0soyoung
Imperial Masterpiece
Volunteer trees, that is.
Among many volunteer trees I’ve potted and grown, I started this group of three Norway maples in 2010 after having found them sprouted in my yard early in the spring of 2008. Sentimentality is the primary reason I maintain it - the mother trees are a few hundred feet away on opposite sides of my property. The mother of the green one is about 100 years old and the two red (‘crimson king’) mothers on the opposite side are about 40 years old – all sizeable, big leafed trees.
Aside from sentimentality, there are two things I find interesting about this group. For one, the color contrast in the summer becomes much more vivid in the fall (in the first attached photo). It is a nice little laboratory for studying leaf size reduction, for the other (illustrated by the other two attached photos with a leaf from one of the mother trees). With these, the top-most leafs tend to be largest with leaf sizes decreasing moving downward, toward the roots. Nevertheless, the top-most leafs never get larger than about 20% the area of the mother-tree leaf size.
Among many volunteer trees I’ve potted and grown, I started this group of three Norway maples in 2010 after having found them sprouted in my yard early in the spring of 2008. Sentimentality is the primary reason I maintain it - the mother trees are a few hundred feet away on opposite sides of my property. The mother of the green one is about 100 years old and the two red (‘crimson king’) mothers on the opposite side are about 40 years old – all sizeable, big leafed trees.
Aside from sentimentality, there are two things I find interesting about this group. For one, the color contrast in the summer becomes much more vivid in the fall (in the first attached photo). It is a nice little laboratory for studying leaf size reduction, for the other (illustrated by the other two attached photos with a leaf from one of the mother trees). With these, the top-most leafs tend to be largest with leaf sizes decreasing moving downward, toward the roots. Nevertheless, the top-most leafs never get larger than about 20% the area of the mother-tree leaf size.