Maple bark forest collection

LittleDingus

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Hi all! Long time lurker trying to come out of my shell a bit.

I've started gathering maples for a bark forest collection. I don't intend to make a true forest. More like a group of individuals I can place together to show the interesting types of barks maples can have. Any suggestions on speices/cultivars to add to the list?

Trees I own so far:

Trident
Griseum (paperbark)
Red

Seedlings I have on order:

Davidii (snake bark)
Palmatum "Nashiki Gawa" (pine bark)
Elegantulum (bright green)
Coral bark...I forget which one

My end goal are trees 18"-24" with maybe 2" trunk. I prefer to start with seed (I'm in no hurry. It's the journey for me!) though for this project I'm mostly looking for young grafts or preferably rooted cuttings since some interesting options may be cultivars.

I'm very curious to see what you all would add to this list!

I have thought about doing something similar with leaf color as well. See if I could make a forest that was a rainbow of maple leaves! (Did I say it was the journey?)

Thanks!!
 

Leo in N E Illinois

The Professor
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A forest of different maple species selected for bark. That's interesting idea. I like the idea, but see it as fraught with many problems.

Scale, proportionality, or ability to respond to leaf reduction techniques. Amur maple, trident maple, and Japanese maples reduce leaf sizes well, and could possibly look okay as a mixed species forest planting. The rest of the species mentioned do not respond well to leaf reduction techniques. Now a bark themed forest might be best enjoyed in winter, with out leaves. But trees who's leave do not reduce much often will not ramify well, so for the winter view the degrees of ramification will not match.

Red maple is good for larger scale bonsai. The other species do not have much of a track record as bonsai. My suspicion is that if they would work at all, it would be as larger scale bonsai, over 36 inches tall or wide. The problem with larger trees they often take significant time to develop. In the genus Acer, there's only 5 or so species regularly used for bonsai. Most are in the Acer palmatum sub group of species.

For leaf colors, again matching leaf sizes would be the greatest difficulty. One could do a whole pallet of color just using Acer palmatum, but great attention would need to be paid to leaf size. Similarly a nice range of color is available for Acer circinatum.

But I am not trying to be overly negative, it's a worthy project, go for it.
 

PA_Penjing

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I love this idea a lot! Don't forget about Acer palmatum ibo nishiki, a more proportionate corking bark in my opinion. I say collect and grow everything that you can. Then when you begin displaying the different pots and species together you can weed out the trees that arent working. Leo is correct in that larger coarser trees won't rammify well, but maybe they could be grown a few inches talller and kept at the back of the display so their lower trunks could add variety and the poorly ramified tops would be hidden behind a tangle of more delicate trees in the front of the "forest"
 

LittleDingus

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My thinking wasn't so much a group forest in a single planting as much as a group of individually potted trees displayed in a coordinated way.

I'd absolutely love to do this as a landscaping project with a walking path and a planned arrangement where the trees contrast/coordinate with one another...taller trees shade shorter more delicate ones, etc...My current property doesn't lend itself to this, however.

We're pretty sure we want to move back to the Chicago area in the next year or three. That's likely to be our retirement property so we're hoping not to have to compromise much so it should have space for this sort of landscaping as well as space for a tree-in-a-pot garden. The problem is that's a shift to zone 5 which might move us out of the comfort zone for some of the maples I'm interested in. We had a lions head maple in that area that did great for several years then we had a hard winter it never woke up from. It just grew suckers from the graft joint.

My thinking is if they are in pots I can more easily shelter them through the worst of winter. Most years, the last week of December, first two of January are really the danger zone I worry about with bitter cold temps and drying winds.

Either way, landscape or pot, I'll likely end up with a range of size of trees. I'd like to shape them for interest either way...bonsai techniques are great for that regardless of the size of the end tree. As I'm mostly interested in the barks and winter interest I'm okay with breaking the 1:6 trunk rule. I would like to ramify and reduce as much as reasonable. It's a fun-to-me project even if not 100% "bonsai".
 
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