I ordered several first-year grafted Japanese maples varieties last spring and grew them in containers. All were nice plants and are doing fine. However, the tree that is supposed to be Emperor seems to have been mislabeled at the nursery where I bought it.

The leaves seemed kind of narrow last year, but I attributed that to it being a first-year graft, and its leaves were burned by receiving too much soon after I initially repotted it. This year, it has fully leafed out now and all of the leaves are narrow and straplike, similar to other linearilobum varieties. None of the leaves has lobes or shape similar to Emperors I have seen in nurseries and books. The leaf lobes are all dissected nearly to the petiole, and are only 3-4 mm wide. It appears to be one of the purple linearilobum varieties such as Atrolinear or Beni otake.

Has anyone ever heard of a variety with wide leaves, such as Emperor, growing narrow straplike leaves while it is young? I assume that the nursery just sent me the wrong tree or mislabeled it, since it was tagged with an Emperor label.