by Zach Smith | Feb 13, 2016 | Bald Cypress, Care
Bonsai South is growing. I already knew it, but it really came home to me when I ran out of bench space last week. I like for all of my trees in pots to be off the ground, even the pre-bonsai that will end up going out as raw material. With last week’s bald cypress collecting trip being such a great success, I found myself having to use mixing tubs to pot four of them. Talk about take up some room!
The spot wasn’t hard to pick. I’ve been working my way toward the front of my main display area for the past few years. You can see the beginning of the process; get the first block in the right spot and level, and it goes a lot easier from there.
About an hour later, the bench is built. I use a very simple design. Cement block and (in this case) treated 2×6’s eight feet long. It’s sturdy and the boards will last at least three to five years.
The bald cypresses were close by, so no need to lug them far. One new bench down, one to go (for now – I’m sure I’ll have to continue expanding as time goes on). I’ve still got a few weeks of collecting season left to go, so there’s no doubt all of my benches will be chock-a-block going into spring. Then, with a little luck, they’ll start emptying out.
by Zach Smith | Feb 7, 2016 | Bald Cypress, Care, Potting, Soil, Styling
When I’m searching for trees to collect, I always look for certain characteristics of the trunks in order to determine if they’re worth lifting. While there’s definitely a bonsai in each one I collect, I generally don’t visualize the finished bonsai in making that initial judgment. On yesterday’s hunt, I found a bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) specimen in which I immediately saw the completed bonsai.
These are two separate trees that decided to grow right up against one another. This isn’t all that uncommon, but in this case the trees had such a terrific interplay of movement for relatively small specimens that the image of companion flat-tops sprang into my mind. There was no way they weren’t coming home with me.
My biggest challenge in preparing this companion planting for a container was the fact that they were separate trees. To be sure, the roots were entertwined, but during the cleanup there was the distinct possibility that the two trees would come apart. My goal was to preserve their “companionship.”
I spent the time necessary to carefully clean up the root zone, which meant pulling out the incredible mass of weed roots that always gather around cypress trees in the swamp. And of course there’s the thick, gooey mud that goes along with them. But plenty of high pressure water and elbow grease did the trick.
There comes a point where it’s time to pot your bonsai. I frequently direct-pot trees, especially when I don’t need to do any trunk development. For this bonsai-in-the-making, all I’ve got to create is the branch structure (limited) and crowns. This is easily done in a restrictive container; bald cypress is powerfully apically dominant, so I’ll get robust growth right where I need it.
A few more comments on this specimen, which incidentally is potted in this very nice Byron Myrick oval. Notice that the depth of the pot, right at 3″, is just about equal to the thickness of the main trunk at soil level, which is 2.75″. It’s 13″ long. I anticipate the finished height for the main tree will be 28-30″. This makes the pot just under half the height of the bonsai in width, which helps give the impression of height in the specimen.
I planted some moss around the trees. In addition to looking good, it will help protect the surface roots that lie right under the soil surface. I need to be sure these remain moist, so they can sprout new feeders when spring gets here.
All in all, I think this is a very nice composition. What do you think?
by Zach Smith | Feb 6, 2016 | Bald Cypress, Potting, Pruning
Today I was finally able to start the bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) collecting season. The weather was cool and dry, meaning ideal; the material was plentiful. In fact, I pretty much stopped collecting when I ran out of charged battery packs – which was for the best, as I had to do the cleaning up and potting on the back side. My personal battery pack barely lasted through it.
Here’s the gang, waiting for processing. You can see the nice, fluted trunks. They’re mostly medium sized specimens, with trunks in the 3-4″ diameter range.
Here’s one of them after a cleanup and final root-pruning, just prior to potting in a growing tub. Ideally, you want this sort of buttressing in the lower trunk. It’s the classic bald cypress growth habit, and one of the reasons bonsai artists prize them.
This tree has a 4.5″ trunk about 5″ from the soil surface, and is chopped at 29″. I’m thinking it would make a nice, graceful flat-top bald cypress bonsai.
Here’s an interesting specimen. Notice the bulging on the root coming toward the front? Yes, that’s the beginnings of a knee. We find such examples from time to time. This one just happened to be worth bringing home. The trunk measures 4″ in diameter and it’s chopped at 21.5″. Plenty of styling possibilities.
Some of the bald cypresses down south are starting to push buds already. A few on my bench are doing so. I’m thinking that means these trees will start showing activity in two to three weeks. Stay tuned; I’ll begin posting some for sale as soon as I can.
by Zach Smith | Jan 9, 2016 | Bald Cypress, Care, Potting, Soil, Styling, Wiring
I last showed you this bald cypress, Taxodium distichum, when I did the initial styling on it a couple of months ago. It grew very well in 2015, after being collected in February of that same year. I decided the tree was ready for its first bonsai pot this year. Now, you may wonder if I’m not rushing things, considering that the new leader is hardly thick enough to make a believable transition at the chop point. But I know just how powerfully top-dominant bald cypress is, so the new apex of this tree can be entirely grown after it’s placed in a bonsai pot.
I commissioned this Byron Myrick oval for the tree. All sorts of greens do very nicely with cypress, as they evoke not only the foliage of the species but also the swampy habitat. This one is no different. Also, the oval shape should complement the graceful curve of the tree.
My first chore is to work on the chop area. You can see that I chose a new leader below the chop and wired it up to continue the trunk line. Now I need to saw off the chop flush with the leader. That’s step number one in prepping this apex for what will ultimately be an uninterrupted trunk line that tapers smoothly from soil line to its tip.
The cut went quickly with my Japanese pruning saw. Cypress has light sapwood, so it’s very easy to work.
Next I used my trunk splitter to make this angled cut. Notice the “shelf” I left near the new leader. This is designed to keep the swelling callus from producing a reverse taper a couple of years down the road. By forcing the callus tissue to cover the shelf, it won’t grow nearly as quickly as the callus below it. Ultimately, it’ll be completely rolled over and will make a very smooth tapering transition.
Here’s a view from the back. Notice that I’ve carved down the rough cut. This will all be sealed when I’m through potting the tree. It’s freshly cut sapwood, and it’ll transpire moisture right out of the trunk and threaten the tree’s survival if I don’t protect it.
Next I unpotted the tree. Check out all the roots I got in a single year! You can also see the buttressing roots I buried right after I collected it. They stayed protected, meaning they stayed alive, and they sprouted new feeder roots as expected.
Finally, here’s the tree in its new home. The branches and the new leader are where I need them to be going into the 2016 growing season. My two chores are creating the tree’s apex and flushing out the branch structure. This is about a four to five year project.
If you’d like to take over the training of this tree, it’s available at our Bald Cypress Bonsai page. The trunk base is 4″ at the soil surface, and it’s 22″ to the chop point. I’m planning for a final height of 30-32″. This is going to be a very elegant bald cypress bonsai.
by Zach Smith | Oct 30, 2015 | Bald Cypress, Care, Sweetgum
One of the most useful – and underutilized – tools we have as bonsai artists is the camera. While it’s gotten pretty common in this age of smart phones to take photos of our trees, how often do we use the results to help us with our styling? I’ve made a conscious effort over the past several years to: 1) get better at taking photos representative of my trees’ actual appearance; and 2) make use of the photos to improve them.
There will, of course, be quite a bit of variation in how well your camera represents what your eye is seeing. What’s vital in getting your photos to properly reflect your trees is to learn the characteristics of your own equipment. One thing it took me a while to learn is that the closer I get to my subject the more it gets distorted in the frame. So when the photo gets loaded up for cropping and various adjustments, it doesn’t quite look like what I saw when observing the tree on the bench. Here are a couple of examples:
This is an eleven tree sweetgum forest I put together this past May. Now, if you look closely and count up the trees you probably only see ten. Why? Because one of them is hiding behind another one. Did I plant them that way? No. I do my best to follow the rules of forest plantings, a key one of which is that no trunk obscures the view of another. So what happened?
Well, as it turns out it was all in the photography. I took this shot from as close a vantage point as possible, and when taking it I was actually able to distinguish all eleven trunks. But that’s not what the camera saw and dutifully recorded.
Here’s my second effort at photographing this forest. If you count the trunks again, you’ll see there are indeed eleven. Yet when you compare the photos, they don’t really look all that different in how they’re framed. But take a closer look, and you’ll see there’s just a little more space between each tree in the second shot – or at least there appears to be more space between each, since they’re in exactly the same spots as before. The closer shot somehow ended up bringing them in toward each other, ever so slightly. I take it that the curvature of the camera lense was responsible for this bit of optical illusion, an effect that was mitigated by retaking the shot from a few feet farther away.
This bald cypress was photographed from three different perspectives. In this first shot, the camera is positioned relatively close to the tree but below the center of the trunk, in order to keep the pot profile on a more horizontal plane. From this angle, the “flat top” doesn’t look particularly flat; rather, it’s taken on a rounded shape (which, by the way, was not the way the tree actually looked).
Same tree, same distance from tree to camera, but now the flat top looks like a flat top, right? It’s not hard to see how this was possible. The photo was taken from a position above center-trunk. Now it appears we’re looking down at the pot. Yet I can tell you that in taking each of these photos, I was not able to see what the camera ended up recording. They appeared pretty much similar to the eye.
This final shot shows how to solve the problem of camera position distortion (which is more apparent in taller trees, by the way). You simply step back four to six feet, and take the shot a little below center-trunk. This keeps the pot on the horizontal plane while not distorting the appearance of the crown by “looking” up into it. In the case of this cypress, I’ve preserved the feel of the flat-top while also keeping the distance-perspective intact.
In Part 2 of this series, I’ll show you how to use photos to improve the design and appearance of your bonsai.
by Zach Smith | Oct 24, 2015 | Bald Cypress, Care, Flowering, Oaks, Potting
I first met Allen Gautreau (“Go Tro” – it’s one of those Cajun names) in 1986, when my rekindled interest in bonsai had me seeking out local enthusiasts. He was new to the art, as was I. While I don’t recall that many details of our early encounters, I know we went on at least one collecting trip together and a nursery hunt.
The latter occasion got Allen this crape myrtle, dug from a field growing bed at an eclectic nursery outside of Baton Rouge. His notes say I helped him. The tree isn’t huge, so I suspect my help was limited to the selection process. Regardless, he worked on it over the next few decades and the tree is now a very mature bonsai that has come into my care. I think it’s got great character. Better still, it has great meaning for me.
By 1989 I had advanced enough in my study and practice of bonsai that I decided to begin teaching classes. My first class consisted of three beginners; Allen was one of them. As I recall, the course was three sessions long, each one lasting four or five hours. But memory fades, so I could certainly be off on my numbers.
No one who lives in the Deep South and loves bonsai doesn’t want a nice live oak bonsai. Problem is, they aren’t that easy to collect. On the other hand, they take to container life very well and are easy to train. Given their great features, I often wonder why more artists don’t grow the species.
Allen usually acquired his live oak pre-bonsai from nurseries selling end-of-season inventory on the cheap. These landscape-bound trees would be chopped down to just a few inches in most cases, then a new compact trunk grown in the “grow and chop” fashion. He worked with a number of specimens over the years that were created this way. A few years ago he gave me one of these trees that had been chopped and trained in the common live oak style, a short main trunk with multiple sub-trunks flaring off from it, some sweeping down to the ground. I reduced the root mass drastically and placed the tree in a shallow tray, to emphasize its style, and was working on development of the multiple sub-trunks when Winter 2014 hit. Alas, my gifted live oak bonsai didn’t survive.
I think that’s why Allen wanted me to have this tree to care for. I’m not sure if this is the only one he actually collected from the wild, but there couldn’t have been that many. His notes say it was dug in 1997, cut back and training begun. Here it is, 18 years later. In 2009 it was worked on in a session with Joe Day, and repotted in 2011, 2012 and 2014. The maturity of the structure of this tree is good testimony to the great work Allen put into it.
And finally, no bonsai collection is complete without bald cypress – doesn’t matter where you live. This forest was started in 2010. I don’t know its entire story, but one tree was replaced and one died and was transformed into a feature of the forest. All in all, though, it’s a nice rendition of a swamp scene. And the tray is a signature Tokoname piece.
One of the most appealing things about the art of bonsai is we often work with tree species that possess the capacity to outlive us (often by far!). While it’s easy to observe that as we learn bonsai we tend to kill a lot of trees, still the thought of having bonsai that can outlive us is testimony to the human spirit. We’re all just passing through this life, but we all have the opportunity to leave something of ourselves to the world and make it a better place. Allen did just that. Rest in the Lord’s embrace, old friend.
