I've just found out that it's possible, maybe even practical, for home gardeners to get into tissue culture. There's info on the web and the supplies are available and not that expensive. So, the first question that pops into my mind: Can Japanese maples be propagated this way?
You certainly stand a good chance for success. The only problem is you may not get the true to type feature as tissue culture may introduce in variance during the cell division stage. This departure luckily iaffects only a small % of your culturelings.
