Growing for Success | Colouring up the season all year-round

By Riverside Gardens

Jan 18, 2024

Purple haze: The Japanese maples create a canopy of shade and vibrant colours for your gardens Photo by Contributed

Larry Smith and the Riverside Gardens team talk all things pots, plants and pruning in their weekly gardening column.

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We are often asked for recommendations for small deciduous trees, especially this time of the year. As the days get hot, customers come looking for shade around their garden, but they still want the winter sunshine to spill into their house.

There are quite a lot to choose from that do very well in our neck of the woods, but my favourite would have to be the Japanese maples.

Japanese maples have the unfair reputation of being temperamental, difficult to grow and more suited to a cooler climate than ours. However, given the right conditions, selecting the right variety and a little care when establishing the tree, you will find they will do extremely well here.

Ranging from two metres to six metres in height, they have a fine, delicate-looking canopy that throws a soft dappled shade, allowing other plants and lawn to be grown right up underneath their canopy. Their root structure is non-invasive, and the fine leaf breaks down readily when it eventually drops after their usually impressive autumn display.

In my garden I have a variety called Acer palmatum ‘Seiryu’ that is four metres high by five metres wide with a lovely fine, lime coloured leaf that turns a fiery red in mid-June. With no special care it cops all the hot north wind, plus the reflected heat from a brick paved drive and it grows happily, beautifully shading the front verandah and garden,

Other varieties worth considering are Acer palmatum ‘Atropurpureum’ with its bronze purple coloured summer foliage, that turns a rich crimson red in autumn.

Growing to about three metres by three metres it has a denser lower branching canopy. These are sometimes grown from seedlings but to get a true-to-colour, size and form you are far better purchasing a grafted tree.

Acer palmatum ‘Sango Kaku’, the coral bark maple, is another one that grows well here but you will need to give it a bit of extra care when young, as the light green slightly courser foliage can sometimes scorch in the intense heat of summer. This can be prevented by spraying them a couple of times over the first few summers with ‘Envy’, a biodegradable polymer that will protect the foliage. Coral bark maples grow to about six metres high by five metres wide with autumn colours of yellow to apricot and orange. The bark of the new growth is pinkish during summer, intensifying to orange, and coral red as the plant goes dormant in winter.

These are just a few of the Japanese maples that we stock as small shade trees that we know grow well in this area. We also stock a range of weeping Japanese maples that, although not tall enough to be a shade tree, make an amazing feature plant in the right garden.

These are normally grafted off on about a one-metre trunk and cascade down from there. Varieties like Acer palmatum ‘Dissectum Inaba Shidare’ which has dark purple foliage that turns bright red in autumn and Acer palmatum ‘Dissectum Viridis’ with bright green leaves that turn scarlet red are hard to beat as feature plants with even their bare architectural structure in winter being a feature giving them year-round appeal.

So if you find yourself looking for a small deciduous shade tree, call in and have a chat, I promise I will show you more that just Japanese maples as there are plenty of other lovely trees in stock to consider.