One hundred is by no means an excessive number of plants to start with, if you are starting from the seedling stage and intending to produce a bonsai. That particular route to a quality miniature tree is so long and arduous that it is only reasonable to expect a lot of failure along the way. I didn't know that back in the year 2000 when we potted up about one hundred little first-year red maple seedlings because I didn't know a lot about bonsai in those days. We had the seedlings at no expense and threw away many more than we kept. The baby trees needed only the smallest of plastic nursery pots and we had plenty of room on the bench for them, so my attitude was very much along the lines of let's grow a bunch of these and see what happens.

Red maples are vigorous growers, as maples generally are. In a few years we had our seedlings growing in several different sized pots because some individuals exhibited a greater rate of growth, so we accommodated them with more room for their roots:

Having at least some variety of sizes proved useful in 2004, when I did a group planting workshop with bonsai artist Bill Valavanis. Bill, true to his roots as Yuji Yoshimura's student, composed the tree arrangement in the classical style:

Tray landscapes early on became a focus when developing new specimens for the Arboretum's bonsai collection. All those young red maple trees lent themselves to this usage. We were red maple rich! Any time I went looking for plant material to use in a new tray landscape project the red maples were ready to go. As a result, they featured prominently in three of our signature tray landscapes:

I made an important personal bonsai discovery in subsequent years while working on red maples in the tray landscape format. My early bonsai training, like Bill Valavanis', was firmly grounded in the classical style. But as I developed the red maples in the miniature landscapes I found there was no way to adhere to the formulaic approach to bonsai tree design. The close spacing of the trees within the composition didn't allow it and the growth habit of red maple didn't facilitate it. Compared to other species typically used for deciduous group plantings — such as elms, hornbeams and even other maples like Japanese and trident — red maple is larger in leaf and somewhat coarser in the way it grows. Besides, the look of trees so consciously designed didn't seem right to me in a forest setting. I was already in the habit of spending as much time as I could exploring the Southern Appalachian forest, so now I began to observe more closely the visual character of the full-size trees growing there. They didn't look like bonsai trees. The wild trees had different structure, different proportions. I thought a great deal about this discrepancy, reasoning with myself that bonsai was an artistic interpretation of nature so there was no requirement for bonsai trees to look like real trees. Still, that didn't mean bonsai trees shouldn't look like real trees.

Circumstances forced my hand. I had too much work on my plate to take the time necessary to shape so many individual trees in a bonsai group according to a preconceived design scheme. Instead, I went with what the young maple trees presented me. I observed their growth then thought of the full-size trees in the forest. I thought not only of how those wild trees look, but why they look that way, the biological and environmental reasons for their appearance. The little red maple trees in the tray landscapes grew and presented a set of options with the multitude of parts they produced. In shaping them I relied entirely on the cut-and-grow method, using no training wire. With a pair of scissors I went about imagining life stories for the landscape trees, making choices as to what parts were lost and what path the canopy branches followed in their unending quest for sunlight. Although consisting of numerous individuals, trees in a group grow together. They cohabitate and coordinate in their development. The young maple trees in the tray landscapes did what they were evolved to do. I just steered them based on the mechanics of natural tree development.

Thus working with red maples developed from the seedling stage put me on the road to naturalism. It didn't happen overnight. Letting go and letting nature have its say wasn’t easy for me, but over time the meditative exercise of shaping bonsai this way had ever greater appeal. Eventually I began to take the same approach with singular specimens that weren't components within a tray landscape. Among the first Arboretum bonsai developed this way were several red maples, naturally enough.

Three of these red maple specimens have previously been profiled in Curator's Journal. Each has a poetic name (click on any name to revisit the entry describing the story behind each bonsai):

The red maple called Long Branch began as one of the many first-year seedlings that sprouted in the roof gutter. Others from that same source are still being developed:

Horticulturally, the care and conditions required by red maple bonsai are basically the same as those called for to cultivate the other maple species more commonly used for bonsai. We keep our red maples evenly moist, fertilizing on a weekly basis during the growing season, and provide them with some relief from direct sun exposure during the most intense part of the day. In the hoop house our red maples are subject to all-day sun but under a fifty-percent shade cloth. In the bonsai garden they are positioned to receive full sun until about 2:00 in the afternoon. Red maples seem to be slightly more bothered by pest problems like aphid and scale than other bonsai maples, and they can experience bouts of fungal disease on foliage. On the other hand, red maple is a more durable species. It takes a lot to kill them.

The big issue with red maple is controlling the size of the leaves. In bonsai the common practice to develop small leaves on maples and many other deciduous species is complete defoliation. With this technique, at some point around the middle of the growing season, all leaves are stripped from the tree. In effect, this removal creates an existential crisis. Losing the means to feed itself is a big hit and the naked tree has to dig deep into energy reserves to replace what has been taken away. As a result the new leaves produced by a deciduous tree after complete defoliation are typically smaller in size. The little leaves are testimony to the stress endured by the plant. Grow small leaves or die!

Arboretum bonsai are rarely ever subjected to this treatment because it seems to me to be unnecessarily harsh. I can appreciate small leaves, but I am not obsessed with them. We get our red maples to reduce leaf size by using a less severe technique that might be thought of as a rolling defoliation.

When new red maple leaves first appear they are quite small and often red, orange or salmon in color. This is a beautiful albeit brief phase. Soon the leaves turn green and expand in size, typically becoming almost ridiculously large. Pruning extending shoots starts almost immediately, employing the standard practice of cutting back to a single set of new leaves per shoot (maple leaves are produced in pairs). Within a month of when spring growth initiates and the first pruning has taken place, we begin to remove individual leaves. The removal is limited to a small number at a time. We might take off ten leaves or so at a pass, making a pass every ten days or two weeks. In truth, I'm never counting the number of leaves or the number of days when I do it. I'm with the bonsai on an almost daily basis and conduct such activities on more of an impulsive, as-needed basis. Always, the leaves chosen for removal are the largest in evidence. We also take the opportunity to remove any damaged leaves or leaves with fungal spots. We take care to distribute the removal as equally as possible throughout the crown of the tree. As a rule, a tree shouldn’t be subjected to any sort of defoliation unless it is in strong, healthy condition.

In this manner we suppress the size of leaves the tree has overall while also keeping it clean and presentable. With rolling defoliation, leaf size is ultimately reduced by the same principle of forcing the plant to generate replacements, yet without ever sending the subject into panic mode. The bonsai always has leaves and those leaves get smaller all the time. It is desirable to end the rolling defoliation at the point of the season when replacement leaves are not likely to be produced because the tree is beginning to prepare for dormancy. The time frame for this is variable, but we generally suspend the program around the end of August.

This less invasive technique works, too:

Red Maple For Bonsai - Part 2