I'm considering removing a perfectly healthy specimen of Peve Starfish just because it doesn't impress me any more and I'd rather put something else in this very prominent spot. I have limited space in the garden and therefore limited patience and tolerance for things I'm not 100% in love with. I've had it 9 years and it is about 8 feet tall so transplanting, or potting, or donating to a neighbor (which I have done successfully with a fairly large tamukeyama in the past) is probably not an option. So, I'm just interested in opinions from other maple lovers, how hard would this be for you? Is it something you have done yourself? I have done it one other time, with an Emperor One that was about 15 years old and about 15 feet tall. It honestly wasn't easy to make that first cut with the chainsaw, but I got over it really quickly and now have zero regrets. More on the Peve Starfish, if you care... For the first few years it was one of my favorite maples of all time! It held the red color better than any other tree I have, and the little starfish leaves were awesome! But over the years it has shown less of the starfish characteristic in the leaves, and it also drops the lower branches easily so ends up with a rather top heavy, scraggly look. I've got a potted Twombly's Red Sentinel that would love to graduate to a spot in the ground, and would look better in this space.
I think this is a very reasonable approach. Firstly, some maples just outgrow themselves in the ground. That it has lost it's characteristics seems pretty normal to me. Witness how great Orange Dream is when young, how "meh" it often becomes as a large tree. Then, there's how we use our (limited) garden space given the time we have. We don't live on "plant time". So sometimes we put something in, it looks great for a while, then it's time to move on. I have like 5 A. stachyophyllum that came as various wild collections, unknown at the time (or not ID'd by the importer), they're nice enough, but there are lots of better maples in the wings. No reason to keep them all. Gardening also involves triage and cutting. -E
Vertrees advocated maintaining Japanese maple collections on less than palatial properties through pruning to control size, talked about how to go about it in his book. Otherwise, some problems that can arise with grafted woody ornamentals in general are overtaking of scions by uncontrolled rootstock sprouts, unwanted invigoration of dwarf or slow-growing scions by use of non-dwarf seedling rootstocks and also genetic instability of scions causing partial or complete reversion to something closer to the parental species.
Pruning is certainly necessary even in larger gardens, if one wants to maintain a "full" aspect, and not just isolated specimen trees. And in more restrained spaces... the amount of branch pruning that comes out of the Esveld Aceretum each year is prodigious. @Ron B your statement about "non-dwarf seedling rootstocks" is intriguing. JM rootstock is grown either by seed (the vast majority) or layering, at least in the EU. I'm unaware of palmatum rootstock being produced by another method, like tissue culture. I have never seen a producer who (honestly) sells dwarfing rootstock, nor am I aware of any grafter who uses it. Have/are you? On the contrary, I think most stock is selected for vigor, because it allows the producer to sell the product in 2 years from germination. Cheers, -E
It would be nice to be able to order JM's on standardised rootstocks like you can with apple trees, but I guess the economics of these two markets are too different for this to be possible. Shame.
