I had already mentioned in another thread that a maple seedling is an ideal subject for creating your bonsai. Whenever you go shopping for your maple, keep a sharp eye for anything which is unusual especially when you are looking for young plants or seedlings. Due to the immense genetic diversity in seeds, seedlings show tremendous variation in leaf shapes, growth habits and bark texture. It can truely be said no two plants from the same mother tree are exactly alike. I would encourage buyers to look specially for the leaf variegation in seedlings. As the young leaves unfurl from the bud they normally exhibit the uniform spring color. In early summer as the leaves slowly change to green, a small percentage (no more than 0.1%) of these seedlings show some form of color fading changes and retain some shades of its spring color. The way the pattern forms is a clear indication of the pattern it will exhibit in autumn, a sort of variegation in color designs. Whenever you spot this happening, grab the specimen immediately as you will then have a rare one of a kind of maple hybrid. I will now show you this color variation in my first year Palmatum maple seedling: Note the spring color stays on close to the mid vein of the leaf lobes.
The seedling has been grown indoors since early summer. I would agree that the soil looks too wet by your standards, but I can safely assert that most plants can adapt to a wide range of wetness or dryness, if you prefer to call it. The reason it appears very wet is due to my method of watering, which I would normally use springlers. However, since the time you claim that root rot is caused by roots from a potted plant wicking water when sitting in water,and, for the sake of experimenting, I commenced to water this chamber by pouring buckets of water up to a depth of 0.5 to 0.75 inch at intervals of 5 to 7 days. In this chamber I have all types of plants growing and I have not lost a single plant to root rot yet. I would suggest that readers try sitting a potted plant in water to test what I had claimed and prove me wrong. I would like to add that stems of certain plants which have been rooted in water medium may die when you plant them in nutrient rich soil. This happen with my herb plants shown in the picture in "jamkh 6" where they just dried up when transplanted into soiless Sunshine No 4 mix. The reason this happens is that the roots formed under water are truely aquatic roots and are unable to adapt to the comparative low levels of water in soil. Likewise you cannot grow water lilies as a potted plant.
