Osakazuki Japanese Maple Spotlight

Today on The MrMaple Show, Matt & Tim talk about the Acer Palmatum 'Osakazuki' Japanese Maple. Click here to purchase Osakazuki straight from our website.

Acer Palmatum Osakazuki is a beautiful tree with a large amoenum style leaf, which is large for a Palmatum. Osakazuki leafs out in the spring with a light green color, and in mid-summer it will get to more of a darker, more full green. As you can see in the video, the bright red fall color is what everybody talks about. It's almost unrivaled for that brilliant bright red fall color, one of the brightest reds of all Japanese Maples.

Osakazuki makes a nice upright tree, typically reaching about 12-14 feet in 15 years. There are a lot of great uses for Osakazuki because of its larger size and fast growth rate. This is a tree that is going to make a great tree to shade other Japanese Maples with, and it pairs beautifully with a lot of lace leaf trees that are going to turn gold and yellow. Tim and Matt suggest planting Osakazuki next to the Waterfall Japanese Maple, which is a low cascading umbrella with bright yellows to oranges. 

The classic pairing with Osakazuki is the Acer Palmatum Hogyoku. Hogyoku is a bold orange where Osakazuki is a bright red. They're going to look essentially very similar all spring and summer with the same green and the same leaf structure, but they're going to be completely different colors in the fall. 

Osakazuki is a great tree to put out in an area to build around, it works great as a bigger tree in your landscape, which will give you bones to build the rest of your garden around. If you've got a shady spot next to the woods and you want to have some peak fall color because everything's so green and bland, this is a tree that's going to go in there and really brighten that spot up. 

Often, people think that Osakazuki originated somewhere in Osaka, Japan, because that's the Osaka everyone knows. Osakazuki is actually a Japanese drinking cup that is colored bright red, describing the Acer Palmatum Osakazuki perfectly. 

Osakazuki is a very durable plant that can go in full sun up to Zone 8. The tree works Zones 5-9 and is incredibly heat and cold tolerant. You definitely want to get a little bit of late day shade in Zone 9 so that you can protect it from the hot afternoon sun.

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