Acer griseum

Few trees carry a collector's story as plainly as the paperbark maple. Ernest Henry Wilson gathered seed of Acer griseum in central China in 1901 for the Veitch nursery, and for most of the twentieth century nearly every paperbark grown in Western gardens traced back to that introduction and one that followed. The maple sets abundant winged samaras, yet most are empty, a parthenocarpic habit that leaves only a small fraction viable. That quirk is why the species has always been scarce, slow to propagate, and quietly treasured wherever a good specimen takes hold.

The bark is the glory of the tree. Within two or three years the trunk and larger limbs begin to shed in papery curls of cinnamon to coppery red brown, and the peeling layers cling rather than fall, catching low winter light until the whole canopy seems lit from within. Three-part leaves, blue green through summer, turn scarlet and orange before dropping, while the small greenish yellow spring flowers pass almost unnoticed, content to leave the bark and the autumn fire to carry the season.

Slow and well mannered, the paperbark maple settles at twenty to thirty feet with a rounded, oval crown, a scale that suits a small lawn, a courtyard, or the corner of a mixed border. Site this maple where the trunk can be read at close range, beside a path, a patio, or a window framed for winter, and give the bark a dark backdrop of evergreens to play against. Adaptable to clay and to both acid and alkaline ground, the tree asks only for reasonable drainage and a few patient years of watering to establish.