Waterfall Japanese Maple Check-In - August 2025

In the Summer of 2023, I planted a couple of Japanese Maple trees including a high-grafted Inaba Shadire, a Seiryu upright, a small First Ghost, a Firefly Japanese Maple, a small, mis-labeled cutleaf red Japanese Maple, an Emperor 1 JM in the Kitchen Curved bed, and a Waterfall (or Virdis) low-grafted weeping Japanese Maple.   Of those seven Japanese Maples planted in 2023, just two of them are still with us in the garden.  The Emperor 1 in the "kitchen curved" bed is doing well (despite the Cicada damage last year) and the Waterfall weeping Japanese Maple.  The other five are gone.  

When the Waterfall tree went in, it had a couple of primary branches that extended in each direction from the trunk.  It seemed to get established in 2023 and came back in 2024.  

Then, it suffered a setback.  In the Summer of 2024, we had a significant storm that dropped some limbs from one of our Black Walnut trees.  That fallen branch (loaded with Walnuts) split the tree right-down-the-middle.  Snapped the branches right to the bark.  I posted some photos in September when the tree was still standing, but much smaller.  

How does it look this year?  First...the tree survived Winter and came back and leaf'd-out this Spring.  The damage from last year removed more than half of the canopy, but the tree is growing and putting on new little green branching and those laceleaf/cutleaf leaves are spraying out from the remaining branches.  

This tree is tucked in amongst some other shade-tolerant plants like hostas, Hicks Yews and various ferns.  There are a number of Ostrich Ferns that have sprung up around this that I'm planning on removing.  

Below are a couple of photos of the Waterfall Japanese Maple as it stands in the Summer of 2024:

The Waterslide hostas (blue ones in the photo above) are providing some nice color contrast in this photo.  They're a ruffled-edge hosta that I should think about dividing and replacing some of the more common ones I have in the garden.