名媛直播

Hello,

My wife bought this Japanese maple last summer, though I've been the one mostly taking care of it. I think it is what you call "mallsai" but nonetheless I am interested in caring for it long term. It's actually came in 3 trees in one pot, which I'm guessing isn't great. It's had a rocky start--not too long after we had it got stressed out and dropped all its leafs, around early August I think. Two of the three died outright, but the third one held on. It did start putting out new buds though, and I did my best place it somewhere with mixed sun and shade, and keeping it watered. We live on a third story apartment with a south-facing balcony, and I have it in the corner where it gets plenty of sunlight but is mostly in the shade. It held on to those buds all winter, and this spring they bloomed, and it exploded with new growth. We havn't tried do any kind of shaping or pruning; we want to but first need to get better at just keeping the plant alive.

Everything was looking good, until just a few days ago, we had just a couple of hot days where we didn't water it, and I found it looking more or less like in the photos. I immediately watered it, but then we had like a week of nonstop rain and low sunshine. The soil mostly stayed damp the whole time and never had an opportunity to dry up again. Now I'm worried that too many of the roots have died off and it's not taking up water. Almost all but a few leaves are completely dried up. I'm not sure what to do at this point, or if it's salvageable. I dont' want to take any drastic action, but I'm worried at this point about root rot, as I've had that with other plants before. It just seemed so hearty until now...

Thanks in advance for any possible advice.

I would say: Just care for it as you did in the past. Make sure it does not dry out again. It is spring, and the tree sould start budding out again over the next weeks. It looks like the leaves that are there are partially at least still alive?

There are a handful of live leaves, and even most of them are a bit scorched at least at the tips.

But yes, my hope is to just keep looking after it and being patient as I did in the past. I just wondered if there was anything else I *should* be doing (but perhaps not). At this point I certainly don't want to stress it out worse.

I'll also add, I read that Japanese maple likes slightly acidic soil--in the past we were just watering it with tap water which is very hard here. You can still see some of the lime scale on the trunk. I've since started giving it filtered water which seemed to help a bit though I haven't tested the soil PH in a while since it seemed to be doing OK until now. I don't know that it would make much of a difference right now though.