Have You ever Planted a mistake ?

LOL I used to feel the same way till I saw a before and after photo of one.

Well most of ours are on the small size The only really big one we had we took down about ten years ago (it developed a hollow in it's fork that ended up making both of the two halves of the trunk too weak to be stable.

I suppose the biggest we have now is the one by the Corn patch the one I call the skeleton maple, because it's leaves are unusually deeply dissected and lacy (it's also a pale yellow green instead of red, with red veins and incredibly red keys. And that's probably only 8-9 feet. We lost a lot of the black leafed one by the driveway in one of the big blizzards. Everything else is just red saplings, barring anything in the scrubby woody part in the back. No one can get through there, so god knows what is in there (there were some Japanese maple seedlings in there when I was a kid, but whether they are still there I don't know.)

Your skeleton maple sounds beautfull.

It is. Pity that, as of this point none of the upty-up thousands of seeds it has shed has come true (and I stink at rooting/grafting, so no vegitative propagation). I'd really like a few more like it. There is also a slight worry as to what will happen when it does get taller. It may be close enough to the road to fall withing village tree trimming zones (to keep the area around the power lines clear), and over the years, the village is largely replacing the policy of "trim trees that might interfere with the power lines back regularly to keep the lines safe" to more of a "cut every and all trees withing 10-20 feet of the power lines, or anywhere where we might put power lines in the future, off at the base to make a dead zone, so we never have to WORRY about branches on the lines. (I find great irony in this given the flack they give you as a homewonver if YOU want to take down a tree). Next Tim'e I'm ouside with my camera I'll try and take a picture.

And here it is
It's a lot more skeletal in the spring. One thing I forgot though, in the fall the leaves DO turn red. Not the purply red the regular Japanese maples get, but the same color as the keys; a deep brilliant fiery red pink (the color I usually refer to as "erythrine")

Nice maple!!

Sorry I couldn't get the whole thing (that's actually just one of the lower branches) but because of where it is, if I walked back far enough to get the whole thing in shot, I'd actually step over the edge of the vegetable garden and wind up falling twenty or so feet into the driveway. And it's still and understory tree, so trying from the other side won't work; the slope of the land and one of the hemlocks makes it invisible from there. (or maybe it's one of the oaks, or the cypresses, I tend to forget the trees that have always been there in the background.
I'll try and get a picture of the black one later.

You might want to try pinning a lower branch to a pot of soil. I make a small cut in the underside of the branch. You should get a 'clone' of your maple that way.

Well, the lowest branch is already four or five feet off the ground, so it's have to be an awfully tall pot place on a really unstable slope (which would also basically block the entire path through that part of the property). But it is something to contemplate if I think the tree is in peril.
Actually, that might be necessary down the road for the black one. The Skeleton is only really at risk if the Village gets really overly proactive about keeping the areas around the poles clear. There's still probably about 30-40 years before the top of that one gets anywhere near the poles and it's far enough in that no branches could ever get anywhere near the wires until about 15-20 years after that. Actually do Japanese maples ever actually GET 40+ feet tall, cause that's probably how tall it would have to get to be under their threat radar unless they really did go "dead zone"; at which point we have much bigger problems.
In contrast the black one is sort of in peril NOW, or very soon. It's in the rock wall on the other side so it's actually breaking that wall up as it grows. and is very susceptible to damage. Actually it's ALREADY fallen over once; in the big blizzard five or so years ago. What's there now is what grew back from the stump. That growth is healthy and it's more or less grown back all it lost. But pretty soon, it's probably going to be necessary to simply cut the WHOLE tree down, stump and all in order to keep the wall and driveway for being destroyed. It'd be nice to root a branch of it elsewhere before that happened, to keep the line going. Maybe as a replacement for the now near dead crabapple (no, wait that's too close to the wall still, we'd just end up having to take it down again)

You can still do what red said, just put the pot on a step stool. Of coruse you would be looking at that step stool for a long time.