welcome to court tube my name is Jim Putnam and this is a coral bark Japanese maple this is the beautiful upright growing pink bark coral bark Japanese maple coral bark Japanese maples are upright Japanese maples like Bloodgood it's actually going to be a small specimen tree probably reach in between 15 20 maybe even 25 feet in height over a very long period of time and maybe somewhere between 8 and 14 15 feet in width at the very top of the tree like all Japanese maples coral bark is going to be very cold hardy this can grow all the way up to zone 5 and then down to zone 8 like all Japanese maples coral bark is not going to be in a big hurry to grow we might get a foot of growth out of these right at the beginning of the season every year and then they won't do a whole lot of growing once they get some heat stress on them later in the summer sun or shade is tricky on pretty much all japanese maples if you're in zone 5 these can definitely take more Sun you could probably put it in an area to get 2/3 of the day direct Sun if you're in zone 6 probably half and half you're in zone 7 or 8 these probably need less than a half a day Sun probably a lot of morning Sun or a lot of late day Sun would be ideal otherwise the leaves get kind of crispy over the course of the summer if they end up in too much Sun there's an example right there where I've had this thing in too much Sun early on in the season right after it's come out we've had some 90-degree days on it it's actually cooking the leaves a little bit in terms of where you're going to use coral bark maple like I said this is a definitely a small specimen tree so you're going to need some space for it this is not going to be a Japanese maple you're going to put on a foundation it's going to need some open space to get some size on it it could be used as a container plant though in the short term it grows slow enough that if you put this in a pretty big container a beside a patio or something you could leave it in that container for several years probably before it outgrew the space and then eventually plant it into the ground the primary feature on this coral bark maple is the fact that in the wintertime especially the stems on this plant are a coral pink color and really really bright it's quite striking quite beautiful in the winter time it's one of my absolute favorite winter interest plant in the spring and summer after it's leaked out it's not as bright you can see a little bit of that pink in there maybe it's kind of hard to tell in this video probably the leaves on coral bark are kind of a light green lime green color which is quite nice and the stems around the new growth are red so it has that going on as well just by beautiful tree really nice arching kind of habit to it just an absolutely perfect small ornamental tree and in the wintertime it's very very striking in the garden I have videos in the description of this video for planting woody trees and shrubs these Japanese maples are actually pretty tough little plants honestly you don't want to cover up anything that's not covered up when you purchase it you want to see the same wood entering the soil after your completed your planting process these are grafted trees and so if that graft is very close to the ground which they frequently are you definitely don't want to pile up anything on that graph it can end up causing you problems in the future these Japanese maples are reasonably drought tolerant if you're in an area to gets normal rainfall you won't have to do a lot of ongoing watering on them once they're established you might want to drown the space around it when you plant it and then let it dry out and then if it gets dry again you can go back and use that same process of drowning and forgetting if it was really dry in the late spring or early summer you could end up with some foliage being damaged if it ended up in a will so maybe in May and June you may want to think about addressing it if it's extremely dry at that time of year in your area you definitely want to fertilize your Japanese maple before it wakes up in the late winter or early spring any kind of outdoor slow release fertilizer to last three to four months is ideal we want it to run out about midsummer so it can start to go into its dormancy in a normal fashion in the fall in terms of pruning your coral bark maple you'll probably get a few crazy limbs on it early on that you can take off once this thing reaches 15 18 20 feet tall it's going to be hard to prune so make those decisions early on about branches you're going to keep if it has a low branch that you know you're eventually going to get rid of typically I'll just go ahead and cut those off when I'm planting them if you know it's going to end up in your face anyway and then if you get any kind of crazy branches that race out ahead of the other ones go ahead and even those up while you can still reach it not a lot of pests on Japanese maples really they will get some leaf spotting if the foliage wet if it's in an area that's too shady and it stays wet all the time a few chewing insects but not too bad really deer do like maples I don't think it's at the top of their list but they will do some damage disease and these cost enough money that you may not want to be feeding deer with these so what are you waiting for even you can grow the low-maintenance pink bark coral bark Japanese maple thank you for watching my video and if it was helpful please hit the like button and subscribe to my channel for future videos also comment below with any questions you have about Japanese maples thanks again you