Is it Japanese maple?

Hello everybody! 

we just moved to the house where in the garden we have this beautiful tree, looks like Japanese Maple? It looks very big and doesn’t look that it’s been looked after. 

Just wondering where to start because ideally i will need to move it somehow but I don’t want to harm it. 

thank you for answering        

Yes it is a Japanese Maple, cultivar

What to do with it.....Let it grow.

That’s the plan is to let it grow. But eventually i will need to move it. Can it be moved to the pot? 
Can i trim lower branches so it will not look like big bush? 

thank yoy

Yes, it can be moved to a pot. That big and well rooted trees is just more complicated and risky to transfer to a pot.

Pruning the lower branches can be done if you wish so. But it will not make it a bonsai. For bonsai creation we value low growing branches and cut the top to reduce size and get the tree into proportion. Actually, your tree already have way to long distance between the soil and first branch to make a good candidate for fast creation of a bonsai. But maples is really good at backbudding. So you can reduce the tree to just a stump about 3 times as high as the thickness of the trunk, let it grow for a couple of years and then repeat for the next section.

But honestly. I would leave it as it is, a beautiful garden tree.

Tropfrog wrote:

Yes, it can be moved to a pot. That big and well rooted trees is just more complicated and risky to transfer to a pot.

Pruning the lower branches can be done if you wish so. But it will not make it a bonsai. For bonsai creation we value low growing branches and cut the top to reduce size and get the tree into proportion. Actually, your tree already have way to long distance between the soil and first branch to make a good candidate for fast creation of a bonsai. But maples is really good at backbudding. So you can reduce the tree to just a stump about 3 times as high as the thickness of the trunk, let it grow for a couple of years and then repeat for the next section.

But honestly. I would leave it as it is, a beautiful garden tree.

I agree. We think of bonsai as growing in a relatively small pot, with heights of a meter at most.  Keep it where it is and prune back to maintain shape. 

In Hong Kong I saw several trees five meters or so high in containers with widths several meters. One had three people working on it, standing in the pot. I have no idea how they root prune. There is probably a term for this.

I measured it’s branches hight. Lower branches grows pretty low around 80cm from ground. Of course two branches goes pretty hight at around 140cm 
I attached few pictures        

As you can see , the first 70 cm are straight, no movement or taper. Not realy usefull as the base of a bonsai.
Same with the position / form of the lower branches.
Maybe you could airlayering somewhere in the tree to get a pre-bonsai out of it, but that's not something to recommend for a starting bonsaika

There are some guidelines for bonsai that are based on aestetic knowledge and experience. I do not claim that it is essential to follow them and sometimes I actually thing that breaking some of them can make a better tree. However for total beginners it is good to use the guidelines as fixed rules until a sence of the aestetics has been achieved. So lets analyse some of them regarding this material.

The general guidelines say that a good trunk to hight ratio is 1:6 to 1:12. Your 13 cm thick trunk can according to that create a 81 to 162 cm high tree.

The general guidelines say that a bonsai can be maximum 1 m tall. So that limits the range for this tree to 81 to 100 cm.

The general guidelines say that first branch should be placed at approximately 1/3 of the trees total hight. That would in your example be around 30 cm. Your first branch is at 70 cm.

The general guidelines say that a smooth and even tapering from bottom to top is prefered. That means that the trunk by the first branch at 30 cm should be around 8 cm thick. Yours is proboably 12 or so?

overall it means creating a somewhat aestetic bonsai means trunk shoping at around 30 cm. Regrow a new leader and new branches. Then do a new trunk shop and regrow again. Repeat until happy with the tapering. For a beginner, I think 3 times is enough. But at least 5 years inbetween trunk shops, means that you may not be a beginner when 3 levels is achieved and may want more.

It makes sense to keep the tree in the ground during this trunk line development as it is so much faster than in a pot.

There are bonsai styles that do not need to follow these rules. The literati style that is not concidered a good options for maples and forest planting that require at least 5 trees.

I agree with Frank that the best option is airlayering a good section. As already told it is not normally recomended for beginners. However, if you see a branch that you want to cut anyway, I see no harm in trying. But do not remove a branch that will leave the mother tree ugly for years.

This is a very beautiful garden tree. Do not waste it.