ok so the bonsai farmer that claims he gets original stock lied to me im guessing....So its not a kiyo hime but a mixture of multiple JM's?
but that bleached color will never go away, is there a tree paint that i can do to cover it up?
Um, the white bark is DESIRABLE for a maple. It doesn't develop until the tree gets a few years under its belt. You don't want the bark to remain green. That's a sign of immaturity, which is not what bonsai are meant to convey. This "discoloration" isn't a bad thing. It's part of the growth process for Japanese maples. It will spread over the trunk in the coming years. The rootstock is older than the scion (top part) grafted onto it. That means it will change soonest. The process is already beginning on the top however.
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Nope. If you take a brush to that "discoloration" and scrub hard enough to remove it, you will take the bark off down past the cambium and seriously injure the tree. That color is NOT sediment. It is bark...
Hmmm, looking at the very first picture...
Well, yeah. Half the trunk has more mature bark, the other half is still developing it.
So when I first purchased this tree 2 years ago I wanted to do a root over rock maple after a few years with it and cutting back alot of the branches, it used to be styled as a broom I don't know if I want to still go that route, i will definitely be repotting it next year, and i was thinking of up potting it to continue the growth+1 for what @Mellow Mullet and @rockm said
as an aside, i would place that tree lower in the pot. It is too late to do that now, so I would add a layer of sphagnum on the surface (especially around around the trunk) for now, and adjust the placement of tree when you repot at the appropriate time of year. Vendors sometimes pot trees high like this to expose roots, because the idea of exposed roots is something that people often have in mind as a valuable feature when they come to the hobby. It is a valuable feature, but this tree is too young to be showing those roots in my opinion.
I would want as many roots as possible emerging from the same horizontal circumference. You currently have that circumference exposed, with a dozen roots emerging from it. Because it is exposed, new roots will not emerge along that same horizontal axis (roots tend to emerge-and-survive below the surface of the soil). By lowering the tree and by pruning back some of the roots when repotting, you can encourage new roots to emerge where you want them.
I love kiyo hime. Like koto hime, they produce very straight growth, but also back bud vigorously. If this were my tree, I would consider this trunk-line (see attached) for the future, or something similar. But I would not do this before that left branch (=currently your main trunk, it seems) thickens the lowest portion of the trunk a bit more, helping to conceal whatever is happening in the area of the trunk that currently and rightly bothers your eye
if that lowest portion continues to bother you in the future (i.e. in 3-4 years from now), possibly because of swelling, I would consider grafting (thread graft) more kiyo hime below the 'graft line', creating a multi-trunk tree that will conceal the area currently in question
just thinking out loud
according to the guys at the local nursery and the arborist at the local arboretum and research on the internet , black walnut trees emit a toxin onto other trees beneath them, its called the juglone toxin and it can stunt the growth and sometimes kill other trees. bonsai are even more sensitive to it. I really hope you are right about my tree being ok, the last thing I want to do is start all over on my trees and all the money and hard work I have invested in them. The future of this tree is uncertain but if it lives, my plan is to air layer or grow from cuttings one of the branches, haven't decided yet so I can have one that is not a graft.
