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There is a Japanese Maple for your Garden

© Gay Klok

When I hear the words Japanese Maples, the first picture in my mind is of the very expensive standards of beautiful trees, about waist high [a standard will never grow bigger than the height below the graft] and usually with dainty plum-red, serrated leaves. The words really translate into any species in the genera Acer that is endemic to Japan and surrounding regions.

There are many Japanese Maples but I am writing and showing you in photos mainly the cultivars of Acer palmatum and Acer japonicum. These cultivars have been selected and propagated for more than 300 years and for 200 years the Japanese maple has been grown and sold in most countries of the world. There is such a variety in these plants that one or more will be suitable for your garden. Some of them you could classify as ?flowering shrubs? but we never do, despite some making a delightful picture when in bloom. We tend to think only of the wonderful colouring in Autumn time and the graceful form of the Acer?s growth and leaves. In Spring time too, the leaves have subtle shades and the coming of the new, delicate leaves is one of the advents of Springtime that I look forward to every year

The subject is too wide to cover in this short article. I will let the photos, [only a small selection of the Acers we grow in our gardens], tell a little bit of the story. Instead, I will write of one of the happenings in the garden in the country in the first year of our serious plantings.

Twelve years ago there was an excellent nursery in the North of Tasmania that specialized in conifers and the rarer Acers. Early in the story of the country garden, I suggested we go up North and visit this particular Nursery. We [perhaps I should say I] bought so many plants that a University friend of my daughter asked her if her parents had been up North in the weekend. My daughter asked her how she knew and the reply was: ?I saw a travelling forest on the midlands highway. I couldn?t see who was in the car, all I could see were plants!?

The nurseries were always very pleased to see me coming that year. I became friends with several, good friends. The nursery folk were very interested in what we doing and I was very happy to tell them and blithely always asked them to come down and see where all those plants were disappearing.