When I bought my house in the suburbs of Detroit in early 2022, it, like many local turn-of-the-century-ish homes, was a bit haphazardly laid out. The interior was habitable, and the families who owned it from its construction in 1928 until the early 1990s maintained it religiously. But that was the inflection point. The neighborhood wasn’t that hot at the time, and it was a big ask to get people to invest heavily in homes whose values were lucky enough to keep pace with inflation.
Three and a half years is a narrow window to complete 30 years, and this was made even more complicated by the condition of the property when I bought it. My time for automotive-related hobbies has dwindled to almost zero as a result, but doing this work every day helps me stay grounded in both worlds, so to speak – and be more sensitive to scenarios where the two overlap.
No, this isn’t one of those “everything I need to know about the industry I’ve learned from gardening” type posts, but this idea came to me while I was planting a tree, and it would take me a minute before I could put it back into anything with four wheels. If that’s not your bag, I respect that. This is your chance to check out.
In 2020, a young GM employee bought the place and started seriously updating it. Among the projects was to revive the 80 year old landscape, and by “revive” I mean he hired a guy with a mini-skid to dig up the backyard pile in front of the fence in anticipation of covering the entire backyard with pavers. The house is spread over half an acre; this is one Very Of strange bricks.
But between cleaning up the eight-decade-old yard and ordering a few pallets of ugly 16x8x4″ concrete blocks, he called his wife (again) and decided that, although the space was big enough, the house itself wasn’t big enough for his growing family. Being a seller’s market, he listed how much he had paid and what his contribution was, and I happily came on board and offered him another $20,000 on top of that.
So I had a perfectly livable house with a dirt pit for a backyard. Out front, I found some gravel, stumps, and a group of aggressively pruned Japanese yews that entered their bushy age decades ago and have since been gone. The wasteland behind was the first priority; I moved into the house in March and by April the first thistle leaves were appearing. I threw down some mulch on the white gravel out front and planted some arborvitaes and junipers along the walls protecting our front grade, but largely my attention was elsewhere.
At the time, I knew very little about lawns except how to mow them. It took two years to turn all the brown parts green and get the artificial berm back under control. By the spring of ’24, I felt like I was ready to tackle the part that people actually looked at. Apart from helping my parents in the garden as a child, I have never planted a flower in my life. I didn’t know anything about designing a garden, but I knew I wanted something other than the moat-like expanse of evergreens that usually surround these old Tudor-inspired houses. I wanted something that would pop.
My search query was simple: “Trees whose color changes in summer to fall.” My trip down the rabbit hole led me to what I now know as a classic gateway plant: a red Japanese maple (a bloodgood for tree fans). I ordered it from the equivalent of a big-box online nursery. It looked much greener than the photos, but I pulled it off Internet™Says it will perform better next year.
And friend, Did it. As soon as it turned bright red last spring, I was mesmerized. I wanted another one. I knew from my prior research that there were other varieties, and I remembered seeing some great (really great, maybe?) photos in my Google results from a small outfit called “Mr. Maple” in North Carolina.
Being in this business, I get criticized a lot. I don’t mean cars, although some vaporware-based organizations have tried to sell me on one imaginary supercar concept or another. By bust I mean mostly just junk. Every week brings another “must have,” “epic,” or “legendary” road trip accessory or another vibe-coded pile of junkware produced by someone who assumed (confidently and without verifying) that no one had thought of their amazing idea before. Here I was, looking at the site of a business that claims to offer hundreds (now about 1,500) of this tree’s varieties, some with promising leaves that make the ornamental flower blooms pale. My doubts came in just as many shades as his photos.
If you’ve spent time browsing the selection of trees at a local nursery, you’ve probably thought that Japanese maples are somewhat expensive. And they can be. Mature Japanese maple trees are smaller than their larger American red or sugar maple counterparts, which actually means they are slower growing. Dwarf varieties prized by collectors are still slow growing. Some of them take years to grow to a height of only a few feet. The smallest trees you typically find in nurseries are usually grown in three to five gallon containers or perhaps even larger, and those trees require years in a greenhouse to grow that big. That investment translates into a higher price tag – a higher barrier to entry.
But as I continued to browse Mister Maple’s stock, I didn’t feel the same way. In fact, most of the listings were quite reasonably priced, as they were all for small trees. For $35-45 you can buy a wide variety that you would 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 keep their rare varieties in the same smaller sizes. Some may seem a bit premium because of how much time and effort it takes to grow them, but we’re talking $10-15 more than big-box staples.
And sure, you might get a Gallon Tamukeyama or Crimson Queen (nothing against either of them; I have one of the former) at Lowe’s or even Walmart, but that’s like saying you can always go to the local used lot and walk away with a running Corolla. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in driving and know where to look, you can get a Miata or Mustang for about the same money.
There you go, boys, girls, and gender-nonconformists: we’re back on wheels. And we’ve also reached our broader point: like many other modern businesses, the car market relies heavily on FOMO. Why do mediocre work when you can do extraordinary work? Why settle for nothing when you can have something new and fresh a little bit better?
Below: ‘Autumn Moon’ (spring/summer colors) -Byron Hurd
The enthusiast market distills it to its purest, arguably most toxic, essence. Just look at Porsche. Far from being Germany’s version of the Corvette, the 911 has become a model defined not by accessibility, but by scarcity. Recently, Porsche dealers were reportedly pressuring buyers to make a Taycan purchase just to guarantee a slot for the hot-ticket 911 allocation (think GT3, GTS). The MSRP of the modern 911 is effectively meaningless; This is a direct-to-speculation market. And this problem is not isolated to Zuffenhausen; The R35 Nissan GT-R was no different, and there are countless other examples across the enthusiast car landscape, even among apparently “affordable” models like the Civic Type-R.
Traditionally, the bullish market has relied on replacement and depreciation to maintain a healthy surplus of options running in the secondary market. New cars come out, making used cars cheaper and more accessible. But the enthusiast new-car pipeline is drying up, meaning fewer fun cars are entering the secondary market, driving up prices and limiting access to the hobby even further.
A used car generally won’t hold the same prestige as a new car, in the same way a one- or three-gallon ornamental tree won’t look like a more mature specimen, but over time, they’ll all become the same, and for the growing hobbyist, just being able to participate is a huge win.
My Bloodgood was my gateway tree, just as my 1995 Volkswagen Passat was my gateway car. Appropriately, that old green VW would look good against the dark red maple outside our living room window. We now have 27 of different sizes (each a different variety) scattered around the property. The Fiat was the first of 12 manual-transmission cars I bought (five new; seven used); Only three of them (my NA, my JK and my CT4-V Blackwing) are still with me, but in my defense, it probably costs me less to water my yard each month than to insure the cheapest of those three. Hobbies—even expensive ones—are not all measured the same way.
I’m sure Mister Maple could have branded itself as a premium-oriented business offering a much 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 that runs it decided to “move on the expansion”, so to speak. Shoppers who start with the $45 Purple Ghost may return next year for the $70 Golden Falls or $100 Fireglow. In five years, they’ll be up and running with Uhaul and thousands of dollars worth of purchases — all because Mr. Maples was willing to sacrifice the promise of bigger margins per unit in order to reach a potentially wider audience.
Imagine.
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