There are many zelkova planted in a nearby walmart parking lot. They are not quite as large as the ones above, however they are starting to have terrible dieback.

just thinking outside the box ... could you just kill the maple.. and leave it standing there.. as garden art .. it might rot and fall in a decade or so ... im just thinking .... sooner or later.. you arent going to be able to keep it in check ... ken

Another P. pendula seedling. In Japan big ones are treated as revered objects, propped up with posts and bestowed with absurd claims of being thousands of years old. Over here they get chopped down. Probably these have long since become effectively extinct commercially in North America because the ethereal beauty of their small pale flowers on the mature tree is not the kind of thing that would show up well in garden center sizes - why would shoppers go for one of these when they can have named cultivars with bigger, darker, even double flowers? On a tree that will always remain small and in scale with something less than acreage?

Colquhounia coccinea is probably barely hardy for me, but still didn't quite deserve a prized position on my limited south wall space. The first couple years of blooming were so underwhelming I was ready to deaccession it, but this year it made enough of a show to decide to keep one somewhere in the garden. It's more sensible to just put it on a (still extra warm) south slope and keep a backup plant in a pot for the next "polar vortex" winter. (hopefully not this one!) Alas it had been there on a raised bed for a few years and I didn't think moving it was feasible anymore. Had to be layered. So I stuck 2 branches in pots back in early August. I used a technique where I stripped a bit of the bark on the branchlets and tied a tiny pea sized wad of cotton-ball-cotton around one end. Then added a few pure drops of dip n grow. This creates a concentration gradient of rooting hormone along the stem. Before the first hard freeze in mid-November I severed them from the mothership and moved them into my garage/greenhouse. Well as you can see it's good I did two, because one worked, and another didn't. It immediately withered after being cut. The other one on the right is still going strong. I am almost certain that little flower spike definitely appeared after the layering...maybe in response to the rooting hormone? The surrounding plants are from my last ever order from Joy Creek.