If you grow it in a pot, you can keep it manageable by cutting it right back to the ground every winter. I don't think it flowers this way, but you get more intense coloured foliage. If you grow it as a tree you'll need to prune it pretty hard, which can also affect the flowering.
Wow. I wouldn't even try it, unless you're going for bonsai. There's a lovely specimen in one of our neighbours gardens, maybe eight years old, and it's a twenty foot tree. Whether you could keep it small and manageable by crowding the roots and heavy pruning, I don't know.
It's easily manageable under that height @seacrows, mine's older than that and it's no more than 7-8 ft high. You just need to chop it back every year (once established) in early spring.
I have two in the ground. I cut them back to maybe 18 inches or 2 feet each spring and they easily get up to six or eight feet over the course of the summer depending on how wet it is. And that's on a dry poor sandy soil. I can't imagine them being very happy in a container for more than one or two years.
Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Soil type: sandy, well-drained
Thanks everyone for your comments. I did have it in the ground (in very poor soil, I might add) and it hardly grew so I recently dug it up and was struggling to find another place to put it so that is why I was considering a container.
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Size of pot depends on size of plant, not too big a pot at first, then pot on.
Plant in a mixture of JI 3 and MPC.
for the fag ends of the aristocracy.
S.Yorkshire/Derbyshire border
I wonder, is any one growing this in a pot at the moment?
I haven't tried growing one in a pot.