“The Chinese call it the blood-bark maple, and people could generally direct us to it,” he said. The tree’s distinctive bark - at times a coppery orange - made it easy to find the survivors. ![]() “It was a very interesting way to see what it means to be an endangered species, because it took us a day to drive between different” stands, Aiello said. Populations have become isolated from one another as forest land has been lost to agriculture and other human pressure. “We also collected from a tree here in Oregon that was very fertile,” Mark Krautmann said.Īiello and colleagues at other botanical gardens are seeking to increase the diversity of paperbark maple, and last year they visited five Chinese provinces to collect DNA samples and some seed from wild specimens. (Nursery trees generally go through two or three growers before reaching a retail nursery.) The Krautmanns have been propagating as many as 40,000 paperbark maples annually since 1985 from seeds they collected in China or had shipped to them. I suspect my maple started life in the Salem, Ore., nursery of Mark and Jolly Krautmann, Heritage Seedlings. Mine was planted that way about four years ago to replace a stewartia that was sickly from the start. It can grow to 50 feet in the wild, but in the garden it tends to be a much smaller tree that lends itself to use by a walkway or patio. It doesn’t have the flamboyant floral display of, say, a magnolia or dogwood, and its chief ornament, the peeling red bark, requires a more refined appreciation. In recent years, its availability has increased substantially, but the tree is still mostly found in the gardens of connoisseurs. Another major problem is that cuttings don’t root, so the nursery keeper has to make new plants from a limited number of seeds. Part of its rarity - in commerce and in nature - is due to the fact that it sets very few fertile seeds. Wilson, but it has remained a fairly uncommon garden plant, in part because Wilson started with only about 100 seedlings. The paperbark maple was introduced to the West more than a century ago by the intrepid plant collector E.H. ![]() In its native China, the paperbark maple grows large with age, but in garden settings its mature height is typically 20 to 30 feet.
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