Acer

Urihadakaede roughly translated as melon skin maple it is in the snakebark group related to capillipes and native to mountain forests in japan. Fall color is orange to red; this is one of the commoner snakebark maples and can reach 15m high.

A great stump the botanist plant, almost no one recognizes this as a maple, the leaves are perfect hornbeam replicas, however the spinner seeds are a dead giveaway. The evolutionary advantage of mimicking a Carpinus eludes me; sinister selective pressures may be at work here.

Related to Acer cissifolium but with much better cold tolerance, visitors to the nursery always comment on this, many of them think we have trained poison ivy into a dwarf tree. Bizarrely unmaplelike, it does bear an uncanny resemblance but we guarantee it itch free.

One of the toughest Japanese Maples at least when they are on their own roots which these are, it is fully hardy here with exellent reddish purple color that get’s even better in fall. Grafted maples are chancy in the north because you never know how hardy the understock is which is why we prefer them on there own roots. Also there is no understock to cut off.