by Zach Smith | Dec 23, 2016 | Care, Collecting, Elms, Potting
I get a lot of pleasure out of trying new things in bonsai, especially things that defy conventional wisdom. This includes “out of season” collecting. As an example, I lifted this field-grown Cedar elm, Ulmus crassifolia, in October.
This photo was taken on October 15th, after the tree had been lifted and potted. I left the foliage alone, considering the time of year and the fact that I wanted to encourage root growth. Is this the right approach? Frankly I’m not sure. My practice when collecting deciduous trees during the growing season is to defoliate, and that would probably have been the best approach. But you don’t learn anything new by doing the conventional, right?
Over the next two weeks I went ahead and defoliated the tree. Some of the foliage dropped off on its own, and some began to look not-so-happy. That told me what I needed to know.
A week later, it was obvious the tree had come through late-season collecting all right. This is early November, so I figured the tree had time before the first freeze to establish some roots. Cedar elm is a tough species, so there was no doubt in my mind this one would make it.
And here we are, six weeks later. We’ve had about four nights of freezing weather, with the lowest temp being 28°F. This is not cold enough to harm the new growth, despite the fact that it’s somewhat tender.
Now the question becomes, is this growth going to persist through winter? And if so, what happens when the new spring growth begins to emerge? If the growth does make it through winter, I suspect it will get pretty “tired” sometime in late spring and need to be removed in favor of fresher growth. But time will tell.
by Zach Smith | Dec 11, 2016 | American Elm, Care, Collecting, Elms, Hackberry, Sweetgum
I’ve written often about developing bonsai from the ground up. Today, following our first couple of freezing nights for the year, we warmed up enough to make working outdoors pleasant. Here are a few bonsai-to-be that I’ve been growing in the ground for a while. Today it was time to do the next round of chopping.
Here’s an American elm, Ulmus Americana, that I’ve been growing for a few years from a volunteer. American elm grows quickly in the ground if left alone to grow. From a seedling it grew strongly in the typical upright fashion. Last year I chopped it back hard – you can see the chop point in this photo – and then selected the strongest leader and put some wire on it in order to create just a little movement in the trunk. Then I just left it alone; I did remove the wire once it started to bite.
Here’s the tree from another angle, after I cut off the other leaders that had emerged from the chop point. I could have left multiple leaders on this tree and grown it in the classic “vase-shape” style of the American elm in nature. But instead I opted for a more typical informal upright style.
Now, as you can tell this new leader loses it taper pretty quickly once it leaves the original chop point. This is all right – I needed the leader to thicken sufficiently to produce a nice tapering transition. But if I don’t chop the tree again now, I’ll lose that transition.
I left the leader extra-long here, but it is cut back enough to prevent loss of taper. Next spring I’m going to get buds all up and down the leader, at which point I’ll select one and cut the excess off. For now I’ve done all the needs doing.
The trunk base is 1.5″ and the new chop is at 8″ from the soil. When I cut back again next year the new chop point is going to be around 4″ from the soil.
I’ve shown you this Sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua, before. This past year I chopped back the main trunk line to about 12″ from the soil, and allowed a low branch to take off in order to thicken the base. Boy, did that work! I got a base of 3″ by doing this, and the new leader literally took over the tree growing about 8′ tall. We’ve reached a point, however, where I had to put a stop to this. By allowing the new leader to continue growing, the main trunk line would begin to weaken and could possibly die. So today I felt it was a good time to eliminate the sacrifice trunk.
A closeup of the trunk base, from the other side.
This is a very important photo. If you’ll look at the point where the trunk changes color from gray to green, you’ll notice just below that point there’s a circular bit of wood that forms a ring below the green part (which is the new strong trunk I need to get rid of). This is the equivalent of a branch collar. For those of you familiar with arborist work, when large branches are removed from trees they’re always cut just beyond the branch collar. Why? Simply to preserve the sap flow from the roots up past the branch. If you remove the lower part of the branch collar, you run the risk of killing off part of the trunk below the collar. In the case of this Sweetgum, I could kill all of the roots below this leader. So I’ll be careful to avoid this when I chop.
And here we are, in just a few minutes. Now I’ve got a great tapering trunk line on my Sweetgum. The original chop on this specimen was at 12″, so with a 3″ trunk base I can finish out this specimen at 18″ and have a perfect base to height ratio.
I don’t plan to lift this specimen until next May. I’ll post a follow-up at that time.
I collected this Hackberry, Celtis laevigata, in 2012. To be honest it was pretty ugly, more so when I got it home. But there’s always hope. So I planted it out a few years ago and just let it get established and start to take off. It’s been a few years, but I finally got strong growth in a leader and I’m beginning to think there may be something to this specimen after all – in a few more years.
A shot from the other side. Doesn’t look like much, does it?
Just a quick chop later, I think 2017 may see this specimen begin to look like wanting to be a bonsai some day. It’s going to take several more years, but that’s just part of the fun. Patient work. Grow and chop. Grow and chop.
And finally, the tree from another angle.
This specimen has a 2.5″ trunk base and has now been chopped to 8″ above the soil surface. In the spring the leader is going to push a number of buds, which will allow me to choose the next leader for growing out.
by Zach Smith | Nov 5, 2016 | Care, Elms, Ficus, Water Elm
What does fall mean to you? Leaves turning, growth ended, prelude to winter? That’s all true, but for most of us (perhaps more of us in the South) some of our trees may still be pushing growth. This is particularly true if you’ve done any recent root work on them. Trees respond in a reliable fashion to having their roots disturbed at any time of year – they grow new roots, and if also pruned in the top grow new shoots. Here are a couple of examples from my own benches:
I wrote about this Water-elm, Planera aquatica, on September 29th. I had lifted it from my growing bed just to have some fun. It had a nice base and a perfect trunk form to produce a great broom-form bonsai. Do I normally lift trees in September? No, but my scientist background makes me want to experiment with trees so you never know what I may do. Up came this one, it got its root-pruning and went straight into this Chuck Iker pot.
I knew at the time that this tree would respond to having its roots and crown cut back hard by producing new growth. It took a few weeks, but lovely new buds began to form on the trunk and before you knew it I had some shoots that were several inches long. Today I wired a couple of them so I could start the shaping process. It sure doesn’t look like much right now, but I can assure you that next year I’ll be able to create the entire structure of this neat little bonsai.
But here’s the critical question: is there harm in doing things to your trees at this time of year that force it to produce growth usually reserved for spring? In my experience, the answer is no. Trees “want” to live, just as you and I do, so doing the hard pruning in summer or even early fall doesn’t really change that. Since deciduous trees store food in their cells over winter, and since sap stops flowing over winter, the only thing the tree needs to do after a late-season pruning is to produce some new roots and whatever top growth it can.
But what if a freeze comes along? I’ve seen this happen too. Because of where I live, some species will continue putting on growth well into November. We get our first freeze down here in December, typically. When it comes, any tender growth that can’t hold up to the cold simply gets burned back and that tends to finish off the growth for the season. Then the tree comes back out in spring. I’ve never seen a case where a tree, which didn’t have a fundamental health issue to start with, failed to come back out the next spring.
Here’s another tree that I pushed the envelope on, a Cedar elm, Ulmus crassifolia. It was lifted from my growing bed on October 15th. You can see in this photo that in only three weeks the tree has pushed a lot of new growth. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have a lot of new root growth as well. So the tree wanted to live and responded accordingly. It will continue to grow for the next few weeks or more. The new growth will harden off to an extent. Then winter will be upon us. And I have every reason to believe that the tree will not skip a beat in spring – in fact, lifting it this fall will give me a head-start on developing it for sale in 2017.
Here’s a closeup of some of the new growth, by the way. Reminiscent of spring, isn’t it?
Do you have any experience lifting trees in fall? I’d love to hear any feedback you might wish to share.
by Zach Smith | Oct 21, 2016 | Care, Elms, Pruning, Styling, Water Elm
I’ve written about this Water-elm bonsai (Planera aquatica) a few times now. Ever since I collected it in 2012, I’ve been working toward a broom-form bonsai. And you can see that this year it’s reached a nice stage of ramification. I could continue pinching and pruning this tree, which would improve the ramification even more. But that would not be the best expression of this tree. If you look “inside” it, you’ll see some issues with the branching. Moreover, these issues can’t be resolved by any quick-fix. No, in order to build this bonsai the right way I’m going to have to apply some tough love – meaning tough cuts.
I’m not sure there’s anything harder for an inexperienced bonsai artist to do than this. I have literally cut away about three years’ worth of development. But at the same time, I’ve corrected some issues that are only going to get worse in the tree in the first photo. For one thing, the silhouette of the tree had already reached its finishing point. There was no further it could go without ruining the proportions of the tree. Another problem with the tree is that most of the primary and secondary branches had just grown too long. Again, the only place for the tree to grow going forward was out. Not okay.
So with today’s tough love, this tree is going to begin its next building phase in 2017. This will go very quickly, because I’ve got a large root mass with not so much demand to begin the growing season. I can grow this tree out and prune it back fairly hard about three times next year. By season’s end, the silhouette will be pretty much where it was before I massacred it. Now, another (not so hard) pruning will happen next fall, to build the next phase in 2018. But one step at a time.
I’d love to know what you think of the work I did today. Leave a comment below.
by Zach Smith | Oct 15, 2016 | Care, Collecting, Elms, Potting
To answer the question first, I don’t know. If this Cedar elm (Ulmus crassifolia) survives, then the answer will be yes but I won’t have any idea of what my success rate would be if I lifted a bunch of them at this time of year. That’s a question I’ll have to answer down the road. But I do want to show you one key pointer if you decide to do some elm collecting of your own.
First of all, here’s the victim – I mean subject – of today’s experiment. It’s a field-grown Cedar elm that’s been in the ground for four years. It started off as a pencil-thin seedling, and has now grown to a trunk girth of 1.5″; the height is about eight feet. This makes it ideal for a medium-size upright bonsai.
The lift was done per my usual technique, namely a cordless reciprocating saw. It took about four or five minutes to cut it free (we’ve having a mini-drought right now, so the ground is harder to penetrate and that slowed me down).
Here’s the specimen topped, lifted, root base roughly chopped with lopping shears, and washed. It’s got some nice roots.
Now, I left the tap root long intentionally, because elms possess a peculiar feature that works against the bonsai artist. In this next photo you’ll see exactly what I mean.
Notice how the bark in the root zone has peeled away perfectly from the sapwood? This happens at both ends of the tree, incidentally. And it means death for the tissue beneath, period. You have to avoid this problem or your wonderful new pre-bonsai elm is not going to turn out the way you want it to.
The answer is the saw. Every cutting tool you use, even when they’re very very sharp, tends to put force onto what you’re cutting. This torsion almost invariably causes the bark to separate from the sapwood, if only slightly. But any separation tends to cause some tissue death. By using the saw, you can either cut through root, trunk or branch completely and cleanly, or you can score around them and then make the cut. If you do score around, it’s still best to saw through.
And finally, the tree is potted into its nursery container. As I said, I don’t know yet if this tree will survive being lifted this time of year. I do know it has good roots, and I know it has food stored for winter already, so it’s just a matter of whether or not the tree decides to live.
Cedar elm is one of my best deciduous trees for the bonsai beginner – and everyone who loves elms should have one. I expect to have a good supply this coming year.
by Zach Smith | Oct 14, 2016 | Care, Elms, Potting, Styling, Tools, Water Elm
Many of you have followed the saga of my “Root around cypress knee” Water-elm. You may recall that earlier this year I reported that the knees were rotting away – an unavoidable situation. I went ahead and removed the last section a few months ago, adding in soil to fill the space. Then I left the tree alone.
2016 marks the fourth year of training for this bonsai. Water-elms are fast to train, easily reaching showable condition in three years. In the case of this broom-form specimen, year four has brought increased ramification and maturing of the branch structure. Here’s a shot of the tree, taken today.
This specimen tends to experience fall early, so a lot of the leaves are already off the tree. That provides a good opportunity to see “inside” the tree, which is essential when you’re ready to begin refining your bonsai.
In the case of broom-form bonsai that are created from trunk-chopped specimens, there comes a point where you have to make those transitions look right. To illustrate what I mean, take a look at this tree a couple of months after I collected it:
I always make a straight cut when trunk-chopping. This helps the tree produce buds where I want them – an angled cut sounds good, but you don’t always get a bud at the top of the angle-cut – which forces you to chop a second time.
Here’s one of those chops today. You can see that I carved it down in the past. That was the correct step at that particular time. Now I’m at the stage where I need to carve this down smooth, and I need to take steps to preserve the wood.
Here’s the other original leader; you can see the rough cut marks from my knob cutter. This also needs carving.
After carving the main leader. I used a cordless Dremel Multi-Pro® to do the work. Notice that the carved area is designed to shed water. This is very important. You don’t want any of the larger cuts on your bonsai to hold water, as this will promote rot.
Here are two other spots I carved, the secondary leader and a spot on the main leader where I had removed a larger branch. These cuts have been treated with PC Petrifier®, to seal them and prevent rot.
Next spring I’ll cut this tree back fairly hard, in order to begin creating the next level of ramification. By cutting back hard, I’ll be able to prevent the tree from growing out of scale. This is a common error made by many artists, namely, letting the tree grow out of its proportions. One cause of this is the natural reticence to do the hard pruning necessary as you’re building out the tree. Once you’ve done it a few times, however, it gets easier – and your trees are much better off for it.
Here are the tree’s stats, by the way: trunk diameter 2.5″ above the root crown; root spread 9″ from the front view; height 21″ from the soil; spread 16″. I’d estimate the age of the tree to be about 75 years. The pot is a custom rectangle by Bryon Myrick.
I plan to offer this tree for sale next year, after I’ve completed the first round of training in spring. If you’re interested send me an email and I’ll give you the details.
