Acer palmatum Cascade Citrine - Japanese Maple

The Acer palmatum CASCADE CITRINE, known by its cultivar name 'Sonkoot7', is a Japanese maple with lemon yellow foliage, featuring a weeping habit. It forms a narrow, pendulous small tree with trailing stems adorned with deeply lobed leaves, fairly wide segments that emerge in spring, then in summer, in a very bright acidic yellow, with some orange highlights at the tips of new shoots evolving to a yellow-green to light green in summer and developing fiery shades of red and orange in autumn. Plant it in a semi-shade or shade position, in the ground or in a pot.

The Acer palmatum is native to Eastern China, Korea, and Japan. Like all maples, it belongs to the acerous family. This Cascade Citrine cultivar stands out for its pretty narrow weeping habit and the lemon yellow colour of its foliage. It is a deciduous, hardy, relatively fast-growing Japanese maple. It develops a single trunk and bears a weeping crown, supported by flexible, slender, widely trailing branches. Ultimately, it will reach around 2 to 3 m in height by 1 to 1.25 m in spread, depending on growing conditions. Its foliage consists of palmate leaves, measuring 5 to 8 cm long, cut into 5 to 7 heavily toothed lobes along the edges. Their colour changes to orange bronze in autumn before falling. The reddish flowers grouped in small clusters in April are insignificant, but the red fruits with curved wings, 3 cm long, are interesting from September onwards. 

The Acer palmatum Cascade Citrine is ideal as a standalone specimen on a lawn or in heather soil beds alongside azaleas, pieris, rhododendrons, hydrangeas, and heathers. It can also be grown in a beautiful container on a terrace or as a bonsai in a flat dish. Despite its delicate appearance, this small tree is hardy and prefers a light, well-drained soil, not too poor, slightly acidic to slightly alkaline, and some occasional watering in dry weather. Diseases, such as Verticillium wilt, are more likely to appear in constantly wet soils rather than sporadically dry ones.