I’ve made an offer on a house - haven’t heard back yet from the sellers.
In the front yard of this house, the owners planted a Japanese maple and, a few feet away, a sequoia. The sequoia has grown enormous and has more or less overrun the maple, which is stunted (about 3 feet tall, if that) and obviously not too happy. I think Japanese maples are lovely plants, and would like to save it.
Assuming I do buy this house, I’ve been thinking that I’ll want to transplant the maple. Then I thought it would be attractive to transplant it into a large ceramic pot or some other container. And *then * I thought about having it inside, as a glorified houseplant. Wouldn’t that be cool? It would, thought I, if it lived.
So my questions are these:
What do I need to do to transplant the Japanese maple from one place to another? (I live in coastal Oregon; lots of Japanese maples seem to thrive here, when not planted in the shade of large evergreens.) I want to keep it alive and not damage the sequoia while I’m at it; and this thing’s roots are surely entwined with the sequoia’s.
Would a transplanted Japanese maple be a good container plant?
Would it be a good indoor container plant, keeping in mind that I am (obviously) neither an expert gardener nor a bonsai expert?
Some Japanese maples are dwarf trees. This may just be the split-leaf (or feather-leaf) variety. The leaf of this tree (though you probably can’t see them now unfortunately) are very feathery though of the same basic shape of a regular maple leaf. I’ve never seen a dwarf Japanese maple with the more regular looking maple leafs.
I say this because the tree you think is young may be quite old. We have a split leaf maple in our yard that is less than 6 feet tall and is well over 40 yers old. If your tree is that old, it will be much harder to transplant.
Transplanting an adult tree is always a delicate proposition. You’ll want as large a rootball as possible. I don’t recommend transplanting an adult “wild” tree into a pot. You can buy a young tree with a small rootball for that.
Indoor plants should be tropicals, like us. Think about it: constant temperature year round, relatively constant light. Indoor plants are, for the most part, understory plants from tropical jungles.
Maples require a winter dormancy period; tropicals do not. If you have a maple in a pot, you can move it around like a vase full of flowers. A very heavy vase full of flowers. You can bring it inside for a short period of time if you like. The shorter the better. You’re better off leaving it outside, and not moving it too terribly much.
In short, while I admire your ambition, it’s not likely your fantasies can be fulfilled around this particular tree. You may not need to move it at all; as noted above, many Japanese maples are dwarf. And many are understory trees as well, like dogwood. So it may do fine just where it is.
Most plants need a good year to recover from transplanting (this is a vast generalization, but a good rule of thumb for non-annuals), so I do it only when necessary.
Thanks for the advice, lissener and OldGuy. Maybe I’ll just leave it alone. It does look kind of funny, a little tiny clump of a tree being dominated by the 25-foot sequoia. But I’d hate to kill it in my ham-fisted attempt to save it.