Incredible Japanese Maple

[Smoke]

You boys sure know how to start a fight huh! Blimey. Who cares what it is and is not called for goodness sake! Why do we have to put everything into little boxes? When these forum discussions get down to such trivial to'ing and fro'ing they become boring! At the end of the day you are either going to like the tree or not like the tree. It is not mature yet, so now is not the time to make that decision. Now the decision is whether you like the potential or not, and that's a personal decision based on personal tastes with no right and no wrong answer!

*yawn*.....

 

[Andrew Legg]

*yawn*.....

That's what I thought mate! You have a knack with words huh. It took you one to convey what took me about a hundred or more!!

 

[Attila Soos]

You boys sure know how to start a fight huh! Blimey. Who cares what it is and is not called for goodness sake!

Sorry, Boss.
Won't happen again..

Promise to behave. Take it out of my paycheck..

 

[daygan]

For the sake of study and contemplation, here's the "sumo" tree superimposed on Walter's tree. The sumo's branches have been removed, and Walter's tree's trunk has been removed. Honestly, it seems to me that the proportions are about the same. You can ignore the part of the sumo that sticks out of the pot at the bottom because that's distance on a horizontal plane, not a vertical plane, due to the angle at which the shot was taken. Again, due to the angle at which the shot was taken, the height-to-base-width ratio is probably even higher than what we see in the photo, because the angle would shorten any length/distance on a vertical plane. Just my personal observations...

Sumo style trees are now mainstream taste, at least in Europe. I personally think it is a typical exaggeration phase at the end of a long trend in art. Someone found that a short fat tree looks good. Then the next one made one even shorter and fatter which looked even better. At the end someone makes the final one which then obviously is totally out of propotion. Then the community wakes up and says 'the emperor has no clothes'. I think we are still a few years away from that point. The maple discussed in this thread is unique insofar as it is a fat Japanese maple. Trident maples like this you can see thousands. I found that one way to make them acceptable for my personal taste is to give them a large crown which fits to the large trunk in proporiton.
Interesting to note that most of the time I tell foolks to make their tree shorter and more compact, the crown smaller and their tree should get better. Here it's the other way round.
I would take the Japanese maple any time and give it a large crown.
Attached my sumo trident maple with a quite large crown.

 

[monza]

Daygan I'm not understanding your post? Take a nice looking tree, take away the interesting parts and talk about ... What?

 

[tanlu]

i feel as though the tree is too fat. like way too fat.

A bit of a late reaction, but I'm with you catfish. I don't understand trees like this. You'll never see maples look like that in nature.

 

[daygan]

Monza - hey - the point was to compare the actual height-base ratio of the two different trees. There was some exchange about whether or not the two were distinctly different. My simplification is that Walter contended that they were basically the same except for the crown. I think if you look at the "mashup" I've created of the two, it seems that they really are about the same in terms of height-to-base ratios.

In my opinion, Walter's does look more pleasing to the eye at first glance, and the comparison reveals a bit more of the truth about what the real difference is between the two trees.

Daygan I'm not understanding your post? Take a nice looking tree, take away the interesting parts and talk about ... What?