FIVE-LOBED MAPLE

Likely extinct in the wild, its unique beauty keeps it circulating in the garden trade

- JEFF COX

NOT EVERY SPECIMEN needs to dazzle the eyes by exploding with color. But to qualify as a focal point in the landscape or garden, it should still be beautiful to see and notable for some less tangible quality, such as rarity.

There is a maple that’s both beautiful and rare. It’s unlike almost any other maple on earth. Native to a small hillside in the mountains of western China, it may have passed into extinction in the wild in just the past few years.

Lucky for us, it earlier found a champion in Bill McNamara, a horticulturist, nurseryman, botanical explorer and former head of the 20-acre Quarryhill Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen, Calif. Over many years and many expeditions to China, he and his cohorts in the botanical world managed to get this rare plant—Acerpentaphyllum, the five-lobed maple—into cultivation. It’s still hard to find but not impossible, and its emergence into modern commerce is the botanical equivalent of an Indiana Jones tale.

Bill is retired now, and the garden has been renamed the Sonoma Botanical Garden, but it’s still a treasure house and one of the world’s two greatest collections of Chinese plants outside of China. (The other is Kew Gardens in England.)

As a nurseryman, McNamara was intrigued by maples and the diversity of their shapes and colors. But it was A.pentaphyllum “that slowly emerged as my favorite,” he wrote for Pacific Horticulture. “Whether it was the unusual deeply divided leaves, or its rarity both in cultivation and in the wild, it captured my imagination.”