kreashun

I purchased my Acer from stock at a local nursery around October of last year. The tree has nice radial root structure and a very strong tap root. It probably was not the best time to do so, but in my haste, I cut the tap root and lost a very large portion of the root volume, perhaps 40%-50%. Although the radial roots were good, they were too vertical for my taste, so I placed a golf ball directly below where the tap root originally was in an attempt to flatten out the roots to produce better nebari. Because of the loss of root mass, I also did some top pruning to hopefully keep the tree from dying. The tree seems to be doing very well and actually thriving after what I perceive to be extreme pruning.

Is it typical to lose that much root mass when cutting a tap root and is there anything else that I should have done to aid the tree's recovery? Also, will I achieve the desired results by placing the golf ball below the roots?

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