Hi everybody! I'm a newbie at this "mapple world", and despite I've look for as much information as I could, I still have tons of questions. I've bought a little Acer palmatum "Little princess" (I'll post a picture as soon as I can) a few weeks ago and I'm a bit disoriented with it's growing pattern and prunning advices. I've read it's a very branched dwarf variety, and their branches use to cross and overlap. So I was thinking about pruning it, but I don't know if I should wait untill it's bigger (It's still ~20cm high). I've also had a look at the "Structural Training of Young Shade Trees" http://http://www.ext.colostate.edu/mg/gardennotes/614.html#basics and I don't know if it's applicable to Little princess mapples, because of it's intense branching. For example, in my case it's 2nd "branch division" (~5 cm from the soil) is a codominant branch... so that I couldn't preserve just one single dominant trunk until 2/3 of mature tree's heigh. I still don't know how high can it grow (depending on the sources their maximum heigh vary from 80 cm to 2.5 m... that's crazy). Do you know a trustable source of information about this variety? Excuse my newbie questions and language mistakes (I'm not used to write in English) Thanks in advance
Hola Hwarang y bienvenido al foro ;-)), Galicia es une región fantástica para los arces japoneses. 'Little Princess", also known as "Mapi-no-machi hime", is a nice dwarf which grows very slowly. The one in the picture is about 7 years old and has never been pruned. The only reason for you to prune yours would be to shape it to a special form, other than its natural shape as seen in the picture. My advice in this case is for you to let it grow for one or two years before starting to prune and shape it. Gomero
Yes, don't be trying to make a little tuft into an open specimen with a tree-like crown that has line pattern interest - it is the wrong kind for that. Smallness and density are the point of the thing.
