The Japanese maple is dying

My Japanese maple is dying. It is the one thing in my garden I consider irreplaceable.

For one thing, I don’t know the name of the variety, so I actually cannot replace it. I recall that it was a Japanese name, possibly starting with shi-, but I haven’t been able to locate it online. It’s a magnificent tree, with spring leaves almost pink, turning to green for the summer then to orangey-red in the fall.
We put it in about five years ago, after removing the dilapidated old garage—a denizen den after hours—from our back yard and installing a proper fence and a little pergola. I went shopping at Weall and Cullen and found the tree and justified the huge price tag on the basis that my husband’s birthday wasn’t far off and he likes Japanese maples. I brought it home and put out my back planting it by myself. David liked it so much he didn’t even press me to reveal the price.

I suppose I can rationalize my connection to the tree by pointing out that it signifies a second phase of my garden. The first phase, with the garden built out of old cinder blocks and broken concrete, filled with plant cuttings from my mother’s Winnipeg garden, was lovely in its youthful exuberance: a riot of experiments in herbaceous colour, all backed by the appalling garage. This second phase is more educated, somewhat better planned. The Phase 1 garden was a laboratory; Phase 2 is a place to stop and breathe.

I’m not saying I got it all right the second time around. I hate the gangly four-in-one apple tree I planted at the same time as the Japanese maple. The patch of lawn next to the barbecue has long-since become a packed mud floor. The raised patio under the pergola is just a little too small for a dining table. Even the beloved Japanese maple would look better turned about 70 degrees; once I wrenched my back hefting it into the hole, no adjustments were in the offing.

But bringing the maple home was one thing I definitely did right. It is a thing of beauty all year ‘round. There may be weeds and frazzled blooms everywhere, but all eyes turn to that superb tree in all its pink, green or red glory.

And now it is in decline. I believe it is full of verticillium wilt, a soil-based fungal death knell for maple trees. Every few days, a branchlet of leaves curls up and dries out. I cut off the dead parts and clean my tools, offer more water and something of a prayer, but it is all too little too late. I should have kept it better watered last year and the year before; the best cure for verticillium is prevention through excellent cultural practices. The only thing my own cultural practices have prevented is a long life for my beloved tree. Japanese maples don’t appreciate tough love.

I tell David, “oh, it’s probably just getting scorched by the sun since we cut the ballerina rose back,” to give him hope while preparing him for the worst. The tree is dying. The tree will be dead soon.

I have children and a dog, so I cannot reasonably compare the decline to losing a child or even a pet—this death does not begin to hint at that level of pain. Yet my sense of hopelessness and loss is entirely real, and not quite like anything else I’ve felt before.

The mid-century American poet William Carlos Williams, who was also a doctor and a gardener, understood the human connection to plants. His poems, though very modern, are as filled with references and odes to specific flowers as anything by Wordsworth. He imagined and understood the character of different flowers and trees. My own current sadness reminds me of his poem “The Stolen Peonies” from the collection Pictures from Brueghel. It goes, in part, like this:

that year
we had the magnificent
stand of peonies

how happy we were
with them
but one night

they were stolen
we shared the
loss together thinking

of nothing else for
a whole day
nothing could have

brought us closer
we had been
married ten years

Now, this is a happy blog and it is summer; I cannot possibly end on a note of sadness, so I will end with hope and promise.This week I went to Vineland Nursery in Beamsville (Niagara) and brought back a trunk-load of exciting new things including a Taxodium, a Dr Seuss tree called Sciadopitys, a pagoda dogwood and a variegated dawn redwood. Yeah, a redwood. My little city lot is about to become an arboretum. Now that’s hopeful!

Published in Ontario Gardener Living vol. 8 no. 2
Copyright Pegasus Publications Inc, 2007