A little over a year ago, two friends of mine purchased a house encircled by sumptuous Japanese landscaping. Cloud-pruned evergreens and spiritually-positioned rocks abounded. So when my friends decided they wanted a paved courtyard and a privacy fence in one portion of the yard, an exquisite specimen of a Japanese maple had to move. We're talking a lacy, 9-foot-wide cascading affair with, as it turned out, a surprisingly robust root system. I was recruited to assist with the transplant on the understanding that I would receive the tree after it had been removed. The reader is spared the expense of watching the moved tree through winter, March, and (painfully) April with no sign of leafing. I eventually admitted failure, though the maple retained an air of majesty with its tangled grey arms, refusing as they did to issue buds. By late April, I had despaired of running outside after work to stare at the branches and will them to bud, so I decided to represent them in paintings inste...