May I please call on your collective thoughts and experience.
I have this beautiful Japanese Maple. I purchased it 17 years ago at Conifer Gardens Nursery. It was a reasonable sized tree then and not cheap. So I reckon it is 25-30 years old as it stands. It was always going to be a beautiful garden plant and always has been. I love it. Here's a picture. It goes a beautiful yellow/golden colour in Autumn.
I am spewing that I lost the tag and can't remember it's name. Other attributes include:-
It is very slow growing. It's height is around 5 1/2 ft from top of the big pot it is in. (7ft if you include pot). It has beautiful small leaves. Here's some pictures of the leaves. Today, I started to think about some air-layers to create some bonsai. I thought about air-layering branches higher up (with the thickness of a thumb). I considered a ground layer at the graft mark - the trunk is wrist thick. The graft is very fine but can be seen where the white'ish bark meets the green. I then dug around the roots and noted a fine spread of roots - in effect 360 nebari. Nice! Here are some more pictures. So now I wonder what to do!? Probably start with a few air-layers higher up. If I didn't ground layer, could this tree ever look really good as a bonsai given that the branching starts about 20 cm from the roots/soil. What if the tree was designed to be say 80-90 cm tall - could branches starting that high up look ok? Would the graft mark ever grey over? What about a ground layer - starting at the part where the graft meets the white bark....
And now ... to people with more experience than I. I would love and appreciated any thoughts.
And of course, I may just keep the tree in the pot and enjoy it, as I have for the past 17 years.
