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 | Dec 31, 2015 | Care, Oaks, Potting, Soil
I’ve shown you this willow oak, Quercus phellos, a couple of times before. It sprouted as a volunteer seedling in an old garden area well over 10 years ago, and has been growing there ever since. I didn’t start cutting it back until I moved my garden and pulled up the concrete blocks surrounding this and other trees. That’s when I noticed its potential. What struck me especially about this specimen was the lovely twin trunks. They’re fused together perfectly, just like a young married couple.
In my study of this specimen, it occurred to me that there’s a limit to how thick I’d be able to grow the trunk, for the simple reason that there needs to remain an ample spread between the trunks. The thicker this trunk gets, the more the spread closes. So to preserve this critical feature, I decided to lift it today so it can begin its life as a bonsai.
The first order of business was to cut it back, to allow me to get in and saw it out of the ground. You can see the potential of this tree a lot better with only this much work having been done.
The tree was out of the ground in just a few minutes. Here’s a shot of it after I washed all the native soil off the roots.
You can see, in the photo before and this one, that I have a couple of choices in my lateral roots. This is a common thing with trees you lift. All too often, however, the second, lower set of roots emerges from a trunk that is smaller in diameter than the trunk above the top set of roots. This inverse taper is extremely difficult to correct; usually the only answer is to layer the tree down the road. In this case, I’m in luck. The trunk base is actually slightly thicker below the higher set of roots. This makes my choice an easy one, even more so because I have three well-spaced lateral roots to provide visual stability. So I took off the higher set of roots, cut back the lower ones more proportionally and potted the tree.
Here’s the final result. I love the color of this rounded-corner Byron Myrick rectangle. Willow oak leaves often turn a bright yellow in fall – certainly more reliably so, farther north than I am. This should make for a great complement when the time comes.
If you’d like to take on the development of this willow oak, the tree is available at our new Oak Bonsai sale page. The trunk base is 2″ in diameter at the soil surface, and it’s 13.5″ in height to the taller of the two chops. The finished height should be roughly 16-18″. The lateral roots are buried to protect them. The tree can be lifted slightly to expose these roots at the first repotting.
by Zach Smith | Oct 10, 2015 | Care, Elms, Hawthorn, Potting, Pruning, Soil
Water-elm, Planera aquatica, is one of my big-two bonsai species along with bald cypress. I’ve probably worked on more water-elms than any other species, and I may very well have worked on more than anyone else in the art. I’ve written on more than one occasion about water-elm collecting season, which is typically July of each year for me. Most of the specimens I’ve acquired have been collected in July. I have had occasion to collect in August – successfully, I might add – and even in January. But I recently learned that it’s possible to collect the species in October. Because my August success rate this year wasn’t all that great, I decided it was time to push the water-elm collecting envelope and see what happens.
This one came with a soil ball clinging to the roots. I don’t always get a soil ball – much less than half the time, in fact – but I’m always glad when it happens. If you look past the grass you can see the trunk base I saw. Definitely a worthwhile piece of material if it lives.
With all of the native soil washed off, you can see all the nice roots that came with this one. When I collect trees I’m primarily interested in the trunk. Roots can be grown pretty easily, and the whole branch structure has to be grown almost every time. It’s the trunk, and especially those with age and character, that are worth the hunt.
I included this photo to show you one of the reasons you have to be very careful with certain elm species. On both American elms and water-elms, the bark will peel easily on branches/sub-trunks you’re cutting as well as chops and, perhaps most significantly, roots. Even with sharp tools you have the potential for this to happen. If it does, do your best to do as I did in this case, peel away the bark along the wood you’re discarding. Then you can come back and cleanly cut the strip of bark.
Now everything’s cleaned up and I’ve made the final cut of the trunk to the length I want. The roots are cut flat and trimmed to fit, ultimately, the size bonsai pot this tree will reside in.
Potted in a nursery container. As always I’ve buried the roots deep enough to prevent their drying out.
The trunk base of this specimen is 3″, and it’s 13″ to the chop. The trunk character is really nice.
So, what with all the envelope pushing I got a wild hair and decided to find out if hawthorns can be collected in October. This is a nice old riverflat hawthorn, Crataegus opaca, with a 2″ trunk base.
More good luck with roots, as you can see. This one has a fine radial root system.
And snugged into its pot until next spring. The angle of the photo doesn’t allow the taper to show as well as it could. The base of this tree is 2″ and the diameter of the chop is 1″, which is the ratio you need. The height to the chop is 18″ from the soil surface. I’m thinking it could be chopped again by 3-4″, but this decision doesn’t have to be made right away. Once your hawthorns are recovered from collecting you have a lot of latitude in working with them.
by Zach Smith | Aug 24, 2015 | Care, Potting, Pruning, Soil, Wiring
The typical bonsai enthusiast is initially captivated by seeing either a real-life bonsai or a photograph in a book or magazine (or even on TV!). These tiny trees seem almost to jump out at you. But what is it about them? Why do they instantly amaze? The secret, quite simply, lies in how the bonsai is artistically designed.
To begin at the beginning, by definition a bonsai is a tree in a tray. That’s exactly what the word means: “bon” for tray, “sai” meaning to plant. Going beyond the basic definition, a bonsai is a representation, on a small scale, of a fully grown, mature tree in nature. It is meant to mimic the features of its natural counterpart, while not precisely copying them in scale. The practical meaning of this is, if the leaves on an eighty foot-tall oak in nature are five inches long each, shrinking that tree to two feet in height would require the leaves to be just over one-tenth of an inch in length. It would be hard to make out an individual leaf on such a tree, which would hamper rather than enhance its appearance.
So with this said, what are the basics of bonsai design? Here we can look to universal principles of design for our answer. Consider a landscape painting, for example. In order for the artist to portray a representation of an actual landscape scene on a flat canvas, he or she must take into account a number of factors. But the first necessity is the very same one the bonsai artist must take into account: fooling the brain into seeing something besides what’s in front of it. What does this mean? Again consider the landscape painting. It’s really nothing more than a piece of cloth with a shallow smattering of medium-infused pigments arranged in such a way as to represent earth, trees, grass, and so forth. Yet when viewed the brain can clearly grasp a scene that might very well appear somewhere in nature. There’s color and perspective, depth, form, shading; this evokes emotions. So too with a bonsai. A bonsai is essentially a landscape “painting.” When properly designed it has color and perspective, depth, form, and shading. And it most certainly evokes emotions. Perhaps the best thing is, it’s alive!
But bonsai is three-dimensional to begin with. This might seem as if it would lessen the problem of creating depth and perspective in our “living landscape painting,” but the truth is it makes this more difficult to achieve. Why? For the simple reason that the typical bonsai only measures from a few up to about 30 inches from front to back. Thus the brain must be tricked somehow into believing this depth is much, much greater (and not just thirty or forty feet, because the world continues on past your tree!). In addition to this, since a typical bonsai only measures from a few up to about 48 inches in height the brain must be tricked into believing this height is much, much greater. Finally, we must somehow manage to represent that part of the landscape which supports the tree – we have to grab a “slice of the earth” as it were. In sum, what you have when you pot up a small tree is basically a small tree in a pot. Much more goes into making it look right.
Let’s summarize what we know so far. Making a bonsai look right means making a small living tree appear to be much taller and larger than it is, and though viewed from an extremely close distance appear to be much farther away than it is. This is exactly the same effect the landscape painter works to achieve: on a flat canvas viewed from perhaps six feet away, a vista stretching for hundreds of feet or even hundreds of miles. Given this, let’s work through the design process that makes a bonsai a bonsai.
Trees visually consist of a root base, trunk, branches, and leaves. Unseen is the network of roots that provides the support, but we know it’s there. When you observe a beautiful tree standing alone in, say, a meadow, you grasp its entirety regarding its height and spread, its shape, its structure – in short, you get a sense of quiet majesty. The tree speaks to you while saying nothing. It stands firm and sure, gripping the earth. In the course of a year, it puts on fresh foliage, grows itself larger and stouter or at least renews itself if very old, bears fruit, shows brilliant colors as its chlorophyll breaks down, then drops its leaves in preparation for the necessary dormancy. Stability, or the appearance of longevity, is thus a key factor in making a tree a tree. Bonsai are no different. You want the tree to appear as if it’s been quietly living its life in its pot, standing against the elements and time. Stability implies a balance between the tree and the earth. Thus we find our way to the first definitive design factor for the tree – a balanced though asymmetric (i.e., non-static – more on this later), stable stance. In order to achieve this, we take advantage of the most stable of the three dimensional shapes – the (scalene) cone pointed upward. When viewed from a point designated as the front, this shape sits on a horizontal base and features unequal sides. In order to make our bonsai appear to be stable, we shape them to fit within the confines of a scalene cone. Now, this does not mean the tree is simply a lopsided Christmas tree with a broad base of foliage terminating in a tiny little point. It means that the combination of positive and negative space occupied by the tree conforms to this shape. Here’s an example:
Notice that even though you can’t see the entire cone in this picture, it’s nevertheless there as far as the brain is concerned (it’s represented here as a triangle; the implied front-to-back depth of the planting produces in the brain an impression of a cone shape). It consists of both positive space, namely the tree’s branch structure, along with negative space where nothing appears. It also captures the network of roots by suggestion; remember, the rootage of a tree in nature extends far beyond the confines of the branch structure. So it’s visually stable. Notice the tree is planted in the container in such a way that there’s a broad expanse of empty ground to the right-hand side of the tree. This asymmetry both enhances visual stability and prevents the composition from being static, which means it prompts the eye to move around and through the tree continually rather than focusing in any one spot.
And so, with our first design factor understood, it’s time to move on to our next factor: making your tree look taller than it really is. To be continued …
by Zach Smith | Aug 9, 2015 | Care, Soil, Sweetgum, Wiring
We’re about six weeks away from the end of the 2015 growing season. There’s still some growth left on my bonsai, though the rate has slowed for most and we’re seeing typical signs of summer heat stress. Sometime in September will come the fall thickening in our trees’ branches, so any wire still on them will have to be watched closely and removed before it causes problems.
Today it was time to do a little trimming and cleaning up of a few sweetgums. Pots needed some scrubbing. Soil, a little top-dressing.
This tree is really developing some good ramification in its fourth year of training. I’ve got an issue with the first right-hand branch (the only one not in the crown); it’s weakened in the past year and isn’t likely to survive into next year. Pretty standard shading out, given the slant of the tree and nature. I do have a very small shoot that arose this past spring where another right-side branch once was; I’m hoping it’ll strengthen next year and allow me to rebalance the design.
The trunk base on this bonsai is 3″ in diameter. It measures 25″ to the tip of the crown. Pot is by Paul Katich.
Here’s my sweetgum forest I just built this year. The two replacement trees survived and are growing. Oddly enough, the weakest tree of this group was the main one. But I think they’ll all be with me come next spring.
There are 11 trees in this forest. The overall height is 36″, with the largest tree sporting a trunk base of 1.75″. Pot is by Byron Myrick
Finally, there’s the small bunjin specimen that appears on my Sweetgum Bonsai sales page. As with tree number one above, this one is developing nice ramification – but in only its first year of training. And the leaf size has reduced surprisingly well. Only a few leaves are 1″ in length; most are less than that, with some only 1/2″. Not bad for a species that sports 5″ long leaves in nature.
This one has a 1/2″ trunk base and is 19″ tall. Pot is by Chuck Iker.
by Zach Smith | May 2, 2015 | Care, Potting, Soil, Sweetgum
With May upon us, it’s time once again to do some serious things with sweetgums. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, collecting sweetgum in winter has not been a happy experience for me in times past. With a success rate of less than 30%, I would just end up scratching my head. Why would sweetgum not respond as other species do? I finally stumbled upon my answer: wait till May.
I’m sure you recognize this sumo-style specimen. I collected it back in 2012, and have let it grow out with some periodic training since then. I’ve been anticipating repotting time, especially because of the big “club” sticking out on the left-hand side of the base. Pretty unattractive – but it was more or less all the root that I was able to recover when I collected the tree. Today it was time to (hopefully) correct the problem.
My first order of business was to pull the tree from its tub and wash off all the old soil – which, incidentally, was too heavy for the tree. Here’s the result: an amazing amount of roots, all of which grew from nothing but the stump I collected and the awkward “club” root hanging off to the side.
For comparison sake, here’s a shot from the other side of the tree. You can see that when I collected this stump I literally sawed off whatever was projecting off the right-hand side. The tree has responded by producing nice roots directly off that cut. In a couple of years I’ll be able to carve the area to make the transition smoother.
Here’s the cut that needed to be made today. You may be able to see a smaller root that comes off this one toward the front. Since I had this to work with, I was much less concerned about just hacking the offending root off. But no matter, I expect roots to sprout at the edges of the cut.
Here’s a view from the front. Yes, it does look a bit abrupt, but to my eye it looks a lot better than what I started with.
The final step, with the tree potted into a much smaller nursery container. I think it looks a lot better without that big root emerging on the left side. What do you think?
