After nursing a handful of young Japanese maples back to health, I decided to plant them all in the same pot to create a small grove planting. I started by selecting a shallow pot and adding lots of wires.
The pot from below
Plenty of wires
Using lots of wires is useful for creating groves as the standard four-wire approach is rarely enough to hold all of the trees in place. Once the pot was wired, I worked on the roots.
After untangling the roots of the first two trees
All nine trees ready to go
Once the pot and trees are ready comes the tricky part – adding a tree or two at a time and wiring them down while making little adjustments to the whole. Fast forwarding a bit, here’s the result.
Planting complete
After cutback
I’ll arrange the trunks a bit and continue to refine the group throughout the growing season.
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John DeMaegd says
Are you really lucky enough to be able to do this already? My trees are all still tucked away with frozen soil and only thoughts of getting to play (work) on them! (zone5)
Michael Gilliland says
Thank you I am about to start my first grouping of maples and needed this info.
Kathy Sloan says
I would really like to see pictures of how you wired them together. Do you have pictures of that? Thanks
Marty says
It is a lot of fun and educational to create such groups and I promote it within our club. I wish we had the same long growing season that Jonah has so that it wouldn’t take 10-15 years to develop the thicker trees he had here.
Jonas Dupuich says
Hi Kathy, I just checked and I don’t have photos of the trees wired in place – it takes a lot of hands to hold the trees in place while wiring them down a tree or two at a time! I’ll try to get more shots the next time I work on a group like this.
Kathy Sloan says
Thank you. I really like the group plantings and hope to do some in the future.