What to do with maples in early Spring

It's the 6th of April and it's about 7.30 in the evening. We are on British summertime so although it's getting late in the evening the light is quite nice. As you can see the maples look a gorgeous color even in this half light. The Deshojos and the other maples are a spectacular color. Let me just walk around the nursery and show you something that is around. This talk is going to be about Japanese maples. Japanese maples in the spring and how to deal with them. If you've never visited Herons before you will probably soon realize that more than half the nursery is just maples. Maples has been my first love ever since I've been doing bonsai. So at Herons you will find maples of every description, every size and age in the fields and on the benches. This great beast of a tree which is about four foot high. Look at the roots there. That was an air layering I did about 15 years ago. Can you imagine this is the sort of roots you get when you air layer a tree. That base at the bottom is about eight or ten inches in diameter. So that was a big air layering I did. So you can see my fascination with maples and my love of maples. We have so many different varieties. Katsura, Mountain Maple. This is Benichidori. This is another air layering that I did and so it goes on. So we have a lot of Deshojos still and then we have Klein's trees. Here's another Benichidori. There are some Deshojos. A lot of these are homemade Deshojos from ordering garden trees. This is a very rare tree. Let me show you the Nibari first. Look at that Nibari. Look at that Nibari there and this is a Shishigashira. Shishigashira. I sold it to a client about three years ago but it's come back for repotting. I could go on and on talking about maples. I will talk about maples. I'm going to just go and show you some more maples that are around on the nursery. This is yet another tunnel and even in this tunnel there are maples everywhere. Look at it. It is just maples. Look at the maples around. Of course in winter when you come here people think all the trees are half dead because they have no leaves on but believe you me when you get into spring these leaves have emerged in the last three weeks. Some of them are still emerging. Look at that. It hasn't fully opened. This is another rare maple until it comes out in leaf. I can't even remember what variety it is. Even the mountain maples are all of a different hue. This mountain maple is a soft bronzy color. That's another one which is an apricot color. The more common mountain maples are just green but anything which is not named is a mountain maple. So look at all the mountain maples that abound and although it looks so lush I know that I have my work cut out because in the next week or so we've got to give them their first trim. So let me just show you all these trees. That's another tree that we've made from field grown material. I love my trees big. That one is over four foot tall. That's a great big Emirates Airbus A380. If you can see it through the netting. Massive plane. Let me walk out and show you this. We always criticize the planes but I'm fascinated by the planes. Look at that Airbus. Look at that great big Airbus. Okay that was a slight distraction but let's get back to the trees. So we're back to the tunnel and I'm showing you these maples again. So reverting to the maples. There you are. Look at the evening sky. The sun set in the background and the maples in the foreground. What a beautiful sight. What a beautiful sight. It's almost like a nursery walk all over again. But this is not the purpose of this video. This purpose really is a talk about maples in the spring and how we are going to deal with them. So at this stage because the leaves are emerging or still emerging we don't do anything to these trees. But maples although they are the same species they all emerge at different times of the year. There's slight variation maybe about much as three weeks even because I will pass some maples which are not yet in leaf and yet others are in full leaf and all of them have been out in the open. Look at that mountain maple. That's been out in the open all year round. 365 days that one has been out in the open with no overhead shelter and nothing. And all these trees along this corridor they have stood here right through the winter. They have not been protected so they are still just emerging. They're just emerging. Look at this maple. This is in the open. This hasn't got many of its leaves yet and so it goes on. The Benichidores are in full flow. They are at the peak of the colour. So as you can see we've got maples all in different stages of their leaf growth. See that is in full leaf. That one is not in full leaf. So there are slight variations. So don't worry. Look at that. This is Cheek by Jowl. This one is almost in full leaf. This would have opened only in the last I would say 10 days, 7 or 10 days. This has only started emerging in the last two days and they're all in the same position. Let me walk and show you some more maples. Let me show you the maples first before I start talking about what to do with them. So let's have a look. This is another giant of a maple. As I say I love them big. I love them big. Look at this. This has got a two foot nebari. Two foot nebari made from a garden tree. That's my hand and that is the tree. Now this maple again Cheek by Jowl. With this one it hasn't started to leaf yet. The leaves are just emerging but most of the tree is still dormant. How strange is that? Okay now let's look at these maples. Trident maples although they're not strictly Japanese maples. They are a maple but we are not talking of the Trident maple. We're talking of the Acer palmatum species and varieties. So that's a massive Deshojo broom style. That's every bit three foot in diameter. That is one of our prize trees and look at these little clump styles. I don't know what they are. I think it could be Deshojo. There's some clump of ordinary mountain maple. These orange ones look like I think Katsura. This is Katsura. Slightly orange in color. These are the Kabudachi that come from Japan. That's an ordinary mountain maple. Kabudachi root connected tree. That's another of my large Deshojos. I used to show that tree at the Chelsea flower show more than 20 years ago. It's grown about 30 percent larger since I last showed it. But it's still a spectacular tree. That pot is over 24 inches in length. So you can imagine that tree is nearly a meter tall. Another of our Deshojos. This again was made from an ordinary field grown Deshojo. Homemade Deshojo. So this has been in leaf for the last three weeks. As I'm passing I'm going to show you all these lovely crab apples and flower. Just as a diversion. Another diversion is the lovely larch. The last of the magnolia, stellata, bonsai which are in flower. More homemade Deshojos. More Deshojos. And I'm just going to now walk you into our greenhouse and then then to the growing area. These are just trident maples. More trident maples. These are Deshojo maples with different colors. These are very young ones compared to that big one. You see how the colors change. It's getting a dusky color and I would say in about three weeks time that entire green tree will be unrecognizable as a Deshojo. Because they turn green pretty soon. I will now walk into the growing area at the back of the greenhouse and show you more maples. Meanwhile the sun is about to set. Look at the horizon. Beautiful orange colored sky. So I'm now in the pond area and we have a lot of maples in pots which we grow in the field and then pot up and they're all ready to become bonsai. So again at this time of the year they are absolutely spectacular. So there are maples galore. Look at these maples. Deshojos, Benichidoris. That pink is a Benichidori. That's a Deshojo. So this is how we grow them. They're grown as garden trees and then they're cut down and then they're made into bonsai. I can't help but show you that magnificent Magnolia. I don't know what variety that is. I think it's a slightly different variety from the ordinary Solangiana because it's pure white but it flowers about two weeks later than the ordinary Solangiana. That green tree in the background that's a mountain, no that's not a mountain maple, that's a Katsura but it doesn't turn orange. It was sold to me as Katsura but that's been in the ground for the last 30, 33 years and it's about I would say 30 or 40 foot tall. That giant redwood is about 80 to 100 foot tall. So let me show you some more maples. These are all different maples which we are developing from our field grown material. So these are all home produced trees and look at the variety that we have. Look at the variety and these are some of the air layerings from last year which weren't successful. We will see why they didn't moot. So that's part of the research we are going to do. That's a huge Dissectum. Look at that Dissectum. Absolutely massive. That's about eight to ten foot tall. Look at it compared to the chair. Eight to ten foot tall and that we will probably air layer. Again these are very rare maples called Nishikigasane. So look at the air layerings everywhere. There are about 20 air layerings on this tree and I'm going to eventually reduce it to the stump and make a bonsai from it. Another Deshoja garden tree which eventually will end up as two big bonsai. So that will be air laid in the middle. I haven't been to the field proper because out in the field there are even more maples. Perhaps I may walk there. This is an S-shaped Benichidori. This was a parent tree that I air laid so I must have made about three air layerings from that and this is the base of the tree. Again that's every bit three to four inches in diameter at the nebari and this tree is about three foot tall. Dissectums are very hard to use for bonsai but I have tried. This is another rare maple. Just look at the leaves. So different. So the first part of this talk is to show you all the different maples that we have. I will also show you the maples in the field to show you how they are developing because at this time of the year the changes are so quick and fast that before you can just blink the colors will have changed and the whole tree will be covered in leaves. Good opportunity to also show you my giant white cherry tree which is Taihaku. So as I walk towards a giant cherry tree let's admire it. The plains are very active in the evening because everyone is coming into land and getting ready to spend their weekend here. So the evenings from about six to eight o'clock the plains are hyperactive. You get one plane flying in every minute. Look at this giant cherry. I think they're more beautiful than the ones in Japan. Looking across the pond I will take you into my maple grove. This cherry tree I planted when I made the pond which was in 1990, 33 or 34 years ago and the diameter is every bit two and a half foot in girth. Absolutely massive tree. How time flies. There's so many maples in the grounds we have. All those beautiful large trees are all maples. This is my maple grove. They were all one inch diameter trees when I planted them in 1990 when I made the pond. One inch diameter. Now these trunks are about I would say 18 inch to two foot in diameter. Ordinary mountain maple. This is my famous Arakawa rough bark maple grown in kabudachi style and the spring color is lime green. That was a mountain maple which last year I cut down in half because it was too tall and it was blocking the light for the rest of the maple. So I reduced the height by half. So let's see how it develops. And here are a mixture of benichidon. No not benichidon. These are supposed to be daishojo maples. Look at that. A grove of daishojo. They're every bit I would say 30 to 40 foot tall. In 30 years or 34 years they become 30 to 40 foot high trees. If you come in another two weeks time it will be dark because it is so dense in the undergrowth that you can't see any light through it. But at this time of the year when the leaves are fresh they look so nice. That's a katsura in the background. So this is another rough bark maple Arakawa. And this one is every bit 20 foot across and about 12 foot in height. This by the way is a phagos granata. Japanese white beech. And this was planted as a bonsai. It's a small plant but now it's about 40 foot tall. More maples that I planted in the ground 30 or so years ago. And they're all large. Look at these large maple trees in the background. The light is getting bad but the colors are still vibrant. And this is my field of daishojo maples. See this is what I mean. We develop all our own maples on the nursery. So we are self-sufficient in maples. And these are the maples that will be used for bonsai in the future. They've been planted here about five or six years. And they were no more than say six inches tall. They are now about two foot tall. But I need to develop their trunks more. I think it's getting a bit dark. I'll resume my walk again tomorrow morning. I will just try and take some more pictures because it's quite nice to come out in this twilight to show you the colors. Because the colors are a different shade and hue in the half light. In the morning light it looks different. In the evening light it looks different too. My hornbeams haven't come out into leaf yet. So they're looking bare. Many of these maples haven't come out into leaf yet. So I will pick this up again tomorrow morning. Suffice it to say that there are scores and scores of maples there. So with this I will stop and resume again tomorrow morning. So today is a bright sunny day and I'm resuming from where I left off. So I will continue to do a sort of prelude, an introduction of the tasks I'm going to do on the maples. But I'm showing you the different stages of the emergence of leaves on the maple. Because they are so variable that it can be confusing to people. So within a space of just a few yards I can see different trees, different maples emerging in different states. So that great big tree in the background is a mountain maple that is almost completely in leaf. This is a large dissectum. This is in leaf. Now this is the same dissectum, same variety, but it's not in leaf yet. It's only just coming into leaf. For those of you who are familiar with my YouTube videos you remember that this was a project I did with a pickaxe and a crowbar where I took a tree which had been grown in a round flower pot and I hacked the roots and made it into bonsai. So three years on look at this tree. This one is just emerging. It's an ordinary mountain maple which I grew in the field for the last 30 or more years. While I'm in this bed of gravel let me show you nature's wonders. Because we have so many maple trees on the nursery everywhere you look, look at these little tiny maple seedlings growing out of gravel, growing out of gravel. It's not even in soil. Wherever I go there's another one. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of little maples coming up between the cracks of the paving and in the gravel. Here there's yet another one. If I go here there's another one. There's more seedlings coming up. They're popping up everywhere. So when people tell me that they can't grow maples, they can't get maples to germinate, I think it is quite incredible how you cannot be successful. Look at it wherever you grow. I think I can pull this up. Look at it, look at that beautiful little seedling that has popped up in the gravel. Half panoramic view of our maple benches and as I told you the other evening many of these Deshojos are beginning to turn colour. They're getting a dark dusky red and I would say in two weeks time they will become almost unrecognisable as Deshojos. But as we say we just enjoy it while it lasts. So I'm just going to venture a little further and show you a little more before I go into the greenhouse to show you what I'm about to do. So the main task now is to start trimming the maples which are too advanced because they need to be thinned out and I'll explain to you why we need to thin it out. So if you come to the nursery this is what you see and you will see grass and weeds along the side because everything is so fertile you can't even stop the weeds growing. But it's not out of control. We will weed it when we have the time but the beauty of the maples is there for all to see. Now just as a slight diversion this is the Eliagnus and the Japanese call it Gumi. It's got beautiful scented flowers, really fragrant flowers and they're followed by a little red fruit. Further diversions I'm walking to a maple. This is a Dissectum as a bonsai and as you can see this has only just emerged in the last three to five days. So it's really at its very early stages. Spring fresh green flowers on the leaves. Talking of flowers I must show you what maple flowers look like because we all know that maples have seed but how do the seeds come? They are formed from the flowers. So all these beautiful little things that you see there are the maple flowers and if I go closely there are a lot of bees buzzing around and this is how the bees pollinate the flowers. I'm trying to get that bee it's flying so fast and that big mountain maple is absolutely covered, smothered with leaves, smothered with flowers and that's my beautiful crab apple. This is a tree that I planted in the nursery since I've come here and it was sown as a seed in 1980 and when my son was only about nine years old or eight years old he picked a seed up from Kew Gardens and I sold the seed and this is the tree after many many years. This, I don't know what this is, I think this is a triple colored one. It's got pink cream and green leaves and you can see there it's got a very thick trunk and I'm growing a new leader so that I get good taper on it. So although it's growing in a flower pot it's destined to become a nice bonsai in time. Again some of our seedlings which simply put in a bonsai pot become very credible as bonsai so you don't have to wait very long to get good maple bonsai. Let me now show you some of the maples that were repotted. I think they were just repotted four to five weeks ago and they are kept in this greenhouse. This is not a heated greenhouse so the temperature is only like maybe four to five degrees warmer than the outside ambient temperature. This is my famous chicken plucker maple. You may remember that I did a video during the pandemic where I plucked the leaves literally by plucking with my two hands very fast and it's now got the name of the chicken plucker maple. Twin trunk maple which is every bit I would say four foot tall or four foot six tall and that is one I'm going to show you how I'm going to thin the leaves. I'm going to show you another maple. I can't show you the detail of this because some of these trees belong to customers and they're very private people they don't want to see this tree shown on media so I'm only going to show you the process of what I'm going to do but I won't show you the detail of the tree because it would be disrespecting his privacy. Now these are other trees that we also repotted about four or five weeks ago and look at the state of health. They are all in full leaf. Now certain trees I have to do slightly different regimes in thinning because if the tree is not too strong I leave the leaves to grow a little more and this is a very very old maple group that I imported more than 30 years ago and it was a pride and joy at many of my Chelsea flower show displays. So this is being made strong again so I will probably not do too much leaf cutting to it. Now this is a good point at which to start talking about leaf pruning and leaf cutting. Many people seem obsessed with the concept of leaf cutting. They say you've got to cut the leaves of maples in order to get them smaller. It doesn't always work that way. Sometimes when you leaf cut a maple the second crop of leaves can come bigger than the first crop of leaves. This is quite incredible but it is true because I always used to leaf cut maples to put them on show but I've always been disappointed that they don't always get smaller leaves from leaf cutting. So just be warned about that. There are no hard and fast rules about these things. So what I will do with very strong maples. Let me show you this maple. Now you can clearly see that this is the new growth. This new growth is about nine to ten inches long and if I count the leaf nodes I have one, two, three, four, five, six. That means 12 leaves have emerged in the last four weeks. 12 leaves. So what we do essentially we cut it back to just two leaves. The first pair of leaves and all the other leaves are discarded. You can make cuttings from them but we have millions of cuttings and we can't have the space to grow them all. So that is what I'm going to do and I'm going to show you how we work on these. I will also show you the chicken plucker regime as I get along. The tools I use are these trimming scissors. Some people use the Satsuki shears which got a long handle but everyone has their own preference and my preference is for these sort of shears. I don't use them for cutting roots. They're only used for trimming. I like the grip of the large handle. Some of them have got smaller handles. If you have small hands you may find this useful but it doesn't matter what type of scissors you use but scissors is the main thing. So as I said to you look at this long shoot. This very long shoot has got one two three four five six pairs of leaves. So I'm going to cut it back to there. So you've got to go through all these trees and literally cut back to the first pair of leaves. Now that is only a rule of thumb. You cannot follow that slavishly because at the end of the day you have to cut to give it the shape you want. So that is the first general principle to follow. Also it doesn't need a lot of intelligence to realize that if you keep adding on one pair of leaves every year the tree eventually in 50 years it'll become 50 times that height another 50 inches. You cannot keep doing that so you'll have to bite the bullet and cut it back to the size you want. So basically although I'm saying to cut back to the first pair of leaves like most of the projects I do, I do a very rough cut. Cut it back to the silhouette. Forget all the niceties of the first pair of leaves. In theory that's what you need to do but just cut it down to it because every new shoot is literally like between four and ten inches long and you cannot let this grow ad infinitum. Now why do we have to leaf cut? We leaf cut because with a dense tree like this light is very important. If you don't let the light get into the twigs and branches it doesn't strengthen the branches and the branches get weak and the branches will die. If you look at this one you see some of these are dead twigs from the previous year. This is what happens when you don't let light into the structure. I remember telling the story which I'm very fond of telling back in 1990s I think 92-93 where we used to go to Japan almost every year. I came across someone in a nursery a Japanese nurseryman and he was pruning you won't believe it a kyohime which was about four foot in width four foot big and it must have had I would say not exaggerating 10-20,000 leaves could be a million leaves it was massive absolutely dense and he had pruned half the tree and I was there at about 11 o'clock so I said how long will it take you a week he said no it'll take me only a day so he could leaf cut the entire tree in a day so this one could probably only take me a couple of hours I'm not boasting in any way but this is we're going to very roughly look at this another long shoot if I cut this entire shoot off look at it this is all the growth that has been made in three to four weeks you cannot let this grow add in for an item so we will just go around and cut to shape very roughly the shape is being spoiled for a person who is not used to maples it can be quite frightening and many of my customers who don't have the time they just like enjoying the trees they trust me to do it for them I don't blame that many people say to me oh why do people keep the trees if they don't work on it but different people have different objectives in keeping bonsai and you've got to respect that okay let me just show you on this side I'll go to the other side in a minute and I don't like to keep repeating it but I have a couple of clients who are very good hairdressers they are top hairdressers in London they probably earn more than I do from doing hairdressing they charge hundreds of pounds to style a lady's hair and they tell me that what I do is exactly what they do in hairdressing I'm not just cutting the ends I'm now going to show you how we layer the tree it's not sufficient just to nibble at the ends look at how much I've got out of it so the object of leaf cutting really should be to let light into the structure getting the leaves smaller is only secondary in my view also I believe many Japanese people leaf cut their maples because the second crop of leaves apparently I've never tested it produces a better autumn color so by leaf cutting you're depriving the tree of its food production facilities because the leaves are the food factories I know I'm trying to explain it in simplistic terms there's some botanically minded people who will berate me for doing it but essentially this is what I'm trying to explain by doing this you're depriving the tree of food but there is sufficient nutrient when we feed the tree virtually in 10 minutes I've created a new silhouette I've created spaces between the different layers of branches and this is what I've cut off from there I will show you the reason why we do this leaf trimming and leaf thinning because where I thin the leaves you see all these yellow leaves those are the leaves that didn't get light so eventually they die they're more like this you see in here all these turning yellow those twigs will eventually die so this is why it's so important to let light get into the structure to keep the stem strong now this is one instance let me show you the famous chicken plucker tree every tree is different and you've got to deal with them individually like human beings they're all individual now this one hasn't got the long extensions that the other maple has that one had about eight to ten pairs of leaves eight to ten leaves I mean about five pairs or six pairs now this one although it was repotted on exactly the same day it has only produced one pair of leaves so I don't need to do anything to this I will probably wait till it grows some more before I do the chicken plucker treatment but there again the tears and levels are quite good so I'm not going to touch this at all so you've just got to play it by ear and deal with each on its merits as you go around the nursery there are different trees in different stages if we look at some of the ordinary trees let me take you to our general growing area we'll show you some of these mountain maples which are very dense so a tree like this for instance look at how dense that is that has to be thinned out so this is the sort of thing we have to do so again look at the extension on this if I want to make the tree strong I will just let it grow and only take the tips out so you can program the tree to do whatever you wish to grow look at that extension it's got one two three four five again ten leaves all this is literally one week's growth one week's growth so I may wait another week but all these will have to be cut back so that I let light into the structure so I hope I've explained to you what you need to do with maples as they grow so by doing this you get more ramification I don't like to use bombastic words to frighten you off but the ramification is important also by trimming the top part you encourage more shoots to grow from the bottom so they serve different purposes as well while we are passing look at all the seedlings this is crab apple seedlings all our seedlings are coming up gradually and I showed you our maple seedlings so spring is well on its way so I hope you enjoyed little like this little exercise about the leaf cutting of maples at the right time there you go