A Plant Mystery

Plants.  They're really an amazing part of creation!  We spent this year studying just plants in science, and it's been fascinating.  In my imagination, I have a beautiful vegetable garden, an orchard of the finest fruits, gorgeous flowers, delicious berries, and lovely house plants too.  But in real life, it's not quite like that.  Most plants that I attempt to grow end up having a short life span.  I even killed a Bonsai tree . . . you know those trees that are supposed to last for hundreds of years?  Yeah, one of those.  But my lack of gardening ability is not the point of this post.  The reason I'm writing is because we have a strange situation going on with one of the trees in front of our house.

It's a Japanese maple that we planted shortly after moving here, so about 8 years ago.  It's always been a pretty tree...nice red leaves, dwarf size, very lovely.  Well, remember the blizzards of 2010 here in Maryland?  We got seriously dumped on that year!  The snow was so heavy that it broke one of the main branches off our Japanese maple.  When the snow melted, we had a very dilapidated tree.  But it survived, and new growth started to show where it had been injured.  So far, nothing too mysterious about that.  But the new growth started to look rather strange, and this spring it really took off and grew fast--much faster than the little dwarf maple tree had ever grown!  But the weirdest part is that it looks like a completely different type of tree!  See for yourself!

The red and light green sections are part of the same tree, and the green part is as big as the red but it's only been growing for 2 years, and the red has been growing for 8+!

How can these leaves be growing from the same tree?

I cannot figure this out, so I thought I'd post it publicly in hopes that a botanically-inclined friend might be able to explain it.  (Hey--does having a really cool 2-in-1 tree make up for all the plants I've killed?)