by Zach Smith | Jan 7, 2017 | Care, Collecting, Oaks, Potting
So you’ve already seen the wintry cover that blew in yesterday for me. Our high today looks like being about 38F, and this means a lot of things remain and will remain frozen at least until tomorrow. Does that stop the bonsai collector? Bah!
So here’s a Willow oak, Quercus phellos, I’ve been growing in the ground for a few years now to thicken up. It’s done just what I had in mind early on, namely, grown two trunks from near the base which would eventually produce a nice tapering shorter specimen. Even though I have two options for chopping, my eye is on the thinner of the two trunks.
Step one was to chop the trunks down to remove the bulk of the growth and allow me to get closer to the base. By the way, you may see advice along the lines of leaving the trunk of your specimen long so you can use it as leverage when you’re ready to bend the tree over and get at the taproot. This doesn’t work in practice – you can only use about two feet of trunk to do this. Anything past that tends to be so flexible it just bends over and does you no good.
Here’s the tree, out of the ground with the roots washed off (in a puddle – my watering system is still frozen solid) and cut back to fit a bonsai pot.
And now the key chops are made. Don’t these proportions look awesome? The tree has a base of 1.5-1.75″ and is now 7″ to the chop. I see a finished height of less than 12″, which means this is going to be a shohin Willow oak bonsai in 3-5 years. Notice the awesome radial roots!
I happened to have a couple of tubs of soil stacked one atop the other. This is the only reason I had soil to work with that wasn’t frozen into a solid chunk. I also had to water the tree in that shallow puddle of water left over from the storm, as that was all I had outside to work with. But no matter. You can’t stop the bonsai collector!
by Zach Smith | Jan 6, 2017 | Care, Collecting, Oaks, Potting, Styling
It was so much fun making a quick Hackberry bonsai last weekend that I did the same thing with a Water oak, Quercus nigra. This tree is a volunteer that has been growing on my property for several years now. I liked the form it took naturally.
If you look closely you can see a nice twin-trunk that has grown on its own that way. Though I could certainly reduce this specimen to a single trunk, I decided to lift it to see what all was there.
Here’s the tree lifted, with the roots washed. There’s too much in the top of this specimen, but it’s a lot easier to see the trunk base. I like what I’m seeing. Remember, selecting deciduous (and some broadleaf evergreen) bonsai material goes along the lines of trunk then rootage. If you’ve got a good trunk – good size, movement, taper, character – you can make good roots and you’ll certainly have to make the crown.
I also have good roots with this one, by the way.
Next came the proportioning. The tree was way too tall and way too “spready” when it came out of the ground. So I simply cut back everything that didn’t look like a bonsai and brought the silhouette inward so the tree made proportional sense.
And here we are, a quick Chuck Iker pot later. Doesn’t the color of the pot go well with the color of the leaves?
You may be wondering, When does this water oak go dormant? Well, water oak often will hold its leaves most of the way through winter. It’s not quite like live oak, which loses its leaves as the new leaves are emerging, but boy does it come close. A neat feature of the species.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one. I think I’ll either try to wire the branches, which are too straight, or simply cut them off altogether and start from the new buds I’m sure to get where the branches used to be. What would you do?
by Zach Smith | Jan 2, 2017 | Care, Elms, Potting, Soil, Styling
And so, armed with some new handmade pots that I wrote about yesterday, my trigger finger has suddenly gotten itchy. To satisfy my need to create bonsai, I went out to my growing area and decided this Hackberry, Celtis laevigata, could be successfully lifted and made into something that can look good immediately this spring.
This one has been in the ground about four years, starting its bonsai journey as a pencil-thick seedling. This past year the tree put on a lot of strong growth, which helped thicken the trunk base to about 1″ diameter. But there’s a really long and straight section of trunk that continues on from the lower trunk area, which by the way has some nice movement. What would you do with something like this?
Here’s the answer I saw. By taking off the main trunk at the point where those two nice sub-trunks emerged, I now have a rudimentary crown for a bonsai that just happened to grow on its own for me. Makes sense, right? So the next move was to cut the tree out of the ground.
Another really nice thing about this Hackberry is that it came up with a good root system. Since the tree did not grow in place from seed, there wasn’t a tap root to have to deal with. So I’ve got a head start on good radial roots and a fibrous root system.
Now everything’s been pruned back where it needs to be for now. I’ve established a nice set of proportions in the crown of the tree that complements the size and height of the trunk. The roots have been cut back to fit a bonsai pot. And isn’t that trunk movement and character nice for a young tree?
And so, taking one of those nice Byron Myrick ovals I wrote about yesterday, I’ve now got a neat little Hackberry bonsai-to-be. Assuming all goes well, this tree will have a pretty complete broom-form design by the end of the 2017 growing season. I’ll post it for sale sometime in the spring.
Let me know what you think. Have you worked with Hackberry before?
by Zach Smith | Jan 1, 2017 | Care, Elms, Potting, Styling
So I’m getting ready for the 2017 bonsai growing season, and that means stocking in my first round of bonsai pots. Now, the world of handmade bonsai pots is an art all to itself. This is not to suggest that there’s anything wrong with inexpensive training pots, of course – I use them myself from time to time. But my preference is to use nice handmade pieces of art to create my bonsai compositions. Art in art, right?
Yesterday I visited Byron Myrick’s studio and came away with 14 pieces. These coupled with the five I had had shipped in by Chuck Iker last week (the first five shown below) gives me a great head-start on my 2017 work. Don’t these two guys create awesome pots? If you prefer potting your own trees and really want to show them to best advantage, you can’t go wrong with either of these top-flight artists.
I have a personal preference for glazed pots, as you can probably tell. Since I grow mostly deciduous trees, the glazed pot is a natural complement – though frankly I’ll use a glazed pot on any species as long as the color works.
Tune in tomorrow to find out what happened with one of these pots and this Hackberry (Celtis laevigata):
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 18, 2016 | Care, Collecting, Hornbeam, Potting, Styling, Wiring
American hornbeam, Carpinus caroliniana, is hands-down one of the best bonsai species for beginners. I’ll be out looking for new material next month, but in the meantime I had this lone specimen left on the bench. I collected it last year. What I liked about it, aside from the size and obvious potential, was that it featured rough bark. This happens sometimes with hornbeam, but frankly it’s unusual.
This tree took its time coming out in Spring 2016, so I fed, watered and otherwise ignored it. Only recently did I take note of how well the leader thickened up as the growing season drew near its close. That told me one thing, that the tree had produced a great root system. This is typical for American hornbeam.
Given the fact that next month it’ll be time to go collect new hornbeams, I thought it might be a good time to play around with this one (it’s hard not to make bonsai, regardless of the time of year).
The first order of business was to address the chop. The tree had produced a nice bud right at the chop, and that bud had grown into a very strong leader. No time like the present to make the angled cut that will produce the tapering transition needed in the apex.
Here’s the tool of choice for this operation – a trunk splitter. It takes a bit of practice, but you eventually become adept at figuring out just the right spot to begin the angled cut.
This is as far as I can go with the trunk splitter. Now it’s time for the knob cutters.
And this is the final result. Now I have a good angled cut that takes the original trunk right into the new leader. As the leader grows and fills out, it’ll continue to thicken which will make the tapering transition look smooth and natural.
Given how strong the tree’s root system is, I felt it was perfectly all right to go ahead and put it into this nice unglazed Chuck Iker round. I’ve wired the branches in the apex and wired up a new leader. Once the 2017 growing season is over, I think this will be a stunning tree. And isn’t the fall color nice, too?
This tree does have one significant flaw I need to address next year. It lacks a nice surface root in the front of the tree. I plan to layer it this coming spring. Given how vigorously hornbeams root, I’m confident I’ll be successful.
Do you grow American hornbeam? Have you had good luck with the species? Leave us a comment below.
