Why I Oughta...

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 (...

Last week, I posted some photos and details of how we added another Japanese Maple - Acer palmatum dissectum Waterfall - to our backyard .  That was the third (current) JM and the second small one we planted this season.  Earlier this Spring, I bought and planted a 2# Emperor 1 JM from the orange big box nursery and put it in a spot that we can enjoy from the patio.  I've had luck with a different Emperor 1 JM, so I wanted to go with something that I knew worked in our yard. On one of my visits to Home Depot, I wandered around the parking lot nursery (as one does during June) and noticed that mixed in with the small Emperor 1 Japanese Maples in 2# containers was something different.  There were small trees in there that, while they were red-leafed, were certainly NOT Emperor 1's.  They were lace-leafed dissectums - at first sight.  Here, below, is what the foliage looked like on these small trees: Well...that's interesting, right?  I picked up the con...