Maples from Around the World 2
Last month I discussed some of the North American and European maples that can be found in Cambridge’s Maple Arboretum, some growing up to 30 metres in height. This month we will look at some of the elegant, smaller maples from Japan, China and Taiwan and Korea, most of which reach only from 4 to 20 metres high. Along with flowering cherries and pine these form the cornerstone of Japanese gardening.
Asian maples are distinguished by the rich range of variations of their delicate leaf forms, and intriguing bark. The arboretum includes several varieties of the popular Japanese garden maple, Acer palmatum: ‘Senkaki’ is notable for its spectacular bright coral stems, ‘Osakazuki’ for its blaze of red leaves in autumn, while the dark red leaves of ‘Atropurpeum’ in summer are outdone only by the deep purple of ‘Trompenburg’. The ‘snake-barked’ maples sport vertical, white, snake-like stripes on their grey-green trunks: they include A. capillipes from Japan, whose leaves are carried on red stems, and A. davidii from Yunnan, China, exquisite in form, with shiny, heart-shaped leaves turning yellow in autumn. The corky bark maple, A. miyabei hails from Hokkaido, Japan, and one of the rarest and most beautiful is the very slow-growing Chinese paper-bark maple, A. griseum, whose rich, red-brown bark catches the light as it peels. A really unusual one is the evergreen maple, A. fabri, from Vietnam and southern China. But my very favourite is A. pentaphyllum (shown): I adore its exquisitely delicate five-fingered leaf-form.
The arboretum is accessed from Thornton Road. It contains more than 35 kinds of maple, some of which are really rare in New Zealand. Do go and enjoy it.
