Hi, Can anybody help with information (origin, hardiness, eventual height, spring/autumn colour, special characteristics etc.) on acer palmatum 'Pygmy', please. I recently purchased this plant from a garden centre in the south west of Ireland. It is a green cultivar with small leaves. From the little information on the plant label, it seems to be a genuine dwarf cultivar. Vertrees mentions it under the category of 'cultivars not yet assessed' and I can find little or nothing on the Web. Most of the hits from search engines related to 'Red Pygmy', 'Coonara Pygmy' or 'Sharp's Pygmy'. Many thanks, JOS
Based on the size and shape differences of the three Maples you mentioned, this one should be easy for others to help but you may need to describe your Maple better or supply some pictures of it. There is a fourth Maple that used to be sold in the nursery trade as being 'Pygmy' but I am not committing, in part due to your wanton no response in the 'Crippsii' thread, until I can see what your plant looks like or have a better sense of what your plant may look like. Jim
Thanks, Jim. I'm about to purchase a new digital camera and will post some photos as soon as I can. You mention about a fourth acer being sold in the nursery trade as 'Pygmy'. On a general point, does the name 'Pygmy' refer to a recognised cultivar in its own right or to a 'generic' class of dwarf green cultivars ? Based on the label, I think that my plant has come from a Dutch nursery rather than an Irish nursery but have no idea beyond that. Apologies for the delay in replying on the 'Crippsii' thread but I've been away for several weeks. JOS
Hi JOS: Before I look at your post there is something I want to pontificate a little about. First off, it is not that I was singling you out as many of us have made comments and then no one responds back to us. I generally will not write everything I may know of a subject in the first post, sometimes not even in the second post. I am waiting for the thread starter to get back to me and if there seems to be no apparent interest I probably will not respond again. Most forums exist for everyone which means that anyone can post a question and there may be others that will join in and try to answer the question as best as we can. Sometimes dealing with generalizations or hope that some of us may know the answer, prior to us having the information to be more certain, makes dealing with the initial question tougher for us. There are people that will respond to questions on Maples and there are many more people that choose not to respond to a thread at all. Those that do respond are not responding for themselves but are trying to shed light on an area of concern to someone else. Many times there are others that share the same issue in their minds that have not asked the same question to a forum. In dealing with varieties of Maples there will be some assessments made on behalf of a responder that may not be completely accurate but at least the responder tried to offer some sort of help or info as opposed to the number of people that just want to be observers. I fully expected my comment of "wanton no response" to be edited out by the UBC staff as it can be construed as being personal in nature but that was not my intention. I did it to check and see if you were sincere or not. With my knowing that answer, I'll be more than glad to help you with your Maple. In regards to Pygmy, at one time in the nursery trade the female Lion form of Shishigashira was sold as being Pygmy. I learned that plant as being Pygmy long before I had the Vertrees Maple book. It becomes almost essential that we see the leaves of your plant to know if the leaves are crinkled in shape, the degree of how much they are crinkled, how large the leaves are and what color the leaves are right now. Even Red Pygmy is green for us most of the year here. Coonara Pygmy colors up better in the Spring. The Fall color here is not spectacular at all. Sharp's Pygmy is green most of the year and the leaves for a dwarf are good sized, larger in size than a Coonara Pygmy's leaves are and show varying degrees of a crinkle in the leaf. Show me some pics of your Maple and I'll tell you what I think it is. A further note: There is also another Linearilobum similar to Red Pygmy but was green leafed instead that was sold in Oregon as Pygmy back in the middle to late 80's but it was just a seedling from Koto no ito that grew to a nice small, tight, bun shaped Maple. It was not a seedling from Koto ito komachi however. There is also a dwarf form of Koto ito komachi that to my knowledge was not ever named. Honestly, we never knew what to call it other than dwarf Koto Ito but it originally came to us from a certain select grower in Canby, Oregon. Yes, Pygmy can refer to the size and relative shape of the tree rather than a specific name of Japanese Maple. Hard to know what the thinking was of the originating nursery but you are probably correct to think that your Maple came into Ireland from elsewhere. Jim
Jim, Many thanks for your very informative reply. As you say, posting a photo would be very useful and I will certainly do this. I think that the specimen I have is certainly not a Linearilobum and there is no noticeable crinkle as in 'Shishigashira'. The leaves are more classic Palmatum or Matsumurae but small in size, more like Coonara, I'd say. One question which you might be able to clear up for me; is 'Pygmy' a registered cultivar name or one of these names loosely applied within the trade. JOS
Hi JOS: Pygmy, the female Lion form of Shishigashira, was not ever registered per say but enough nurseries carried it that to many nurseries saying the name Pygmy meant that Maple. For a very long time and what has caused a lot of confusion as a result is that for many years no Japanese Maple was officially registered here. Many Maples were named for the nursery trade and because of that trying to pinpoint where a particular Maple had its origin here is not well documented at all. In some cases the origin of the Maple was not ever meant to be documented. As long as people in the nursery trade knew which Maple the nursery was calling it, then there was enough people around the US that would eventually know it by name and later by sight. Very unscientific and one of the valid reasons the Europeans have had a tough time with us and our Maples here. Even in Japan many Maples did not have official names before they were shipped here. Knowing that drove a few of the purists in plants crazy trying to find out what the Japanese called their Maples as in many cases there were more than one name applied per Maple such as Toyo nishiki and Goshiki Kaede. The other problem issue was trying to learn where the Maple originated in Japan, whose nursery did it come from or who selected the seedling or found it in the wild and later propagated it. If the Maple you have is not a Linearilobum form, nor a form of Shishigashira, a Sharp's Pygmy nor a Coonara Pygmy then hopefully someone will give us some insight as to what the Maple is. It is not uncommon for a nursery to name a Maple on its own as we've seen it done in Pines and Spruce whereby a nursery in its sales catalog will misspell a name and then "everyone" wants the plant expecting it to be different than the Pine or Spruce they already have. I know of one nursery now that in its sales catalog is selling a Koshiki Kiyohome. Wait until someone in this forum asks how to grow their new Maple or we see it for sale in two to three years in a nursery or offered in an online auction! If we know what a Goshiki Kiyohime is or looks like we already know the Maples are the same but not enough people will know that. I've been a proponent of people knowing their plants and the above is a good example why it is so important. Some people may think I am blowing smoke but I've probably been around the block more often than they have with Maples and I have a better idea what to look out for than most people do. We've seen a similar thing in antique Art Glass whereby people have paid $30,000 for a vase thinking it was of French origin made in 1890, to later find out their faked vase can be purchased in a Miami shop for $300 that was made last year in Romania! Buyer beware has a little more significance in such a case, doesn't it? Things are not that extreme in Maples but there are others hoping we do not know our plants and then can say that their misspelling was just oversight on their part. Not so, when it has been going on for 3-5 years or longer. The Linearilobum Pygmy came from a nursery in Oregon that sold it to a few other nurseries that grew it on and later decided not to propagate it. Today, that same Maple would be all over the place. Is the name Pygmy just? No, it isn't but once again not enough current day people know what the first so-called Pygmy was in relation to which Maple it was, that many nurseries all knew as being Pygmy before there was a clarification made that the Maple was indeed a form of Shishigashira instead. Still, the name Pygmy, although not ever registered applies to that particular Maple. The "old guard" in Maples would not have any disagreement there now as they knew which Maple it was and in many cases had propagated it and sold it to others as being Pygmy. I bought my Maple as being Pygmy back in 1983. Best regards, Jim
'Mejishi' 'Mejishi' is the female form of 'Shishigashira'. It is not really female but the name refers to the mythical lion as female. It is the more common form. A larger growing form. Mejishi means female lion. 'Ojishi' refers to the male mythical lion. The 'Ojishi' form of 'Shishigashira' is a much more compact and less common maple.
Hi Elmore: You brought up an excellent point but not everyone agreed in the names of the male and female Lions in how they corresponded to the forms. The names you mentioned are correct but depending on who one talked to, the larger form is the male Lion and the smaller dwarf form was the female Lion. I had this discussion with Don more than once and he told me that both Koichiro Wada and Jiro Kobayashi said the dwarf form was the female form of Shishigashira. I did make a glaring mistake though. I mentioned Goshiki Kiyohime of which there was one at one time but I've never seen it. Where I messed up was in the spelling of Koshiki Gotohime and adding in Kiyohime. Just a ways off I think but that was a mistake that I felt needed to be cleared up. I checked the catalog later to be sure about the Koshiki Gotohime spelling after I sensed I was more than just a little wrong. Jim
Parroting Hey Jim, just parroting the info in the book. A few years back I took scion from a 'Shishigashira' in a large container. Those in the middle picture (above) may be them. Anyway this maple struck me as being different than any of the other 'Shishigashira' that I had found. It was about 4' tall and about 2.5' wide. Full like a shrub from top to bottom. When I was grafting them it seemed like the leaves were a little smaller also. I tagged them 'Ojishi' so that I could at least keep track of them and discern any different growth habits than the other ones that I grafted from taller, more open trees. Elmore
Hi Elmore: I know where the info came from. I asked Don about Pygmy and what J.D. wrote a second time soon after I had J.D.'s book. I have no problems with what you wrote. There is a 3rd form of Shishigashira that starts out a small, bun shaped Maple and then will grow to be a willowy, rather bushy upright. The leaves are the smallest of the 3 forms and has the most crinkling in the leaves. It will show lots of red (some leaves are almost totally red) and gold in the Fall, even for us here. That form is my personal favorite for Shishigashira. The nursery that did the misspelling are also the ones that started the Picea Backeri spelling of which there is no such thing to us purists. There was a Goshiki Kiyohime as I've seen pics of it in 2 old Japanese nursery catalogs from many years ago. Koichiro Wada had it but Don could only bring in one plant of it due to limited supply from what I was told. Don rather soon after getting it here lost his plant and did not get another one. Jim
