Silver Maple for Bonsai?

Hi I live in Minnesota and I am thinking about doing something simular this spring. I am going to air layer a Silver maple in my back yard.
      I think that it will make a good bonsai tell me if it works well.  

Hi,
Do you mean Air layer?
Silver Maples respond great and very fast to air layer. Branches of the thickness of a finger will develop good amount of roots in just 4 to 6 weeks.

https://i.servimg.com/u/f56/18/76/39/05/silver10.jpg

It´s a 17 year old, and is 1 1/2 feet

Nice info on this topic. I'm looking to get into native species and with all this info I will try the silver maple as it overruns my yard to. I could collect up to 100 if I wanted to. I also have three full grown pin oaks and their seedlings grow all over my yard to I think I will try these also.

When it comes to big leaf, I think I can take the cake, or pie if you prefer, however humble it may be, here's an Acer macrophyllum.
This was taken in 08.


About a month later.


I'll have to take a new pic tomorrow. It has not leafed out yet and I'm cleaning off most of the new buds.

This is a native species here in Oregon, aka, Oregon Maple, though it ranges from SW British Columbia to the hills of So. Calif. I recovered this tree from a roadside where it was wedged between to big rocks. The road crew cut it back to the rocks every year so the top was a mass of prongs. A grader had dislodged the rocks and I was able to cut the roots and bring it home.

The tree was planted in a spot in my garden in 2010 and has been growing relentlessly ever since. I have been able to remove all the old stubs and build an acceptable trunkline.

This tree can sport six to ten inch leaves and I've seen leaves twelve to fourteen inches across on trees growing by the river. At this point I average 3-5 inch leaves and I'm just beginning to work on refining the branches. It required alot of growing out and cutting back to get the heighth I need without ramrod straight limbs. Even still, all new growth is the same straight elongated rods.

I've been treating this tree like any other maple, I let the rods extend and then dock them back to two sets of leaves. It does repond well to defoliation, though I've only done partial, just clipping out the biggest leaves, so far. I think once I'm done building I can get the leaves down to an inch or two on about a two feet tall by three foot wide frame.

It may be a fools errand, but I persist none the less. A few more years of clip and growing and I can bring it out of the garden and continue the refining process. So a good ten years from roadside to pot and I don't know if this tree will ever win any prizes, but she stole my heart.   Best of luck, Rick

Some trees DO make better bonsai than others. Iris really is trying to be helpful and steer the original poster toward local species they could collect for free that are known to make SUPERIOR bonsai.

Yes, you can apply bonsai technique to just about any species of plant you want to. Yes, you can call them bonsai. Will a mature example of these various species ever be good enough to be accepted at a jury show? Will it have a chance of being good enough for the National Exhibit in Rochester, NY? For the species that Iris pointed out as having problems, the answer is it is unlikely that a grower can overcome the problems.

But many can become good enough to be pleasing for a local show, county fair, or you might just personally enjoy them. Nothing wrong with growing a tree in a pot and enjoying it for your own pleasure. Many of my trees are in this category.

Silver maples, especially in leafless winter displays, especially when designed to sizes over 24 inches tall can be nice. But side by side in leaf against a Japanese maple, or a trident maple, the traits of the others clearly are superior in allowing you to be flexible with your design.

Of the deciduous trees, trident maple and chinese elm are almost like putty, or Play Dough, they can be molded into just about any shape, any style, any form. Silver maples are much more limited in how effective they can be because of the coarser branching. Larger leaves, and longer leaf petioles.

Interesting point: Acer rubrum, American red maple, the leaves reduce nicely, but the leaf petioles do not. By late summer you have a weird looking tree where all the modest size leaves are hanging out in space off long leaf petioles, like so many kites in the wind. Really a strange look. But for Chuchin and larger bonsai, nothing wrong with Acer rubrum, especially if you display it either in full autumn color (where the color trumps the weird effect of the long petioles) or in winter, leafless, or in early spring when it is just leafing out and is in flower.

So, Iris's point is that some species, like Juniper, can make a bonsai that can be displayed at anytime of the year. Other species have growth characteristics that limit when they will look their best.

Sometimes these traits can be managed by good technique, sometimes not.

One of the most important parts of a bonsai is the trunk and the nebari - surface roots. If the trunk and the nebari are really exceptional, allowances can be made for the rest of the tree. So occassionally there are individual specimens of species normally viewed as inferior for bonsai that really are respectable bonsai. But this is the exception. Growing from seed or nursery material take time, why not put the time into growing species that have traits that will make good bonsai, rather than investing time and effort on species that have known problems that are known to be difficult to overcome.

On the other hand, if time and energy are not limiting factors, go ahead, have fun and who knows, maybe you will produce a work of art that will take awards at shows.

If I were in Utah, I would be looking at collecting juniper's myself, I'm in the urban Mid-west, so I keep an eye on old foundation plantings and hedges. Junipers, yews and mugo pines abound. Crab apple, burning bush, honeysuckle, elms, and maples are around too.