How to Identify and Manage Common Japanese Maple Diseases

03.05.2024 - 14:11 / gardenerspath.com / Joe Butler

How to Identify and Manage Common Japanese Maple Diseases

A versatile specimen tree for the landscape, the Japanese maple is truly a thing of beauty – which, when you see one that’s diseased, makes it that much more of a tragedy.

And just like a Shakespearean sad story, a sick Japanese maple can easily end in death. Not that of a person, thankfully, but of your tree.

A dead Acer palmatum can still hit you in the feels pretty hard, though, especially if you’ve been nurturing it for a good long while.

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Armed with the knowledge of what to look for, you can save your Japanese maples, or even keep them from contracting a disease in the first place.

That’s why we’ve whipped up this guide on the most common illnesses of A. palmatum. How to identify them, how to manage them, how to prevent them… it’s all covered here.

Here’s the list of diseases:

If you’re in need of a refresher about how to grow Japanese maples, be sure to check out our guide.

Fun fact about the word “anthracnose”: it’s a catch-all term for a group of related fungal diseases that usually cause darkened foliar lesions.

And anthracnose can infect many plants, including Acer species such as Japanese maples.

Several fungal pathogens can cause anthracnose in Japanese maples – Aureobasidium apocryptum,Discula campestris, andColletotrichum gleosporoides are a few significant ones.

Overwintering in dead leaves, twigs, and buds, the pathogens produce fruiting bodies in spring, which release spores that spread via wind and rainwater to uninfected structures.

Once infected, Japanese maple foliage exhibits tan or