Ideal Trident Maple Foliage.

[Scott Roxburgh]

I am looking at doing some Trident grafting next spring and have many seedlings from which to graft but many have different leaf characteristics.

After reading a number of Bonsai today/focus, i have read that there is 'not ideal' foliage but what is the ideal?

Is it best to have very separate lobs on each leaf, a certain shape, rounded leaves, sharp points, blunt points...can you see where i am coming from?

any help would be great.

Thanks

Scott.

[Bretts]

Hi Scott
That is a good question. I too have heard this grafting better leaves on a trident maple and wondered what was so special about the leaves they grafted on?

The trident the neighbors had in their back yard had a variation in the leaves so much so that for a few years it had single lobed fig shaped leaves on it. Then it slowly reverted back to mainly tri lobed trident leaf over a couple of years. After some research and ID it was reported that this was a normal occurrence with trident maple

Anyway good luck with the question I hope someone can shed some light on this.

[DavidN]

The very quick answer here is that the "ideal" foliage (or why tridents have branches grafted onto them) is for the smallest leaf, short internodes, compact growth and possibly exhibits great autumn colour.

David