When I bought my house in the Detroit ‘burbs in early 2022, it was, like many local century-ish homes, a bit haphazardly kept up. The interior was livable, and the families that owned it from its construction in 1928 until the early 1990s kept it up religiously. But that was the inflection point. The neighborhood wasn’t doing so hot back then, and it was a big ask to get people to invest heavily in homes whose values were lucky to pace with inflation.
Three and a half years is a narrow window to accomplish 30 years of catching up, and it was further complicated by the state of the property when I purchased it. My time for automotive-related hobbies has shrunk to near zero as a result, but doing this job every day helps keep me grounded in both worlds, so to speak—and far more sensitive to scenarios where the two overlap.
No, this isn’t one of those “everything I need to know about the industry, I learned from gardening” type posts, but the idea did come to me while I was planting a tree, and it’s going to be a minute before I bring this back around to anything with four wheels. If that’s not your bag, I respect it. This is your chance to check out.
In 2020, a young GM employee bought the place and began updating it in earnest. Among the projects was revitalizing the 80-year-old landscaping, and by “revitalizing,” I mean he hired a guy with a mini-skid to scrape the back yard into a pile against the fence in anticipation of covering the entirety of the back yard with pavers. This house sits on half an acre; that’s a lot of freakin’ bricks.
But somewhere in between de-sodding an eight-decade-old yard and ordering a few pallets of ugly 16x8x4″ concrete blocks, he knocked his wife up (again) and decided that, while the lot was plenty big, the house itself simply wasn’t adequate for his growing family. Being a seller’s market, he listed it for what he’d paid plus what he had into it, and I gladly came along and offered him another $20,000 on top of that.
So I had a perfectly habitable house with a mud pit for a back yard. Up front, I got some gravel, stumps, and a host of aggressively pruned Japanese Yews that entered and subsequently departed their bush era decades ago. The wasteland in back was the first priority; I moved into the house in March and the first thistle leaves were already visible by April. I threw some mulch over the white gravel in front and planted a few arborvitaes and junipers along the retaining walls that wing our front grade, but by and large my attention was elsewhere.
At the time, I knew little about a lawn except how to mow it. It took a solid two years to turn all the brown parts into something green and get the artificial berm out back under control. By the spring of ’24, I felt like I was ready to tackle the part people actually looked at. I’d never planted a flower in my life apart from helping my parents around the yard as a kid. I didn’t know a thing about designing a garden, but I knew I wanted something besides the moat-like expanse of evergreen that typically surrounds these old Tudor-inspired homes. I wanted something that popped.
My search query was simple: “Trees that have fall color in summer.” My journey down the rabbit hole led me to what I now know to be a classic gateway plant: a red Japanese maple (a Bloodgood, for the tree fans). I ordered it from the equivalent of a big-box online nursery. It arrived looking far greener than it did in photos but I took The Internet™‘s word that it would perform better the following year.
And man, did it. From the instant it leafed out bright crimson last spring, I was hooked. I needed another one. I knew from my prior research that there were other varieties, and I remembered seeing some rather spectacular (too good to be true, perhaps?) photos pop up in my Google results from a little outfit in North Carolina called simply “MrMaple.”
Being in this business, I get pitched a lot of schlock. I don’t necessarily mean cars, though more than a few vaporware-based outfits have tried to sell me on one fantastical supercar concept or another. Bust mostly I just mean junk. Every week brings another “must-have,” “epic,” or “legendary” road trip accessory or another vibe-coded pile of junkware produced by somebody who assumed (confidently and without verifying) that nobody had thought of their amazing idea previously. Here I was, looking at the site for a business purporting to offer hundreds (nearly 1,500 now) varieties of this tree, some promising leaves that make ornamental flower blossoms look dull. My skepticism came in just as many shades as their photographs.
If you’ve spent any time browsing the tree selection at a local nursery, you probably think of Japanese maples as being somewhat expensive. And they can be. Mature Japanese maple trees are smaller than their larger American red or sugar maple cousins, which really just means they’re slower-growing. The dwarf varieties prized by collectors are even slower still. It takes years for some of them to grow to just a few feet high. The smallest trees you typically find at a nursery are usually in a three-to-five-gallon container or maybe even larger, and those trees needed years in a greenhouse just to get that big. That investment translates to a higher price tag—a higher barrier to entry.
But as I continued browsing MrMaple’s stock, I didn’t find that to be the case. Most of the listings were quite reasonably priced, in fact, because they were all for smaller trees. $35-45 will buy you any number of varieties that you’d typically only see in much larger sizes if you went shopping locally. And it’s not just the common, everyday varieties at those prices—they stock their rarest cultivars in the same small sizes. Some may carry a slight premium just due to how much time and work goes into growing them, but we’re talking $10-15 more than the big-box staples.
And sure, you might find a one-gallon Tamukeyama or Crimson Queen (not a knock against either; I own one of the former) at Lowe’s or even Walmart, but that’s like saying you can always go down to the local used lot and walk away with a running Corolla. Meanwhile, if you care about driving and you know where to look, you could have a Miata or a Mustang for the same money.
There you go, boys, girls, and gender-nonconforming: We’re back on wheels. And we’ve also arrived at my broader point: Like many other modern businesses, the car market relies heavily on FOMO. Why do the ordinary when you could do the extraordinary? Why settle for what you have when you could get something newer and just a little bit better?
Bottom: ‘Autumn Moon’ (spring/summer color) -Byron Hurd
The enthusiast market distills this to its purest, arguably most toxic, essence. Just look at Porsche. The 911 has gone from being something akin to Germany’s version of the Corvette to being a model defined not by accessibility, but by scarcity. In the not-at-all-distant-past, Porsche dealers were reportedly forcing Taycan purchases on buyers just to guarantee slots for hot-ticket 911 allocations (think GT3, GTS). The MSRP of a modern 911 is effectively meaningless; it’s a direct-to-speculator market. And this problem is not isolated to Zuffenhausen; the R35 Nissan GT-R was no different, and there are countless other examples in the enthusiast car scene, even among ostensibly “affordable” models like the Civic Type-R.
Traditionally, the enthusiast market has relied on replacement and depreciation to keep a healthy surplus of options circulating in the secondary market. New cars come along, rendering older ones cheaper and more accessible. But the enthusiast new-car pipeline is drying up, which means fewer fun cars are entering the secondary market, driving prices up and further limiting the hobby’s accessibility.
A used car typically won’t carry the same prestige as a new one, much the same way a one- or three-gallon ornamental tree won’t wow like a far more mature specimen, but in time, they’ll all end up the same, and for the burgeoning hobbyist, just being able to take part is a huge win.
My Bloodgood was my gateway tree the way my 1995 Volkswagen Passat was my gateway car. Appropriately, that old green VW would look good in front of the deep-crimson maple that sits outside our living room window. We now have 27 of them of various sizes (each a different variety) scattered around the property. The Passat was the first of 12 manual-transmission cars I’ve purchased (five new; seven used); only three of those (my NA, my JK and CT4-V Blackwing) are still with me, but in my defense, it probably costs me less to water my yard every month than it does to insure the cheapest of those three. Hobbies—even expensive ones—don’t all scale the same.
I’m sure that MrMaple could have branded itself as a premium-oriented business offering a far smaller variety of more-mature plants and achieved the same level of profitability, but if it had, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it today. Instead, the family running it decided to “go wide,” so to speak. The buyer who starts with a $45 Purple Ghost might come back next year for that $70 Golden Falls or that $100 Fireglow. In five years, they’ll be pulling up out front with a Uhaul and driving off with thousands of dollars in purchases out back—all because MrMaple was willing to sacrifice the promise of bigger margins per unit to gamble on potentially reaching a wider audience.
Imagine that.
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