Moving the Maple—Again

    One year, when I was a child, my siblings and I gave our mother, for Mother's Day, a Japanese red maple. She planted it at the bottom of the hill on the front lawn, where it spread its wine-red, delicately pointed leaves over the grass. After my parents died, my sister Laura dug up some shoots at the foot of the tree and cultivated them into tiny saplings she gave to each of her siblings.

    When I brought my little tree from Georgia to Oregon, I stuck it temporarily in a pot on the deck with my flower boxes. It did well there for the first couple of years. Then it must have outgrown its pot because it stopped growing. I think the deer might have stripped it of its tiny leaves more than once, too. After several years—I'm embarrassed to say how many—when Mike had become part of my life, he dug a deep hole on the hill below my house, where I envisioned my Japanese maple spreading its arms over my yard the way its mother had done at my childhood home. Mike built a hogwire cage around it to keep it safe from deer.

    However, now I had a problem keeping it watered. Every year it put out leaves, but it remained a pygmy.

    Last fall I visited a friend on a farm near Portland. Kelly has an astonishing garden, and I noticed a maple tree in a large pot in her yard, growing luxuriously. Maybe what I needed was to put my maple tree in a massive pot on the deck, where I could keep it watered. Kelly said, "I have a pot you can have" and brought out a beautiful and very large ceramic pot.

She and her teen-age sons managed to get it in my car, and when I got home, a helper friend lugged it to the end of my deck. Then I filled it with dirt, dug up the maple tree, planted it there, and waited for spring leaves.

    But no. When I proudly showed another gardening friend my newly planted maple tree, she said, "Oh, but it's too hot in that place." It was easier to replant the tree in another pot than to move this big one, now full of dirt, so I bought an oak wine half-barrel, filled it with dirt, and replanted the Japanese maple under a madrone tree, next to my rhododendron. The ceramic pot, still in its spot at the corner of the deck, now sports a beautiful flowering plant.

    My father used to quote a poem: "I had a wooden whistle. But it would'n whistle. I had a steel whistle. But it steel would'n whistle. I had a lead whistle. But it steel would'n lead me whistle. I had a tin whistle. Now I tin whistle!"

    That's the way I feel with my maple. I tried it on the deck, and it would'n whistle. I tried it in the yard, and it steel would'n whistle. I put it in a big pot on the deck, and it steel would'n lead me whistle. Now that it's in a shady spot just off the deck where I can water it frequently, will it grow and put out lovely lacy burgundy-red leaves? Now tin I whistle?

I will, of course, put the hogwire cage around it again to keep the deer out.

Laura also dug up the mother tree and replanted it in her yard. Today it looks like this: