by Zach Smith | Mar 12, 2017 | Care, Collecting, Potting, Styling, Vines
A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog on using vines for bonsai. In it, we began the tale of a neat Trumpet vine, Campsis radicans, that I collected on my property and started working on. It wasn’t long before I was able to report this progress.
Isn’t this a wonderfully “bonsai-y” designed Trumpet vine? I mean, you’ve got a nice curvy trunk that tapers because I was able to cut to a smaller leader. You’ve got the shoots you need to make a branch set. All that’s needed from this point is to let the thing grow and then make pruning decisions. And then pot the new bonsai in a suitable pot the next spring.
Well, this Trumpet vine had other ideas, as you can see from this photo I just took today. That new leader decided not to live. The branches made out of shoots did grow out, but then some of them died off. But the vine hung in there. I wasn’t sure what it was going to do this year, then I noticed some buds pushing. It’s alive!
Clearly this vine is going to decide for me what it’s going to end up being, regardless of my ideas. I have found this to be true as often as not in my years in bonsai. I suspect you will, too. The trees you work on will sometimes, despite your best efforts, not behave in the way you want them to. At which point you can either get angry or frustrated, or learn to go with the flow. We usually have a design in mind for our trees. When this design plan doesn’t work out, I’ve usually found it best just to go with the flow and see what else I can do. In this case, I pulled the vine from its (deep) pot, uncovered the rest of the original trunk, cut off the roots growing above that spot, and ended up making a literati bonsai-to-be.
Is the Trumpet vine going to go along with my new plan? Well, I don’t know but if it comes through today’s man-handling I’ll post an update. Who knows, I might just end up with a neat bonsai.
by Zach Smith | Mar 5, 2017 | Care, Styling, Sweetgum
Bonsai design is a hugely complex subject. The good news is, we have some tried and true rules to help get us through the process even if we’re not the next Rembrandt (I’m certainly not).
Last October I published a blog titled Designing Your Bonsai – Not To Not Miss Better Options, which featured this pretty decent Sweetgum.
As I noted at the time, the usual idea with a piece of material like this is that it becomes an informal upright bonsai. There’s nothing at all wrong with this idea. But with all of the foliage emerging from near the top of the trunk, I got this strange idea while looking at photos of the tree from different angles. I ultimately decided that this angle might make an ordinary Sweetgum a little less so.
This photo was taken in October, when I published the blog referenced above. It had grown out enough to get an initial wiring. And that’s what convinced me to do something different.
Take a few seconds to study this photo. Does anything look odd about it, or not quite right? Remember our principles about potting trees in bonsai pots. For oval and rectangle shaped pots, you always pot the tree slightly off-center. The idea is that the very tip of the apex of the tree should be right about in the center of the oval or rectangle, which helps you choose where to place the base of the trunk in the pot. Now, depending on the specific degree of “informality” your tree possesses, the apex may not end up precisely over the center of the pot. And in the case of slanting style bonsai, this definitely does not happen. Not only does the apex shift away from the center of the pot, the trunk base shifts farther away from the center of the pot in the opposite direction. The key is always balance. In the photo above, does the tree look balanced in its nursery pot? It appears the trunk may be emerging from near the center of the pot, and this throws the apex far off-center. Taken as a whole, it looks like the tree and pot are going to tip over. And this gives us all of the guidance we need in order to make a nice composition out of this Sweetgum with the right bonsai pot.
Here’s the result of applying compositional principles to a slanting style bonsai. I’ve restored the balance of this tree and pot as a whole. Notice that the base of the trunk is a good bit off-center; this is to counterbalance the thrusting movement of the trunk toward the left. If the tree were planted in the center of the pot, as in the photo above, it would appear as if the whole thing were going to tip over. Balance is vital to making a nice composition with your bonsai.
The buds of this tree are starting to open, so in order to avoid any unnecessary disturbance of the roots I slip-potted it into its pot. It shouldn’t skip a beat.
I’ll be posting this Sweetgum bonsai for sale in about a month, so stay tuned.
by Zach Smith | Mar 4, 2017 | Care, Collecting, Oaks, Potting, Styling, Wiring
I’ve written before about reducing roots when collecting trees. Even though my collecting season is about over, some of you may just be getting started. So this isn’t a bad time at all to review some principles – and surprises.
Before I get into this topic, I do need to stress that the information here is based solely on my own experience with certain species. I collect almost exclusively deciduous trees. Add to that a few broadleaf evergreens such as Chinese privet, Yaupon and today’s subject, Live oak. These species behave similarly to all of the deciduous species I collect, and so what I’m showing you here is applicable. Or put another way, don’t do this with a pine or juniper.
So here’s the Live oak, Quercus virginiana, that I chose for lifting and potting. Not a huge tree, but the trunk is nice and there are some well-placed branches. I whacked off most of the tree – you can see where I made the chop. The bonsai comes from what’s left.
In a few minutes I had the tree out of the ground and had washed off the roots. That’s when I got a not-unexpected shock. Look at how big those roots are! Now, I’ve grown this tree along with a bunch of others from seed collected in 2010. When I went from the growing tub to the ground, I took all of the taproots off. But that didn’t stop the tree from producing very large lateral roots in the process of getting itself established. Contrary to common belief, Live oaks grow quickly when they’re young. This specimen was about eight feet tall before I chopped it back. So the roots you’re looking at are the roots this tree planned to use to grow much bigger much faster.
Can you believe I ended up with this little root? I was a bit surprised myself. But I had to get those whoppers out of there, because the tree wasn’t going to fit into a bonsai pot any time soon if I tried to leave them and gradually work them down. So I bit the bullet.
This brings up a very important point when you’re collecting deciduous trees, namely, don’t leave the roots too long. It isn’t necessary, first of all, and it ends up causing headaches when it’s time to put the tree in a bonsai pot. Ideally, when you collect a tree – or basically a trunk, because it may have zero branches – you should have in mind the finished height of the tree and what size bonsai pot it’ll end up in. If you size your pot correctly, those long roots you leave on because you’re worried about cutting off too much just aren’t going to fit. Take it from me; I’ve learned this lesson the hard way.
Is this tree going to survive the drastic root-pruning I gave it? Obviously, any given tree may not survive collecting, but I think I’ve got a pretty good shot. This tree has enough root tissue, and it’s been reduced enough on both ends, that it will be prompted to regenerate what’s “missing.” In a fashion analogous to rooting a cutting, only more reliable, all trees have a strong “urge” to survive and in order to do so will grow roots and leaves. That’s really the basic principle that allows us to collect trees in the first place.
This Live oak needed one more challenge, so I put it directly into a bonsai pot. I buried the minimal roots pretty deep, to ensure they stay moist.
And finally, after a little wiring and trimming. Assuming it survives, this is going to make a pretty neat broom-form Live oak bonsai. The trunk base is 1″ in diameter, and it’s 16″ to the tip of the apex.
Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.
by Zach Smith | Feb 26, 2017 | Bald Cypress, Care, Collecting, Potting
With an early spring in the offing, today was probably just a bit beyond the end of the collecting season. All of the specimens I brought home today were already leafing out. Now, I’ve had good luck collecting cypresses after they start budding, so I don’t have a lot of concern that the ones I brought home today won’t make it. But it would have been preferable had they been a little less out. I’ll know in a few weeks how it went.
Meanwhile, here are a few shots from today’s adventure.
This is what you call overdoing it when you’re 62. There are 15 trees here. Oh, I had the young strong help getting them out of the swamp, but the work on the back end is a lot harder. It took almost four hours to get these guys cleaned up and potted.
I often make note of the fact that when I pot a collected tree, the lateral roots get buried deep in the pot to protect them from drying out. Here’s one of the bigger trees I got today. The cut ends of the large roots you see here have to go at least three inches beneath the soil. Though we water our trees on a schedule, between waterings the soil at the surface of the pot gets fairly dry. If this goes too far into the pot, you end up with a cut root that dries out. Cypresses in particular are like sponges – and I mean that just about literally. When you’re cutting the smaller roots of a cypress, they will actually squeeze like a sponge. It has to do with how the cells are made, though I don’t know the botany behind it. Anyway, once you pot up a large cypress with those big cut roots they suck up water like a sponge, so you want to keep that flow going. With the chop sealed off, the water that is sucked up into the tree goes to keep the cells hydrated and ultimately to allow for new buds to form.
Here’s another of the larger ones for today. Again, those lateral roots will end up buried inches under the soil surface.
Here’s another specimen, a smaller tree with great trunk movement and superb lateral roots. This is unusual for a tree with this small a caliper.
And one more. This tree is also not particularly large in terms of basal trunk thickness. But it has fantastic roots.
And finally, here’s one I plan to keep for my collection. It’s a terrific twin-trunk, which I plan to make into a literati flat-top. The trunk base on the larger tree is 1.75″, and it’s 25″ to the chop. The smaller one is 0.5″ at the base. The pot is an extraordinary piece by Chuck Iker.
Let me know what you think of these trees. With a little luck, I’ll be posting more specimens for sale in the next few weeks.
by Zach Smith | Feb 25, 2017 | Care, Collecting, Flowering, Hawthorn
Collecting season 2017 is drawing to a close. One species I wanted to be sure to have some stock of is Parsley hawthorn, Crataegus marshallii. Today I took care of that chore. Here are a few that I brought home.
This guy isn’t much to look at, having only slight taper, but once it buds out I can either grow out the tree as a taller slender specimen or select a low branch to make into a new leader. I left it long to maximize the choices.
This one shouted “literati” at me from the woods, so it had to come home. Notice in the first example how straight the trunk is. This is normal for hawthorns. But all the twists and turns on this one are most definitely not. I’m looking forward to making something of this one.
This is my best find of the day. Taper and character, all in a neat package.
I should know in a couple of weeks if these trees have made it. All but one I collected today were already leafing out. Hawthorns are very forgiving when it comes to being lifted – my success rate is right at 90% – but you never know what will happen when you collect outside the dormant season.
Let me know what you think of these Parsley haws.
by Zach Smith | Feb 19, 2017 | Care, Flowering, Hawthorn, Potting, Styling
Creating a bonsai is a step by step process that goes roughly like this:
- Select, buy or collect a piece of raw material
- Prune away unneeded branches and excess trunk to create a single trunk line (for formal, informal, slanting, and cascade styles), wire and position branches; or, select and wire shoots and a leader of the purchased or collected specimen to create a branch structure and apex-in-training
- Pot the tree into a bonsai container if it isn’t already in one
- Continue development steps such as creating a tapering transition in the apex if needed, cutting back, shaping and ramifying branches, and working in the root zone to create a pleasing nebari
- Make changes if and as needed to improve your bonsai
I collected this Parsley hawthorn, Crataegus marshallii, in January of 2016 and potted it directly into this Chuck Iker round. Because the tree has little taper, I planned to make a literati-style bonsai out of it. It responded by producing several buds along the trunk, certainly enough for the plan. I did some wiring on it, fed and watered it, but left it alone otherwise.
Here’s the tree today. You can see that my new leader emerged a couple of inches below the chop point. No real problem, you always have to work on the chop point anyway. Other than this, my other few branches are waiting to open up for spring.
As the months went on last year, I decided that I wasn’t happy with the pot. To be sure, literati bonsai are usually placed in relatively small pots. But this one just stopped seeming right to me.
The obvious first order of business was to eliminate the chop stub, and carve down what was left so that it tapered smoothly into the new leader. This looks much better. Now for a replacement pot.
I think this new Chuck Iker round better suits the tree. What do you think?
This year’s development work on this bonsai will be aimed at building the branch structure and building the apex. I plan to continue with the idea that this Parsley hawthorn will be a literati bonsai when all is said and done. And I think it’ll be a nice one.
