- Author: Karen Metz
I spent the first days of the New Year inside fighting a virus. Much of that week was dismal and rainy. Although extremely grateful for the rain, the landscape was gray and drab when I looked through the sliding glass door. Suddenly I was struck by a jolt of color against all the gray. It was my Coral Bark Maple, Acer palmatum 'Sango-Kaku'. Its red bark glowed. A few days later when the sun came out, the color was even prettier in the afternoon when back lit by the setting sun.
I had been waiting for that moment for a long time. Years ago I bought an extremely small seedling at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show. I wasn't sure how a Japanese Maple would do in our very sunny yard, so I didn't want to make a big investment and watch it fry. I bought a baby and put it in a pot. Well it didn't die, but it didn't thrive either. After several years it was still only about a foot and didn't have any dramatic red coloration. I was definitely disappointed. A friend of mine told me her tree had taken awhile to get started but then took off. I waited some more, still not much. Finally I put it in a bigger pot. The tree began to grow a little each year, but still I didn't have the coloration that I was expecting. This winter with the cold, the bark finally achieved that beautiful red, I had been waiting for.
Coral Bark Maples can get to 15 to 25 feet tall in the ground but in containers are more likely to keep to about 10 feet. I hope to keep mine in a container. The good news is that it has taken so long to grow, the back yard landscaping has grown up to provide some summer shade now. The tree has four season beauty with lovely leaves that turn colors in the fall and then, the beautiful red bark in the winter.