American Elm | Bonsai South

An American Elm Gets Potted

by Zach Smith | May 12, 2019 | American Elm, Care, Elms, Potting, Pruning, Styling

Every tree you work on will eventually reach a state where it’s got to go into a bonsai pot. Sometimes we delay doing so, and while that’s okay you don’t want to push any tree too far or you risk decline and, of course, the D word.

This American elm, Ulmus Americana, has grown from a bare trunk to this state in just two years. True to the species, it’s grown like a weed and requires frequent attention. And so, out of self-defense, I decided to put it in a bonsai pot so it won’t annoy me as much (only kidding, but you know you have some trees that demand a lot more attention than others).

While today’s work mostly consisted of trimming back the rampant growth, a little wiring was in order. The lowest left branch has been allowed to grow out, and still needs more in order to thicken, but it also need some movement in it. Hence the wire.

In this photo you can see I’ve started pruning back. Whenever you prune your trees, you have to do a little strategic thinking. You also have to be willing to sacrifice having the tree look good now in order to make it look better later. This is one of the tougher things we have to do as bonsai artists, but we owe it to our trees to make them just as good as we possibly can.

After still more pruning, and I wedged up the pot a little in order to see the potting angle better. The tree was too slanted in the pot.

This is a vintage pot I’ve had now for about 30 years. It was created by the late Richard Robertson of Rockport Pottery. I bought most of my pots from him when I first got into bonsai seriously.

Time to rustle the tree out of its nursery container. Plenty, plenty of roots. This sort of root density is typical of elms (this is two years’ worth). I also rediscovered some nice radial roots I’d forgotten about when I buried them in the pot.

And this is where the tree and I ended up today. Once growth has resumed, I’ll be able to judge how long it’ll take to finish out the work on it. My guess as of now is about two years to showable condition.

By way of stats, the trunk base is 2″ and the tree will finish around 22″ tall.

Let me know what you think of this American elm bonsai.

If You Don’t Have An American Elm Bonsai, You Should

by Zach Smith | Apr 6, 2019 | American Elm, Care, Elms, Styling

I collected this American elm, Ulmus Americana, in May of 2018. It’s not a bad piece of material. The trunk base is 2″ in diameter, and I chopped it at 16″. It didn’t take long for buds to show up all over the trunk.

Within two months I was wiring like crazy. American elm is a very vigorous species. One of the best features is leaf-size reduction – from 5″ in the wild to less than 1/2″ in a bonsai pot. You can’t ask for much more than that!

One more good thing about American elm: it ranges all the way from Canada down to Florida, and west to Texas. So winter hardiness is not an issue.

What about Dutch elm disease? I’ve grown quite a few American elm bonsai through the years, and I’ve never had a problem with it nor have I heard of anyone else who did. There appears to be a relationship between the height and age of specimens in the wild and susceptibility to DED.

Here is today’s shot. In less than one year, I have a complete and nice set of branches on this elm. I’ll be pruning back hard in about a month or so, and that will encourage back-budding and ramification. I may even go ahead and slip-pot into a bonsai container.

Let me know what you think. Do you grow American elm?

A Terrific American Elm Bonsai-To-Be

by Zach Smith | Jun 16, 2018 | American Elm, Care, Elms, Pruning, Styling, Wiring

I love elm bonsai. Among my favorite elm species to work with is American elm, Ulmus Americana. I found this one almost by accident in early May. Though I would normally prefer to collect American elms in January or February, I thought it would be worth a try to lift this one. And I was pleasantly surprised when it came right back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiqMeigKZHw

Americanelm6 16 18 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiqMeigKZHw)

Here’s a quick styling that I did on this tree. I was fortunate in the number of shoots it gave me to work with, including some in most of the right spots! But as I note in the video, it’s common to not get a “perfect” set of branches, and frankly if we always did we’d end up bored with our trees because they’d all look alike.

Fascinating Facts About 10 Bonsai Species

by Zach Smith | Jan 2, 2018 | American Elm, Bald Cypress, Crape myrtle, Dogwood, Elms, Hornbeam, Vines

There’s not much growing at this time of year, so I got to pondering some fascinating facts about 10 of the species I grow as bonsai. Here they are, in no particular order.

Bald Cypress - Taxodium Distichum

This species produces more trunk buds when collected as bare stumps than just about any other species. This makes branch selection almost problematic (too many choices!).

Holly - Ilex Species

This species have male and female flowers on different plants. The bright red fall berries occur only on the female plants. The leaves and stems of common Yaupon, Ilex vomitoria, were brewed into a tea by Native American men for use in purification and unity rituals. These rituals included vomiting, hence the scientific name given by Europeans when they originally classified the species. Only the Yaupon tea does not actually cause vomiting. Oops.

Crape Myrtle - Lagerstroemia Indica

With this species, new shoots are square when they first emerge. As they extend and thicken, they round off.

Flowering Dogwood - Cornus Florida

The beautiful white flowers are not flowers at all (as in flower petals), they’re white flower bracts. The actual flowers are yellow and inconspicuous, and reside in the center of the bracts.

Elms - Ulmus Species

Tricky to prune larger roots, as the bark will separate easily. Sawing works better, however, don’t saw straight through from one side or the bark will likely peel on the other side of the cut. (Even with experience you will likely make a mistake here and there when preparing collected elms.)

American elm – champion in leaf-size reduction, from 5” long in the wild to under ½” in a bonsai pot. This is the first image to your left. Six weeks later (image to your immediate left), this American elm already has much smaller leaves. Easy stuff!

Willow Leaf Ficus - Ficus Salicaria

This is perhaps the most popular fig species grown as bonsai, it is unknown in the wild (meaning you can’t go look at mature specimens in their natural habitat). The original plant was discovered in a Florida nursery by Joe Samuels, who eventually acquired and began propagating it. If you have one, it came from this single specimen.

American Hornbeam - Carpinus Caroliniana

This species grows continuously throughout the growing season, never pausing as most species do. There’s always fresh new growth. This trait is almost unique among species grown as bonsai.

Figs - Ficus Species

Figs are technically among the flowering plants (angiosperms), so where are the flowers? Actually, the flowers are inside the fruit and never “bloom” as we understand the term. Typically a specialized wasp enters the tiny opening at the end of the fruit to pollinate it.

Wisteria - Wisteria Floribunda

This species is quite the bean! I know we don’t tend to think of the lovely Wisteria in such terms, but as a member of the legume family Wisteria is related to all of the beans and peas. Once the stunning flowers have done their thing each year, a pod slowly but surely develops until it’s quite obvious by fall.

Did You Enjoy?

This was a fun topic for me. I sure hope you enjoyed the read. Drop me a comment below; I really enjoy hearing from people who love bonsai as much as I love it!

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It’s Getting Cold Tonight, Why Not Dream Of Elms?

by Zach Smith | Oct 28, 2017 | American Elm, Care, Collecting, Elms, Styling, Wiring

I’ve been hustling today to finish getting my greenhouse up and heated, so all those tropicals I just had to make this year will survive. It looks like a light freeze is headed our way tonight.

And this is turn means the weather has broken, so it’s just a matter of time till the leaves are off the trees. I don’t know if I’ll get any color this year, it’s not common here in the Deep South, but by year-end most everything should be bare.

I’ve had a good and fun year with elms, and truth be told they’re probably my favorite species to grow as bonsai with the exception of Bald cypress. Here’s an American elm, Ulmus americana, that I lifted in May of this year. Here’s its story. It’s been growing on its own as a volunteer on my property for probably eight or ten years, in a not-so-good spot. It just so happened to be growing in a partly-recumbent manner, and was perhaps ten feet long (tall). The trunk was 1.5″ across, so not a bad start for something. So it seemed clear to me that the something should be a raft-style bonsai. The recumbent section had some roots already, so I just chopped it to size and potted it up.

The photo above is dated 6/17/17. In just a few weeks the recumbent trunk had grown plenty of shoots. Those shoots would to be the trunks of my raft-style bonsai. And given how fast American elm grows, I was going to have to apply some wire before long.

Sure enough, on July 21st it was time to put some wire on. There were five trunks for sure, so they got wired and shaped. And back on the bench it went.

On October 1st, this thing had grown so fast I had to remove the wire from two of the trunks in order to keep it from biting in. I’d also gotten another couple of trunks to add to the raft, making a total of seven. I was really getting somewhere.

And here we are today. The growth is over for 2017, but you just can’t argue with the results of five months’ work. And you can’t help but dream of next year. I’ve got a lot of American elms I’m growing to size, so hopefully next year by summer I’ll have more to offer.

Just to close out this post, I’ll make mention of another favorite elm of mine, Cedar elm, which I’ve written about a lot this year. While all of my other elms are done growing, the Cedar elms continue to plug away. This is true even for specimens in the ground.

This one was looking pretty awful at the end of summer, with ugly leaves many of which had dried up; then the temperatures moderated a bit, and it decided to put on some fresh new growth. It could grow most of the way through November, if we don’t get a killing frost.

Those Devilish Details – How To Make Your Trees Better

by Zach Smith | Sep 30, 2017 | American Elm, Care, Elms, Pruning, Wiring

You may remember this American elm, Ulmus americana, from a couple of months ago. I lifted it and put it directly into this neat funky Chuck Iker rectangle. It dutifully threw new shoots, and I wired an initial design. So far, so good.

Here we are this morning. Very nice growth, as you can see. I recently pruned back the leader, as it had grown enough for this year. But now I have a lot of unruly branches that need attention. They say the devil’s in the details. They must have been thinking of bonsai when they came up with that one.

Now, how do you go about tackling the details that will take your tree to the next phase of development? Here’s a step by step illustration of my thought process and the results.

I almost always begin at the bottom of the tree. In this case, the number one (lowest left) branch of the tree needs pruning. You can see in this closeup (just click on the image to enlarge it) that a secondary branch has emerged all on its own. Perfect. I can cut to this branch, and next year let it run before pruning it again.

After pruning.

My next stop is the branch above the number one branch. Why not the number two branch, the one on the right side of the tree? It’s not as thick as I need it to be (see two photos down). Pruning it back would not be the right thing to do at this time. You’ll commonly see this in the growth of your trees. Branches tend to grow with more strength in the apex. Branches also tend to grow with different degrees of strength in the same part of the tree. Part of developing your bonsai is to balance this growth by means of selective pruning.

Branch pruned.

This is the number two branch, the lowest right-hand branch. You can see that it’s not as strong/thick as the lowest left branch – in part because there are actually two branches emerging from the same spot. I needed a back branch, so kept them both.

Now let’s move up the tree some more. This branch near the apex is way too strong (not surprisingly, apical dominance you know). It needs to be “cooled off.”

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Cut back pretty hard..

Now on to the other side of the tree. Same problem.

I unwired it and pruned it back hard. That’s step one for this branch.

Now I used the same wire to rewire the smaller branch I cut to into position.

Now back to the other side of the tree. This branch needs to be pruned.

Snip.

Here’s that back branch I mentioned above. I don’t want this branch to get too thick, as it might cause undue swelling at the point on the trunk where they emerge. So I’ll prune it back.

Snip.

Back up higher in the tree, this branch is now obviously too heavy. I’d trimmed the secondary branches that emerged, but more needs to be done.

Unwire and prune back.

Now I’ve wired one of the secondary branches out as a new leader.

And here’s the final result. This is a nice little American elm bonsai. The species grows so fast that by the end of the 2018 growing season, I should have a nicely filled out specimen.

Let me know what you think.

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