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This gorgeous little dwarf fills me with joy during April and May. The bright pale luminous leaves are a wonder unlike any other, and by June, the tree is as dull as ditchwater, with
leaves of an equally unique unpleasant green. I love it, I hate it. By october it is just a pile of sticks, and I can rest my emotions for the year.
I keep it in a pot in the shade, because in full sun it can develop the strangest yellow tints.
It is a tree with a short window of spectacular beauty.
Astonishing peach leaves, just starting to develop green tints along the veins.
The first flush of growth is brilliant red, before it fades through salmon to yellow green. Poor old tree (2011) really needs me to find a space for it in the garden, at the moment I am more concerned with taking out trees that are no longer needed but the plan is to give myself space for all the new things that have to go in. It has now been planted out (2015) and although it is suffering a bit in the sun, it should eventually grow more vigorously. Introduced some time before 1905, it received an Award of Merit from the RHS in 1925 and a First Class certificate in 1977. Trees and Shrubs online says: "'Brilliantissimum' has been cultivated in Europe since 1905 and North America since 1927 (Jacobson 1996). It is undoubtedly at its best in spring, the most dramatically coloured of all the leaf variants; the foliage emerges a show-stealing salmon pink to orange, but it eventually fades to a rather pallid and sickly-looking green. It is slow growing, eventually making a small tree with a rounded crown (Jacobson 1996; Dirr & Warren 2019)." Havlis say: "Men usually get mad when women describe colours with expressions like salmon pink, peachy red etc. Well, men, get ready for another hit below the belt: we have a tree whose leaves are SHRIMP pink. Not familiar with that colour? Go to the nearest restaurant and have a prawn-cocktail to see what the fuss is all about … The name itself - Brilliantissimum - already suggests something exceptional by name, and this maple lives up to it. It is a very slow‑growing shrub or tree: in shrub (ungrafted) form it typically reaches about 3–4 m, while as a grafted standard it commonly attains 5–7 m, with full maturity reached only after several decades. The crown usually spans 3–5 m, making it suitable for smaller gardens. Its leaves are soft shrimp pink, changing to golden-yellow and maturing green in summer. They are mostly moderately lobed. Yellow-green flowers appear in April and May and are followed by clusters of red-winged fruit in late summer." |
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| 1st May 2006 | ||
