Japanese Maple project
Jun. 16th, 2009 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
summer_jackelAbout 6 years ago (geez, has it been that long?) when we'd just topsoiled the yard, the neighbor's mature Japanese maple volunteered a bunch of seedlings, a little over half a dozen of which I faithfully collected and nurtured in little pots. One in particular had unusually bright red foliage even on its first autumn, and in subsequent years it has only gotten more spectacular, going a very pure lacquer-red in fall, with these lovely red/purple/green shadings now. (Most of them, seed parent included, are pure green and turn yellowish with some red in the fall, which is the commonest phenotype for wild trees. Breeders often seek the red ones).
My prize tree is beautiful, and I am now trying to clone it. You can see why:
I needed to prune a fairly large branch off of it yesterday, and hated to do so enough that I started researching how to clone the thing so as not to waste any. I have had one cutting off of one of my other maples in a mason jar with water and a curly willow cutting for a month (willows contain a hormone that encourages other plants to root) and though the maple has kept most of its leaves, there are no roots at all. The willow, by comparison, has roots all over the place; all you need to clone a willow is a chunk of one, a glass of water and two weeks.
For anyone interested, here's what useful information I scraped off the interwebs viz. the propagation of acer palmatium and a description of my little experiment:
Japanese maples are slow-growing, with weak root systems. Generally, the fancy varieties, which are often fragile mutants to begin with, are bench-grafted by splicing a scion of the desired tree onto 2-year old rootstock. Incidentally, fruit trees and wine grapes are propagated this same way, so all your Fuji apples, for instance, are from identical clones. I won't go into how nervous genetically identical monocropping makes me, but it also means pretty much all maples you see for sale are clones---some of them ancient---and potentially makes my little seedling even more interesting. Since it's a product of sexual reproduction, it's a whole new variety---and a pretty one---that only I have. No idea if any other maple fanciers would be interested, but I think it's worth making more of them.
Well, I've never grafted and don't have a young tree I want to sacrifice, but apparently you can root cuttings from them; it's just chancy and takes at least 8 weeks. So my little guy on the windowsill is probably doing ok. I made a bunch of cuttings from the pruned branch, cut each diagonally below a branch node, dipped them in rooting hormone gel and did the following:
1. Potato grafts. I love this one and I hope it works. You take a potato, cut a small hole in it, insert your cutting, and bury in soil. Theoretically, the potato will root immediately, feeding the clone until its own roots develop. From a site talking about hardwoods but not maples specifically. I made two.
2. Cuttings in willow water. 2. (Original one, plus one new red one)
3. Cuttings in small rockwool cubes on a bed of perlite, fertilized lightly: 5 good ones and several smaller clones that aren't as good, but I wanted to give them a chance.
4. Cuttings directly in jars of moist perlite: 4
5. Cuttings in small rockwool cube buried in soil: 3 good ones, 3 probably-nots. I used my best vermicompost for the soil.
In addition to my red tree, I, um, came away with just a bit of a neighbor's lace-leaf cultivar I've been drooling over for a few years (thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's maple), so some of these clones are of that. It's an even slower growing, more delicate mutant than mine, and if I get a survivor of it, I'm really going to be happy.
Really, though, I'll be happy if I get anything out of this. One survivor is a success, but I'd love to see half of them or more make it. (I don't expect 100% survival; they don't clone readily). Anyone want to take bets on how many survivors I get from which method?
My favorite clone, a potato graft:
In morning sunlight.
My prize tree is beautiful, and I am now trying to clone it. You can see why:
I needed to prune a fairly large branch off of it yesterday, and hated to do so enough that I started researching how to clone the thing so as not to waste any. I have had one cutting off of one of my other maples in a mason jar with water and a curly willow cutting for a month (willows contain a hormone that encourages other plants to root) and though the maple has kept most of its leaves, there are no roots at all. The willow, by comparison, has roots all over the place; all you need to clone a willow is a chunk of one, a glass of water and two weeks.
For anyone interested, here's what useful information I scraped off the interwebs viz. the propagation of acer palmatium and a description of my little experiment:
Japanese maples are slow-growing, with weak root systems. Generally, the fancy varieties, which are often fragile mutants to begin with, are bench-grafted by splicing a scion of the desired tree onto 2-year old rootstock. Incidentally, fruit trees and wine grapes are propagated this same way, so all your Fuji apples, for instance, are from identical clones. I won't go into how nervous genetically identical monocropping makes me, but it also means pretty much all maples you see for sale are clones---some of them ancient---and potentially makes my little seedling even more interesting. Since it's a product of sexual reproduction, it's a whole new variety---and a pretty one---that only I have. No idea if any other maple fanciers would be interested, but I think it's worth making more of them.
Well, I've never grafted and don't have a young tree I want to sacrifice, but apparently you can root cuttings from them; it's just chancy and takes at least 8 weeks. So my little guy on the windowsill is probably doing ok. I made a bunch of cuttings from the pruned branch, cut each diagonally below a branch node, dipped them in rooting hormone gel and did the following:
1. Potato grafts. I love this one and I hope it works. You take a potato, cut a small hole in it, insert your cutting, and bury in soil. Theoretically, the potato will root immediately, feeding the clone until its own roots develop. From a site talking about hardwoods but not maples specifically. I made two.
2. Cuttings in willow water. 2. (Original one, plus one new red one)
3. Cuttings in small rockwool cubes on a bed of perlite, fertilized lightly: 5 good ones and several smaller clones that aren't as good, but I wanted to give them a chance.
4. Cuttings directly in jars of moist perlite: 4
5. Cuttings in small rockwool cube buried in soil: 3 good ones, 3 probably-nots. I used my best vermicompost for the soil.
In addition to my red tree, I, um, came away with just a bit of a neighbor's lace-leaf cultivar I've been drooling over for a few years (thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's maple), so some of these clones are of that. It's an even slower growing, more delicate mutant than mine, and if I get a survivor of it, I'm really going to be happy.
Really, though, I'll be happy if I get anything out of this. One survivor is a success, but I'd love to see half of them or more make it. (I don't expect 100% survival; they don't clone readily). Anyone want to take bets on how many survivors I get from which method?
My favorite clone, a potato graft:
In morning sunlight.
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Date: 2009-06-16 07:56 pm (UTC)In other plant news, I bought a new orchid today. Back up to 3!
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