"Another thing to remember is that wild-collecting trees is HARD! All the best trees are in locations that are inaccesible, and once you get there, they really don't want to come out of the ground"
Hard is a relative thing in collecting at a nursery or in the wild. All the best trees aren't really in inaccessible locaitons, nor are many all that hard to collect. It's the search that's really the hard part. Finding a collectible tree is hard and takes time. Only one in 300 or 400 is worth the effort and a smaller percentage is collectible without tremendous effort. Knowing which ones will come out without killing you or the tree comes with a little time and alot of time in the dirt.
For instance, (and no, I'm not bragging here, just trying to show how things can work out with a similar plant), I have a collected wisteria with a diameter of about 11 inches. I collected it in half an hour, in the woods about 1,000 yards from my house. Of course, I found it only after a couple of years of looking. There's alot of dense scrub forest behind the house and alot of wild wisteria
. I'd collected alot of smaller wisteria before tackling the big one. In that time, I learned that Wisteria don't need alot of roots to allow them to recover, so you don't really have to dig a humongous trench or use traditional collection methods to get one. Severing the major roots six inches out (in the spring) all the way around is sufficient, if you plant it in moist soil upon removing it. They are aggressive in growth in the spring, so they bounce back in about six weeks.