Marcescense

It's been warm enough finally to get outside and do some pruning. I shaped up some shrubs and trimmed back some wayward branches too near the house, and then gathered my courage to prune the Japanese maple in a pot by the deck.

I have no idea what I'm doing, and the tree is still little and scraggly enough that even my best intentions haven't improved it much. It looked like this last summer before any shaping at all:

Not shapely last summer, but green and leafy.

And early last fall, when this Acer palmatum 'Seiryu' was supposed to be fiery scarlet red, an early frost and sustained cold nights turned the leafy tree brown all over.

Brown. Very brown. In November.
Not what I was going for.

It kept its brown leaves into winter, in a process called marcescense. I love that word, so formal, so sibilant, so exotic. I do not love what it means, which is "the retention of dead plant materials that are normally shed".

It's kind of a fascinating biological process that oaks and some other plants go through normally. It's not normal for Japanese maples, but sometimes when there's a freeze before the tree has gone through the several-step process to harden off its leaves to drop them, they get short circuited and everything stops. The process doesn't get completed.

It doesn't hurt the tree, and the brown leaves blew off in winter. But I missed fall color, which would have been part of the normal process if everything didn't freeze too early.

After pruning. Can you tell? I took off about a third of the
tiny branches, but until it leafs out I won't know what I've done.

This little tree is doing well in this climate. The challenge of growing Japanese maples at high altitude in the dry west -- clearly not their preferred conditions -- is not the dry air or the lack of rain or the harsh sun.

It's the too-early freezes in the mountains. In a word, marcescence.

Lovely word, brown mess.