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Man in Roseburg Becomes authority on Japanese maple
May 16, 1988
Mysteries blossom from curious tree
In old Japan, the tree inspired poems, novels, dramas and paintings.
In its own way, it was inscrutable and mystic. A maple like all other maples, but capable of surprise, of randomly tossing off stunning natural variants. Some had leaves like lace, fingers or tendrils of hair. Some sported foliage colors that ranged from fluorescent crimson to the deepest of Green. Some had bark that might be scaly and peeling or rough and plated, or bright red and smooth.
The Japanese maple has a worldwide following now. It is cultivated from Amsterdam to Tokyo. Around the globe, those who’ve worked the hardest at fathoming the genetic mysteries of this wonderful tree of the Orient know about the backyard gardener from Roseburg.
At 72, J. D. Vertrees has made himself and author and an expert on a tree that continues to fascinate horticulturalists. To do it, he’s worked with thousands of plantings, studied translation of 400-year-old Japanese horticultural works and sorted out a confusing welter of often inaccurate plant names.
These days the word, or at least that portion of it that is passionate about Japanese maples, beats a path to his door.
‘He knows more about Japanese maples that anybody in this country,” says Brian Mulligan, former director of the University of Washington arboretum. “It was obviously just a hobby when it began. But he’s taken it far beyond that. Anybody who knows anything about maples knows that he’s one of the experts.”
The visitors who come to Vertrees’ home, sometimes by the busload and always by invitation only, range from British nobles to Dutch horticulturalists to the Japanese themselves. The Japanese, in fact, are talking about having Vertrees’ book translated into their language.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought it would come to this,” Vertrees says. “It wtill amazes me that there are this many people in the world who what to know about one plant.
“The curiosity about the Japanese maple isn’t as strong in the western United States as it is in other parts of the world. Somehow, I’m better know in places like Australia and France and England and Japan and the Eastern states than I am here. People pull off the freeway and ask how to find me in Roseburg, and no one can tell them.”
For years, Vertrees was a man who specialized in insects, not plants.
He’d come to Oregon from California as a young man and in 1940 had completed an agriculture degree, focusing on entomology. As a representative for agricultural chemical companies, he lived in Portland during the 1940’s and first saw the Japanese maple there.
“You’d see these beautiful trees in the parks,” he says. “I remember asking about them. Some of them were red, some were green. Some had the typical maple leaves, and others had leaves that were like lace. I had a little greenhouse then and I fooled around some, but I never really did much with them.”
By 1950, he was working for the Oregon State University Extension Service in Klamath Falls, a place where the Japanese maple doesn’t grow. He and his wife, Roseann, spend 23 years there. He established a national reputation in academic circles as an insect photographer, doing much of the work with equipment he built himself.
In 1963, he moved to Roseburg to head Extension Service operations for Douglas County.
“Instead of being a happy entomologist chasing grasshoppers, I wound up worrying about paper clips for secretaries and budgets for home economists,” he says, with the ruefulness of a many who treaded fieldwork for a desk.
But the upside of the tradeoff was that he was back in a region where the climate was hospitable to Japanese maples. Vertrees hadn’t forgotten eh plants that had so intrigued him decades earlier. When he and Roseann bought a rural home, the maples were their first choice for landscaping.
It could have ended there. Their lawn could have been like thousands of toerhs around Oregon, displaying a few of the dwarf and standard-sized Japanese maples commonly carried by commercial nurseries.
But Vertrees was curious. And he began to learn.
He learned that the Japanese maples, a first cousin to the vine maples that is native to Oregon’s forests, has been the object of intense study in Japan for centuries.
The tree in its natural form is found through most of the country, spreading its typical big leaves and growing up to 30 feet tall. But the tree is curious. Among the thousands of seeds it produces, a few will sprout in forms markedly different from the parent, displaying wild variation of color, leaf shape, bark texture or size.
Some of the variations are so striking that, to a layman, it’s as if the dandelion had given birth to a rose.
It gets curiouser and curiouser. The variants will seldom reproduce themselves in seed. Their seed is more likely to revert to the standard tree or occasionally, to sprout some other variation.
“Take a dwarf green,” Vertrees says. “You plant enough seeds from it and pretty soon on of them will be a tall red-leaf. Or you work with a green Lace-leaf and pretty soon one of the seeds will give you an upright big-leaf red.”
To propagate the interesting varieties, maple fanciers like Vertrees use grafting. Seedlings are grown primarily to provide root stock for the grafts or to search for new varieties.
As his knowledge expanded, Vertrees traveled to Europe to visit with experts who had worked with the maples for decades. He forged a link with Hideo Suzuki, a prominent Japanese horticulturist. Suzuki tirelessly searched out rare varieties and had Japanese works translated into English so that Vertrees could work with them.
Eventually, Vertrees established to the satisfaction of Suzuki and others that many of the historic varieties were duplicates; they existed in other regions under other names. But at the same time, Vertrees’ own work led to the registration of five new varieties.
“Every time I asked the Japanese to provide the new name,” he says. “The plant is a prt of their culture. I know an American who discover a variety and named it Red Baron. To me, that’s like naming a cactus for a polar bear.”
In 1978, Vertrees, with help from his wife, pulled his research into a book. “Japanese Maples.” To his own surprise, the book has found a worldwide market and is now in its third printing. Negotiations are under was for Japanese and German editions.
Vertrees, who retired from the Extension Service in 1974, has found a few trusted outlets around the nation to handle stock from his home nursery. In the spring his carefully maintained grounds explode in a riot of color and form. The work goes on. The inscrutably delightful tree continues to surprise.
“I can’t always get them to do what the laws of science say they should do,” he says. “Sometimes I can work for two or three years on an idea and I can’t prove that I’ve had and effect. It makes you feel inconsequential.”
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