LESSON LEARNED

 In April of 2013 I adopted a new baby...a beautiful lace leaf Japanese maple...perfect for filling the corner of our newly constructed privacy screen/wind break on the back patio. It was love at first sight for this plant besotted gardener. It was in a suspiciously small pot for its size but I was sure I could convince the roots to spread out and be happy in this large redwood tub. All seemed well as it started to leaf out this spring. My gardener's ego was pleased that I had indeed "rescued" this tree from unhappiness in a small pot and the purchase price of $75 (a lot for me!) was vindicated. (I had ignored the warning signs, it seemed, during the previous summer as it seemed to get a lot of tip die back, even with copious amounts of water). 
It never fully leafed...it just stopped and the little leaflets never opened. 
What had I done? I forked the tub in a panic and discovered that the root ball was a solid mass. I couldn't get my big garden fork into it. I still didn't give up and added fertilizer, drenched it with my special compost tea and talked to it. But by May nothing had changed. I wrenched it out of the tub. It was time for a post mortem. Turns out the main root system had continued to wrap itself around the root ball. Some research (an article in Fine Gardening) confirmed that I had made a classic mistake thinking I could change the rooting habit of a tree. According to the article, I never should have fallen for it. I should have popped off the pot right there in the nursery, seen the wadded up root ball and passed. You can't change the mind of a tree root system!     

So a new baby is growing in the big tub. It was in a 2 gallon tub...freshly dug and brought from the tree farm south of Eugene, OR to the new nursery of choice for me. I forked over $47.99 this time. It got the "treatment" of compost tea and fertilizer along with recharged potting soil. So lesson learned...you never stop learning in the gardening game, it seems!