What job that turned out to be!
Getting hold of this stuff locally is impossible. The local garden centres, diy outlets, nurseries do not stock the stuff. Quite why is beyond me as they have almost everything else you could imagine.
So I had to fall back onto the Internet
Last night I spent an hour or so tracking down a supply of Hydroleca or expanded clay granules to use in my next round of repotting my Japanese Maples.
Those of you who read this blog regularly will realise there is nothing scientific in this. I am just trying to find out what is the best compost to use for potted Japanese Maples to thrive in.
The reason why the shoot tips are stuck together is that there are tiny little grubs inside the ball of leaves that have stuck them together to protect themselves from birds such as blue tits and also wasps who spend most of their year searching out caterpillars and grubs to feed to their young.
I happened upon a pair of plain, sorry that word does not apply to any Japanese Maple. I'll start again.
I came upon a pair of green Japanese Maples either side of a gateway in a walled garden in Castle Kennedy just outside of Stranraer in South West Scotland. I was actually there to see some very fine Paper Bark Maples but more of that later.
I'll give the first of an occasional series of cultivar profiles here today. There are an ever changing number of cultivars in the trade. Many of these are only available in small quantities and in only in some countries.
Bloodgood is one that is universally available.
As the majority of Maple cultivars are grafted plants, simply because it is the only way to guarantee the consistency of the type, there will always be the potential for the understock of the graft to sprout forth and try and take over.
At this point most people would say you need to talk to an "expert" or go to the library and read about them or jump on the internet and find out how its done.
All reasonable advice but I have a far better way that is low cost and low risk which will show you just how easy it is to grow these most marvellous of trees either in the ground or in the pot.
I have been toying with the idea of trying to grow a Japanese Maple or three almost hydroponically just to see what the growth rate would be.
Japanese Maple varieties do NOT come true from seed. It always galls me when I read that this isn't the case because it is frankly wrong.
If these marvellous trees did come true from seed we would have many many more cultivars to choose from.
Japanese Maples practice, perhaps practice is the wrong word, but they constantly adjust their canopy according to how the seasons are progressing. This means that if the tree makes the decision whether to maintain a branch, twig or shoot depending on environmental factors and how well its growth rhythm is functioning.
