Haircut Time For Water-elms

by | May 24, 2020 | Care, Elms, Most Recent, Pruning, Styling, Water Elm

haircut time for water-elms

the bonsai files

Sneak Peak

I’ve written about shearing bonsai during their development – a procedure now popularized as “hedge-pruning.” I recently pulled a few Water-elms that had grown enough to need a haircut. See how that went below.

Haircut Time For Water-Elms

We’re at that point in the growing season where it’s time to cut back the rampant growth on trees heavily into their primary development phase.

This triple-trunk specimen is new in its pot for the 2020 season. As the weather has warmed up, the growth has accelerated. Water-elms love the heat, so they grow very nicely during summer (provided you keep the afternoon sun off the pot).

It’s time to prune this one back. The fastest and best way to do this is to shear it to a good silhouette.

This process takes just a few minutes, and it’s pretty much as simple as it sounds. You just take your shears and trim to a shape that’s pleasing and proportionate to the design. You don’t have to be too precise, which is good. I do recommend that you eliminate crossing branches when you do this; they’re a lot easier to spot once you’ve sheared the tree.

(This tree is available at the Shop.)

This raft-style Water-elm was potted up earlier in the season. With the fast growth kicking in, it’s time for a haircut.

This makes a good silhouette, and will be the ultimate outer shape of the bonsai. With that said, it’s important to realize that as this tree ramifies, the detailed branching will change as I directionally prune. For now, I’ve done what I need to do. Back-budding will give me new choices as I go forward with it. But for now, this is what’s needed.

(This tree is also available at the Shop.)

This specimen is in my personal collection, and was initially potted last summer. As part of that process, I wired and positioned the branches needing it. This is essential with all of the bonsai you make. The branching of each tree must be both horticulturally sound, as well as aesthetically pleasing. This is especially true of deciduous species, because when winter comes if you haven’t done a good job at this the bare branches will rat you out.

Here’s the result for this stage of development. In addition to shearing to shape, I also did a somewhat hard-pruning to encourage back-budding. But notice the positions of the branches and their relationship to one another. Again, I’m working toward a design that will be pleasing both during the growing season as well as winter, when the finer structure of the tree will be easy to see.

Let me know what you think. Do you use shearing as part of your design work on deciduous and broadleaf evergreens that backbud well?

BC Forest – Would You?

by | May 16, 2020 | Bald Cypress, Care, Most Recent, Styling, ZPC

bc forest – would you?

the bonsai files

Sneak Peak

It’s common to have to redesign bonsai over time. A branch dies; you find a better front; and in the case of established forest plantings you lose trees, which have to be replaced. Here’s one of those cases, and what I’m thinking of doing about it. But would you?

BC Forest – Would You?

For those of you who have been following my blog for the past few years, you probably recall seeing this Bald cypress forest that was left to me by my late bonsai friend Allen Gautreau. This is the earliest photo I have of the forest, which Allen did a great job putting together and maintaining.

It is worth noting that the forest started out life as nine trees. Time and chance reduced the number, and when I got it there were five.

I decided to move the forest to a new container, a vintage tray by the late Richard Robertson, a few months later. I also did a little redesigning, as I thought the placement of the secondary group was too close to the primary. I also snugged the trees in a little bit.

The next overwintering claimed the largest specimen in the secondary group.

Here we are, in the third growing season since the repotting. All of the trees are doing well, but of course there’s that problem of the fifth tree. The obvious thing to do would be to plant another small seedling and get it on its way to maturity in the forest. But what if there’s another answer?

What if I go bigger – quite a bit bigger? I recently acquired this specimen, which looked like a natural future flat-top. I re-chopped it yesterday, and will start the crown-building process once I have the new shoots I need. But in the meantime ….

What if the original forest, with its original focal specimen, suddenly became the smaller trees? I’m thinking that the big tree will look best not out front, which is typical, but rather as a towering specimen that pushes the forest perspective in what would be the opposite direction from normal practice. We try to create the impression of depth in our forest plantings by having larger trees placed toward the front of the container. This is the most common way of doing things, and it works great. But who’s to say you can’t reverse that, under the right circumstances, and end up with a forest planting that works visually and artistically.

I’m thinking I’m going to do this soon. The question is, Would you?

Stay tuned for updates.

Update 5/17: I had a large forest tray on the bench that Byron Myrick made for me several years ago. Although the color would not be my first choice for a BC forest, the size seems to be just right.

I think there’s a lot of potential in this design. I’ll know if it’s paid off once I’m able to build the crown of the primary tree. I the meantime, I think this has the makings of a pretty nice forest. How about you?

Maple Sunday

by | May 3, 2020 | Care, Maples, Potting, Pruning, Styling

maple sunday

the bonsai files

Sneak Peak

The maples are going gangbusters right now. Some have been cut back a couple of times already. This sort of rapid growth is not only common, but essential with collected trees that are in the recovery process. The faster the recovery growth, the faster you can design your tree. Simple stuff.

maple sunday

You get a lot of bang for your buck during spring, with newly collected trees. Once they take off, you’re able to take advantage of strong growth all over the tree to accomplish the goals you have at that particular time. Deciduous trees harvested from the wild are typically trunk-chopped and potted, and typically don’t have any branching at all. We variously describe them as trunks, stumps or even the humorous “stick in a pot.”

You’ve seen this Boxelder before. I had the advantage when it was collected of an alternative leader emerging low on the trunk, and this I knew would save me development time, possibly even a year’s worth. I spotted an appropriately placed bud on this leader, then nurtered it as it grew out tenuously. As you can see in this photo, that tenuous bud cum shoot is now over two feet long and thickening rapidly. I have no intention of cutting it back any time soon. Every inch it grows helps thicken the section of new trunk below it. This is exactly what you want when working a trunk chop.

Now let’s move over to Swamp maples. We collected several this year so I could expand on my learning experiment/adventure with the species. This one is a nice twin-trunk, and like the other maples has put on all of this branch growth since the tree first started budding back in late February.

Today’s chore: selective pruning. I have way more shoots than I’m going to need, so there’s no point in keeping the extra. This is a way you direct energy in your trees. By removing unwanted growth, the tree tends to redistribute its energy to what’s left. Not that they won’t rebud where you take off branches, which is almost always going to happen, you just give the remaining branches a chance to outpace them and get better established (while you rub off those insistent buds when they pop out). In time the battle ends, and those buds that pushed early on stay dormant.

As you can see, I reduced the recovery growth on the smaller trunk dramatically. I have two internodes below the pruning mark, and both will likely sprout buds. I want the lowest one, but I left myself two chances because that’s the smart thing to do.

On the larger trunk, I just pruned away shoots that won’t be needed, and shortened the strong right-hand shoot near the apex so it doesn’t overwhelm the others. The leader I want is the highest shoot on the left near the apex.

Here’s the Swamp maple I wrote about recently. As you probably remember, my whole plan with this tree was to develop it as quickly as I could and rush it into a pot. My goal in this is to try and gain a better understanding of how to successfully collect, develop and maintain this species without losing specimens to fungal attack. My thinking has centered around the concept that there’s some factor in the native soil that is vital to the tree’s survival.

So here’s the tree is a reasonably oversized pot, a nice Byron Myrick oval. I did have to remove a little of the tap root that came home with the tree, but that shouldn’t affect things too dramatically. There’s still a lot of native muck surrounding the roots.

The branches are overlong, but this will be corrected once they thicken up some more. I have internodes closer to the trunk whose buds will activate once I do the pruning – hopefully by late summer.

I don’t expect to know if I’ve been successful for a couple of years, but if everything works out I will have cut years off the development of this tree as a bonsai.

For now, we wait.

A Little Evening Fun With A Crape Myrtle

by | Apr 23, 2020 | Care, Crape myrtle, Flowering, Potting, Pruning, Styling

I was walking through the benches this evening and this Crape myrtle caught my eye. I started it from a cutting several years ago, and haven’t done more than maybe rough-prune it once. Today it called out “make something out of me” as I passed by. So I took it to the work bench, figuring it would make a fun 10-minute project.

(I apologize for the low-light photo. Late in the evening, sun going down, you know.)

When you have a piece of material like this, you have to always think about proportions. This Crape is a small shrub in a nursery pot. Making a bonsai-to-be out of it requires adjusting its proportions. This is one of the challenges I see beginners face all the time.

A few minutes of pruning changes everything! With the height of this specimen dramatically reduced, we now have a workable trunk thickness to height and spread ratio. It actually looks like a much larger specimen. So when it gets to its bonsai pot, it’ll possess the necessary “treeness.”

This is what I had in mind when I first noticed this Crape on the bench this evening. It’s not a huge specimen, but it looks like a full-grown Crape myrtle. A little more shearing is needed, but that’s easy-peasy.

What style of bonsai is this? It’s the well-known “I’m not sure but I like it anyway” style. But seriously, my plan is to guide it toward the so-called “pierneef” style, the iconic African savannah tree form. By shearing each of the trunks properly, I should be able to get to this result in a year.

Now about the pot. It’s a Lary Howard piece I ordered last year, but unfortunately it was broken in transit by the ever-enthusiastic shipping service. I really loved the pot, so I kept the pieces just so I could learn Kintsugi. This is my first effort. If you look closely, you can see the gold leaf I used along the mended cracks on either side of the front of the pot. Not a bad result at all.

Bon-science And The Swamp Maple

by | Apr 22, 2020 | Care, Maples, Pruning, Styling, Wiring

So I’m probably not the first person to use the term “Bon-science,” but on the off-chance I am then I’ll cheerfully stake my claim.

Swamp maple, or Red maple, or Acer rubrum, or A. rubrum “Drummondii” is a very fine species that grows from South Florida north to Canada, and west to East Texas down here and Minnesota up there. Many folks will tell you they can’t be grown as bonsai because of large leaves that don’t reduce. This is not correct. It is also said that even if you get the leaves to reduce the petioles stay long. This is also not correct. As you get the leaves to reduce, the petioles get shorter so the effect is quite nice.

Anyway, my multi-year experiment consists of collecting trees with a good soil ball and the roots that go with it, and retaining that native soil in order to prevent (however it happens) the top-down rot that has plagued me in years gone by. I’ve had some success with this, as I’ve reported in previous blogs. So I upped my number of candidates this year, just in case I’ve cracked the code. Here’s one of them, at the just got home “stick in a pot” stage.

Here we are two months later, in the kind-of-sad “I only have a right arm and it’s been wired and stuck out to the side” stage. Hey, every bonsai starts somewhere. Why’d I do this, you may ask? Just to keep that branch cool while other growth caught up. The last thing I needed was for that one to gain strength and get so thick I could no longer bend it. Pre-emptive bending, I suppose.

Here’s what a month will do for you, if it’s late-March to late-April and you have roots that need to express themselves. Lonely right branch has lots of friends now.

Wire applied, and I’ve got my first two branches on their way.

Then in one fell swoop I cut away most of the top of this tree. Why? Because I had the opportunity to shorten the tree a bit and make use of an existing branch that had already grown upward on its own. It happened to make a good continuation of the trunk line. Swamp maple exhibits apical dominance, as most trees do, so you typically get a bushy top that you have to fight while making the tree structure. Here I’ve taken out 90% of it in one chop. The tree will try to replace what I cut off. I’ll continue pruning and pinching most of it off while the lower branches gain strength. Sometime next year I’ll have a better balance than I do now, though the tree is never going to completely give up on the idea of getting taller. It’s just part of bonsai.

So my goal with this tree is to make a presentable bonsai out of it in 2020. From harvesting to stick-in-pot to designed tree to potted-up-bonsai. I’ll get some degree of ramification but not much in the way of leaf size reduction. But that’s okay. If I get two years ahead of the curve with this specimen, then my experiment will have been a success. The tree and I can then settle into the refinement phase of its life in a pot.

Elm Sunday

by | Apr 19, 2020 | Care, Chinese Elm, Elms, Pruning, Styling, Water Elm, Wiring
Every tree has its own story, and this Cedar elm is no different. We collected it back in 2018. The bark and trunk character were the thing. As with trees of similar size, it got chopped to about 12″ and put in this pot. Unlike all but one of its fellow draft picks, it refused to bud anywhere but the trunk chop. Many elm species will bud at a trunk chop, and Cedar elm is no different. But it’s really unusual for them to fail to bud along the trunk. My solution, once the tree had grown out long enough for me to be sure if wasn’t going to cooperate, was to chop half the trunk off. I figured that even if it didn’t produce any buds low down, any new growth would allow me to build a tree with a first branch in a good spot. In keeping with its determination, the tree only produced two buds, and both of them were at the new chop point. Hurray (sarc). But okay, we work with what we have. Here’s the tree as it is now. Nice growth.
Here’s a closeup of my new leader. The transition point is thickening very well, and the leader has the added benefit of good tapering. All I need to do is continue to let it grow out.
The other thing that needs doing right now is to go ahead and do an angle cut where my new leader emerges. This is about what you should shoot for when you do these angle cuts. It’s best to go ahead and carve them smooth, especially the edges where callus is going to roll over. If you work with Cedar elm, you’ll learn quickly that they roll callus as well as any species out there, including Trident maple and Bald cypress.
I think this will make the best front, when all is said and done. What do you think?

It’s been a few weeks since I did the initial styling on this Chinese elm. Once these things start growing, it’s amazing what they can do. I first took off all the wire.

First order of business: get rid of that low back branch. I thought I might need it, but now it’s clear I won’t. The original branch set was back-left-back-right. Nothing wrong with this. But there’s also nothing wrong with left-back-right. And considering the size and eventual height of this specimen, I don’t think that first back branch is going to look right. The other thing I’ve done here is to remove the sub-branches close to the trunk. This is a key to proper design. Now, there are cases where you may want to leave some branching near the base of the primary branch in order to create or improve taper of the branch; but that’s not necessary here, so I’ve simplified my life by going ahead and taking it off.
The last thing that needs doing today is to wire and reposition the left branch at the bottom and the corresponding right branch farther up (the back branch in between did not require repositioning). I need a lot more growth from this tree before it will begin to look like something worthwhile. I anticipate getting the new leader to a point this season where it’s about twice its current thickness. And that will put me in a good position for next year’s work.
This Water-elm is a 2018 recruit. I loved the trunk character when I first spotted it, and it’s just been a building chore ever since it first started throwing recovery shoots. The process is pretty simple once you’ve done it a few times. The chore of the day is to do the first trim for 2020. Also, notice how I have a couple of shoots emerging from that empty spot on the left side of the trunk between the lowest back branch and the left-hand branch farther up the trunk. I needed something in this spot, and the tree decided to cooperate. Love it when that happens.
Here I’ve wired and positioned that new left-hand branch. I’ll let it grow untrimmed for the next several weeks.
The remaining chore for today is to rough-prune (hedge) the crown and any lower branch that is thick enough. The branches that need more thickening are left alone for now. I was pleased with this result for today … until I wasn’t. I’ve commented before about the value you can get out of photographing your trees. As long as you understand and allow for any visual disagreement between the eye lens and the camera lens, photos can reveal flaws in your trees that you might not otherwise notice or take seriously enough. Now, you can usually work around or hide your trees’ flaws; in fact, much of the art of bonsai is doing just this. Rarely do we have perfect trees to work on, but rather imperfect trees that we can work to perfect or at least make better. In the case of this tree, I finally had to throw in the towel on its inescapable flaw. Nothing I’ve done so far has allowed me to get around it.
Yes, it was that long untapering stretch of trunk. My rule of thumb when I work on trees is that, whether trunk or branch, if you have an untapering section it can run for either two or three basal diameters before a reduction has to occur. In the case of this tree, I had a section that ran about six diameters without any taper. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it except to cut most of it off. The tree looks a bit odd now, but rest assured that the branch emerging from the chop point is going to backbud some more. And because I’m going to let it grow out untrimmed for several weeks, I should have a much better crown in the making by late summer. Stay tuned. (It’s worth noting that in an earlier post on this tree a reader pointed out the flaw in the trunk to me. I managed to ignore the obvious until today. You’ll probably have the same experience many times on your bonsai journey.) Leave me a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.