Acer Palmatum ‘Goshiki Shidare’

This particular variety of lace leaf has variegated leaves and is one of the harder to find maples. The leaves are a deep red with a light salmon color variegated through out the leaf.

I got my hands on a couple of these in a local nursery this weekend and I’m thrilled. It will take many years to develop this little starter plant into a bonsai.

But I have the patience and hopefully the time so I will surely try. I seem to be drawn to maples for some reason my collection has many now and I still keep looking for more.

There are so many cultivars of maples that you could collect for many years and still probably not have all of them. However if maples fascinate you like they do me well then you can certainly obtain many and have a wonderful collection.

Lace leaf maples are among the most beautiful of all the maples in my opinion. And you do not find them as bonsai in a pot very often.

I think that perhaps the reason that you do not find them is because most of these types of maples are grafted and I for one do not like to start out with a grafted plant for a bonsai.

The people who graft this type of plant always seem to graft the start really high on the plant and this makes the whole thing look rather leggy and just not acceptable to me anyway.

But then we have to also understand that the nursery business is not grafting these plants for the bonsai hobby they are selling most of them to regular home gardeners and they simply do not care that the starter plant is really tall and leggy looking because after all there not going to raise it in a pot.

You can see lace leaf in nearly every yard especially in the NorthWest and since it is considered a garden favorite you'll continue to see it planted where ever it will grow.

You must be very vigilante of the lace leaf in the very warm summer months as the leaves of these and many other maples will burn very rapid and once it starts there usually is no saving the leaf.

I water always early in the morning and very rarely at night and for the reason that if I soak the plant really good in the morning it will most often make it though the day just fine.

I do not water at night because this draws out many bugs that will then feast on your plants leaves and it also tends to mold your plants at the base.

These types of maples will grow in sort of and umbrella style unless you shape it different. You will most defiantly want to protect your maple from the direct hot sun if at all possible.

This maple will do really well if planted around a pond or as a bonsai and will reward you with leaves that can be either green marked with a bronze color and or a red cast or they might be light with pink splashes and even in some cases they might have large white patches and this can all be on the same plant.

If you’re going to fertilize then I would suggest not going over board as most maples of this type seem to get leggier with a lot of fertilizer.

I personally will let the plant just grow and develop on its own and forget the fertilizer.

I have not lost any of my maples yet because of lack of fertilizer.
The plant seems to do well from zone 5a to zone 9a and if you need to see a plant zone map then you can see one at the web url below.
http://forestry.about.com/od/treehabitatandrange/ss/plant_zones.htm

You can propagate this maple by either grafting or budding or by collecting seeds after they have ripened off and dried in the fall. I will write a more detailed article on getting these and other types of maples started from seed later in another post.

Although this maple is considered to be more like a shrub it will grow to around fifteen feet if left to grow in the ground.

I have not grown one in the ground but have two of these cultivars as bonsai and I may perhaps at some later time take a cutting and and graft it in order to get one for my garden.

In the picture above you can see a small starter bonsai of this material that I acquired just this spring and in time it will make a very lovely bonsai but since this material grows very slow it will take a few years to create this one.

I will train it in the umbrella style and later when it has had time to grow a stronger trunk then I will twist the trunk around a bamboo stick to get a desired S curve look to the trunk.

Thanks for reading and looking.
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