resentment flares up in me when threads imply that somehow grafted plants are ethically inferior to cutting-grown ones. It's not just a matter of waiting the extra couple of years for a cutting-grown maple to catch up in size for marketability, it's the unreliability of rooting success that has most of us grafting. From a plant breeder's point of view one plant is more pure than the other for breeding purposes. All I did was relate what others that have been babied with cutting grown Maples felt about them. I stand behind the application of the theory in regards to purity but no matter who chooses what method of propagation there are advantages and disadvantages either way. One method of propagation is far more mainstream than the other so we go with what works best and for us it was grafting most of the time but not all. Hey, we still grafted and the whole process of going through the rigors of the seedling trails was for developing a better rootstock for grafting. To be honest trying to root cuttings is a real pain and it takes several years to become successful at it. We let someone else do the hard ones for us as the only one he had trouble with was 'Koto ito komachi'. He was lucky to get a 10% take at best with that one. The hobbyist has all kinds of time to play around and do all the cuttings they want whereas a nursery for the most part cannot wait too long for results as time is their enemy. Glad to see you back in here. Best regards, Jim
