Garden Layout - Plants - Acer Circle
Acer pseudoplatanus 'Brilliantissimum' I've long admired one of these trees in a garden fronting the main road through a neighbouring village, and when we moved to this, our first house with a garden, my parents very kindly bought a 1.8m standard for us as a house-warming gift. It was originally planted in 1991 in a 450x450x450mm hole dug into the lawn, but it never really established itself and the growth was pitiful.
By the spring of 1994, it was obvious that the tree was unhappy and I decided to uproot it and try replanting it in a specially dug tree-pit with drainage. Spring isn't the best time to move growing trees, but the work was done to tie-in with the driveway and drainage reconstruction that was taking place at that time. And so, a 1m x1m x1m tree-pit was dug, a land drain inserted and connected to the land drainage system that runs from the lawn to the surface water drainage system beneath the driveway. The pit was backfilled with an equal mixture of coarse sand, well-rotted garden compost and top-soil, and the tree re-planted. A circle of 125mm wide kerbs was constructed around the tree, planted with 5 different heathers and surface-dressed with a golden coloured gravel.	Acer pseudoplatanus 'Brilliantissimum'
The tree is fed with a general fertiliser, such as Growmore, in March, June and September, and I inspect it each day for nasticreechas, as the ants are quite fond of farming aphids on the newly emerged leaves.
Newly emerging leaves	Since its replanting, the tree has flourished, and regularly puts on about 150mm of new growth each season. The leaves emerge in mid spring as a beautiful coral pink and over the following 4-6 weeks they gradually mature to a pale green. The tree continues to develop new, coral-pink leaves until about mid-summer, but not as many as that first flush of spring.

Back-a-Page

Home Page

Garden Guide

Layout

Text, images, design and construction © cormaic web design - Last updated October 30th 2000