Hello all,

I'm in Michigan and am curious what this tree/bush is outside of my house. My aunt thought it was some kind of fairly rare japanese or asian bush so i'm seeing what you all think.

Any chance that if it is rare, I could clone it and then try to sell the clones?

Thanks for any help!

-Bruce

japanese maple ?

Also, plants have patents on them. No cloning for sale.

Only some plants, Daisy. A species wouldn't be patented, and not all cultivars are patented. You can check if a particular plant is patented in the United States by doing a search at the USPTO.

I assumed because its a Japanese Maple and because it is small, that it is grafted and somewhere, has a name. There are so many though, that it would be hard to figure out which one.

I may have made too many assumptions and it could very well be a seedling. Better safe than sorry though.

The Japanese maples do not come true from seed so you should be fine offering it for sale.
Your plant looks more like a shrub than a tree so it could be that the growth is coming from the root stock itself and not whichever variety was grafted onto it.

Having a name doesn't inevitably mean it is patented though. I checked the USPTO and there are only eight patented Japanese maples. It would have to have something different about it to be worth propagating and selling, which would be a slow process given their typical growth rate. There are more than 700 cultivars of Japanese maple in circulation according to an article in Fine Gardening, so that means 692+ that have names but are not patented. Some would be easy to distinguish from Bruce's plant, like the purple dissected leaf ones but others not so much.