Anyone have a trident with bark like this?

[wahoo172]

I bought this tree from a club auction a few years ago. It was grown by Bill Henderson and I am sure is not a young tree. I potted it in a 15 gallon pot to let it thicken, it rooted into the ground and I left it. In the past year or so the bark has become even chunkier than it was when I got it. I also have a forest of tridents that another club member had styled, also years ago. I have been looking at pictures of trident maples trying to see how un common this type of bark is, I know Brent has a trident that has bark similar to oak (my opinion anyway) but other than the trees I have I can not find other examples of this behavior. I have attached a picture of the bark, I have larger images for those that care to see them full sized.
Your thoughts?

George

 

[Mojosan]

Are you absolutely positive that it is a Trident? (Doesn't look like one to me) It could have been mis-identified, and actually be something else - like Acer griseum, commonly called the paper bark maple.


http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/...s-new/images/acer/acer_griseum-paperbark2.jpg

http://greenspade.com/?p=105


Also, from the USFS
"This deciduous, 30 to 45-foot-high by 25-footwide
tree has beautiful 3-inch-wide, tri-lobed leaves,
glossy green above and paler underneath, which turn
various shades of red, orange, and yellow in autumn
(Fig. 1). Flowers are bright yellow and showy in the
spring. Trident Maple naturally exhibits low spreading
growth and multiple stems but can be trained to a
single trunk and pruned to make it branch higher,
allowing passage below its broad, oval to rounded
canopy. With its moderate growth rate, attractive
orange-brown peeling bark, and easy maintenance,
Trident Maple is popular as a patio or street tree and is
also highly valued as a bonsai subject. Crown form is
often variable and selection of a uniformly-shaped,
vigorous cultivar is needed."

Although I have some much more mature Tridents than the one you show, and they do not have such peeling.....

 

[wahoo172]

Mojo,

Thanks for your reply and links. I took a few more pictures of the trees I spoke of. Since it is dark I could not comose the photos as well as I would have liked, I think you will get the idea though.
The forest has trees from two different sources, the rough barked ones are original to that group, the smooth barked ones I added in the past few years.
Also, I want to stress that these trees are mature, Bill is a shohin freak and has many trees that he began working on 35 or 40 years ago that are smaller than the ones I am showing pictures of. I only planted the single tree in a large pot to reshape it as I was not feeling what he had done with it over the years.
I should add a little history to this I guess. Bill Henderson is one of the charter members of the Bonsai Society of Florida and has been on the scene for a long time.

 

[Mojosan]

Well, after seeing the foliage, it is obvious that it is a trident.

But as I understand it, mature trees will gradually develop the "peel". Maybe these little guys are much older than we think...

 

[Graydon]

It's a good thing that the rough bark one has grown in to the ground. Otherwise it would be too tempting for me to drive by and acquire it...

Thanks for posting a shot of that bark. It really is cool. I need to come by soon and look at some stuff.

 

[wahoo172]

Mojo,
I think they are older than most anyone would guess based on their size.
I don't know if you can see from the first foliage picture, the bark has a demarcation where the younger growth started (When I potted it up)
That said, I do not think their bark characteristics are due to old age only, I guess as more people see this we will get more input.



Graydon, We can air layer it if you want some of that trunk. I plan on taking cuttings down the road also. I took a cutting from one of the forest trees last winter, it rooted and has the rough bark down low.

George

 

[Brent]

George

Trident maple, Acer buergerianum, seedlings can show a range of bark characteristics. It is not that uncommon. I have been watching several bark types for years (one of which I introduced is 'Evergreen's Roughbark'). Another one that I want to introduce, but haven't got around to it yet has very shaggy bark. It was discovered by Chuck Shane in Sebastopol CA and he has named it 'Tanoguchi' after the owner of the parent tree. This is a mature Trident about thirty feet tall with bark almost exactly like Shagbark Hickory with huge peeling scales. It's seedlings show a whole range of bark characteristics, but most shaggy like the parent, but not as pronounced. In younger, smaller trees the bark of course forms smaller plates, but they still retain the distinctive upper and lower 'curl'. This cultivar might be useful for larger specimen plants where the bark plates would be more in scale to the trunk size.

The batch of seedlings (seed origin unknown) from which I selected 'Evergreen's Roughbark' also exhibited a range of peeling bark characteristics, but only one had the very distinctive and small checked "nishiki" type bark of 'Evergreen's Roughbark'. I have never seen anything like it anywhere else.

So, to answer your question, no it's not that uncommon, and it can be useful for bonsai purposes to achieve mature bark looking features at a younger age.

Brent
EvergreenGardenworks.com

 

[mapleman77]

I was looking at Walter Pall's website earlier today and saw that one of his tridents has the same bark characteristics as yours, wahoo172. He specifically mentioned that this was a very old trident that he got when it was basically designed. I looked at the first pictures of it and it had smooth bark. As the pictures progressed, the bark gradually changed into having the "curly" characteristics that you see on your trees. Here is the link to the specific tree:

http://walter-pall.de/maplestrident_maple_nr__1.jpg.dir/index.html

Hope that this helps your understanding. Personally, I believe that the curling bark comes after 40-50 years of age when the tree really matures and slows down......but then again I don't even have a trident, so take all of this with a grain of salt.