hello i'm a virgin so please be gentle with me i have a shindeshojo which is planted in a border it broke leaf fine but appears to have suffered wind burn .i have heard of defoliating as it is early in the season is this A advisable B how do i go about it .
Hi Clive: I would not advise you to defoliate your Maple at any time. I have to with Cotton but that is another matter all together. Even if all of your leaves burned up you should get some new vegetative leaf buds to form relatively soon and then you will get a flush of new growth. Shindeshojo does suffer leaf burn rather easily but in a few weeks you will see new growth appearing in areas where the leaves burned up and elsewhere. Shindeshojo is a pretty resilient plant so I would not worry about the condition of the leaves just yet. Even some twig die back is not unusual after a series of leaf burns either but if it seems you may lose some major branches then you may want to ask for some help but I do not think you are anywhere near there yet. Sometimes we want our Maples to burn some as it can make the plant more resistant to leaf burn later. I'd rather have my Maples burn early in the year rather than late in the year as I have much more time to help the plant along than I do in late Summer. Jim
