Bald Cypress Progression

by | Dec 28, 2019 | Bald Cypress, Care, Pruning, Styling, Wiring, ZPC

Zach’s Personal Collection

bald cypress

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Bald Cypress

 

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bald cypress

Updates are in date order beginning with the first date Zach began documenting the progression.

2015

This Bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) came home in 2015, and I knew from the start that I was keeping it for my personal collection. A BC of this size, 6″ trunk (6″ above the soil), will invariably take about 10 years to reach a “finished,” showable state. So as of the end of the 2019 growing season, I’m halfway there.

2016

I got really good growth the first year the tree was on my bench. That encouraged me to defoliate in July of 2016. In this photo, you can see the progress in building a new leader. This must be done properly, or the tree will look unnatural during winter dormancy.

2016

Here’s a closeup to show you the new apex building process, which includes growing a new leader and controlling the powerful rolling callus that BCs typically produce.

2017

Here we are at the beginning of the 2017 growing season. I’ve got a good branch structure going, and my new apex is poised for further thickening. Again, this process is going to take a number of years and can’t be rushed.

I’ve also got the tree potted into a training pot. This will slow the growth, of course, but I’ll still be able to accomplish all of my plans for this tree.

2017

Two months later, the tree is full of foliage and continuing strong development.

2017

Another defoliation in early July. It’s easy to see how much the branches and leader have thickened since the beginning of the year (two photos above).

2017

Here’s a head-on view of the tapering transition point, showing how well the callus is filling in. At the top you can see the “shelf” of wood I left when making the year two chop. This is to prevent the callus at the top of the wound from growing too rapidly and thereby producing a reverse taper at the transition point. The shelf will be carved down either at the end of this growing season, or the beginning of the next.

2019

This closeup, from February of 2019, shows an adjustment I made to the transition point on the left side. The callus did its thing as it was meant to, but there was a bit of a bulge where I didn’t need it. The solution? Carve it down. That makes it look much more natural.

2019

Time for a root-pruning, as the tree has been in this pot for a couple of years now. Many collected trees will re-root with great vigor once you’ve taken them from the wild. It’s a normal response. BC commonly do this.

Note: I don’t defoliate cypresses in the year they get root-pruned.

2019

The tree is root-pruned and back in its home, ready for the 2019 growing season.

2019

This shot was taken in June of 2019. The growth is not quite as vigorous as I’d like, though it isn’t bad. In situations like this, you make sure the tree gets enough fertilizer. I’ve also seen some occasions where BC will get chlorosis, and this specimen looked like it could use some iron. I’ve always found that works well, usually within a few weeks.

2019

A few weeks later, and looking better.

2019

This shot is from December 27th, 2019. I’ve removed the wire from earlier in the season and cleaned up the trunk. The state of development is very pleasing to me, though of course there are still some years ahead before this tree is showable.

With that said, there’s a significant flaw in the design of this tree that I need to address now, before it becomes too hard to do so. Can you spot it? I took the opportunity to write an article illustrating the advanced training technique I used to correct this flaw. If you’re interested in learning more, send me an email and I’ll be glad to forward it to you (it’s in pdf format).

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What Lies Beneath – Zag When You Gotta

by | Dec 24, 2019 | Care, Elms, Potting, Pruning, Styling, Water Elm, Wiring
The mildness of winter (so far) plus the need to get things moving for 2020 encouraged me to pot up this Water-elm. It’s a nice smaller specimen, an unconventional triple-trunk. The larger ones are 3/4″ thick, with the entire base 2″ across. The first thing to figure out is the right front. Here’s one option.
Another option. The trunks seem a little too evenly spaced here.
I think this is it. There’s uneven spacing between the trunks, and good perspective among them. Also nice complementary movement among the trunks.
As for training at this time, I only needed to trim away some unneeded shoots and trim back some others. A little wire for a couple of stronger shoots was also called for. Once growth begins in spring, I’ll look to add more wire and finish the basic design. Then it’s all about grow and clip, which Water-elm seems to have been created for. I’ll have a complete bonsai by the end of the 2020 growing season.
Here’s where the tree zigged on me. When it came out of the ground, there was the main trunk and then, from the base of an original shoot that grew into two of the three current trunks, a large surface root. I left that root when I potted up the tree. Why? To remove it would have rendered the appearance of the tree odd and off-balance at the base, and I wanted to avoid that. At the same time, I left the main root base longer than I should have. True to form, new roots sprouted from all around edge of the cut base. In order to keep them going forward, I’d end up having to pot the tree relatively high in its bonsai pot. That won’t do with this specimen, which needs to be in a low-profile pot in order to look right. The only solution is to zag. I can’t cut off that surface root on the right, so I have to take off a good chuck of the base along with all the roots growing from it.
Here’s what I was able to make happen. The tree now sits low enough in the pot to make a believable multi-trunk specimen. I also retained the balance provided by the root on the right side. I think the zag worked.
The end-result says it all. The pot, by the way, is a nice unglazed Lary Howard round with a unique design cut into it that’s reminiscent of cobblestone. I think it suits the tree very well. Let me know what you think.

More Fall Work – Water-Elm

by | Dec 8, 2019 | Care, Elms, Pruning, Styling, Water Elm, Wiring
This nice Water-elm got its first bonsai pot in late February of this year (2109). I had collected it as a bare trunk, and chopped it where you see the obvious mark.
So here we are, just under 10 months later. There’s been a good bit of wiring and trimming during that time, and the tree is shaping up well. But … time for a cut and style!
Whenever you’re doing this sort of work, you need to examine the tree closely for this problem – namely, overgrown apical branches. Just about everything you’ll grow for bonsai will be apically dominant, and it’s this phenomenon that can literally ruin a tree. I’ve caught this one in time, but I do have to take strong measures to rebalance the tree’s energy.
This is the first step in controlling the imbalance, namely, cutting back the strong branch hard. Now, it will react as you’d expect, and try to regrow what I hacked off. As long as I come right behind and keep the branch trimmed, I’ll win the fight.
The problem is not as bad over on the right, but if I don’t cut back pretty hard it’ll just keep on thickening and get out of balance as the left one did.
And this completes the pruning of the crown of this tree. It’ll bud like crazy some spring, so I’ll need to be on my toes. But I’ll achieve at least tertiary ramification in the crown in 2020.
In this photo, I’ve done the rest of the cleanup pruning and trimming. All that’s left is to do some necessary wiring to get the structure back in line.
All set for the start of the 2020 growing season. This tree should be ready for grow and clip, for the most part, by next summer.

Bonsai Odds & Ends – Oak, Oak, Sweetgum

by | Dec 1, 2019 | Care, Oaks, Pruning, Styling, Sweetgum, Wiring

Here’s a nice smaller Water oak I started working on last year.  Water oak is quickly becoming one of my favorite species, featuring small leaves, short internodes and ease of ramification.  They are very happy in a bonsai pot.

This one budded fairly high on the trunk, but I’m going with what I have.  You can probably tell I’ve been through two rounds of leader building already.  That’s an indispensable process when you work with collected trunks.  Usually you’ll chop fairly low, 10-24″ depending on the size of the tree, then build the tapering transition and a third to more than half of the entire structure of the tree from nothing.  As you can see with this tree, you can make very fast progress.

Snip, wire, shape.  Now the next iteration of the trunk line of this tree has begun.

Incidentally, one of the nice features of Water oak is they often hang onto most of their leaves through winter.  Though certainly not as persistent as Live oaks, you could actually term them persistent-leafed. 

I haven’t published an update on my world-class Willow oak in a while.  Frankly, it had a tough spring and I had to give it some extra attention to get it back to good health.  My secret?  More sun.  Where I have my garden, there are some Willow trees growing and as you may know they grow super fast.  This has brought more shade to that part of the garden, including where I’ve had this tree sitting for a couple of years.  So the extra shade snuck up on both of us.  I relocated the tree to my Bald cypress bench, which is in full sun, and it responded by pushing a lot of good new growth.  We’re both much happer now.

Here’s the tree after a trim last month.  For those of you familiar with this specimen, you may notice I don’t have a low right-hand branch anymore.  Unfortunately (?), I lost that branch this year.  I also acquired some more dead wood.  But is that a bad thing?

Here’s the fall almost-bare look, which gives you a better idea of the new structure of the tree.  I’ve always been a little unhappy with the fact that I had more or less a bar-branch situation in the lower part of the tree.  Of course, the traditional view of things is you would want the low right-hand branch and not the left-hand branch above it.  Well, trees do what they want in the end.  I actually don’t mind this structure at all.  It’s not as unbalanced as you’d expect it to look, and that works for me.  It may have to do with the incredible basal flare on the tree.  I mean, it looks at least a hundred years old (I’d guess it’s about 60 or so).  So for my money, this specimen has enough gravitas to carry just about any design.

I worked on the dead wood some while I was doing a general pruning back.  Oaks have solid wood, of course, so the amount of punky stuff I had to remove was not that great.  I painted on some lime sulfur, and will follow with PC Petrifier in the coming week.

This Sweetgum has been in training for just over a year.  In the Progression I’ve posted, you can see the quick development including the potting that happened almost five months ago.  Now, with the leaves about off the tree, it’s easy to see what needs doing.

Young Sweetgum branches are very supple, so there’s not a big chance of snapping one if you do fall wiring.  Here I’ve put the branches back where they belong, in anticipation of spring.

It’s important to bear in mind, when doing the early development work on a Sweetgum, not to remove terminal buds in fall or winter from non-ramified branches.  This increases the risk of dieback, probably due to auxin withdrawal.  If the branch is ramified, meaning there are multiple terminal buds, removing one or two won’t hurt (just don’t remove them all).

Flat-Top Bald Cypress Design Work

by | Nov 30, 2019 | Bald Cypress, Care, Pruning, Styling, Wiring
This flat-top Bald cypress is coming along really well for a single year of training. With that said, the design can stand some tweaking and fall is a perfect time to do it. All of the foliage will be off this tree within the next few days, so knocking some off today won’t hurt a thing.

Now, there are a couple of things that bother me about the basic design of this tree: one, the two apical leaders are too symmetrical; and two, the top of the tree is insufficiently “flat.” You can easily see what I mean by the former; by the latter I mean the crown of this tree is too rounded, and this is something that will need to be controlled as this tree continues to develop.

So let’s tackle both problems, shall we?

The first step in making the two leaders asymmetrical is to wrap some thick-gauge wire around them.
The change I’ve made here is subtle but important. I’ve pulled down the left leader and pushed up the right leader, both just enough to introduce the asymmetry I need. That’s the first step. The next few are equally important.
A sub-branch of the left leader is wired and pulled down. Again, a subtle change but very important.
A closer view, and more in line with the typical viewing angle. Take a closer look at the change in the leaders I made above, from this view. It’s all about the apical asymmetry that’s typical of flat-top BC.
More wiring on the left leader, the sub-branch at the rear. It’s brought down flatter into the plane where it belongs, and moved toward the back of the tree.
Moving over to the right leader, notice I’ve pruned out the sub-branch that was sticking straight up. It was too heavy and its further growth would adversely affect the design of this leader.
A close up, after a little more trimming. I know it may seem like I’m removing needed ramification, but trust me when I say it’ll all grow back and more! What’s vital at this point in the life of this bonsai is to properly establish the finer branch structure. BC are so apically dominant that you can completely develop a flat-top crown in a couple of seasons. In fact, if you don’t manage the growth during this crucial time, the tree will literally outgrow itself and force you to start over.
Now I’ve wired and positioned two sub-branches on the right leader. These will provide me with a good base for ramification in 2020.

Notice how flat the profile of the crown is from this view. It’s just what I need.

And the final shot for today. It’s easy to see where I’m going with this tree. I expect that by summer of 2020 I’ll be almost completely through with the overall design. Obviously I have to develop the lower branches on the trunk, and this will take a couple more seasons as the tree will push most of its energy upward. But I’ve won that fight before!

Let me know what you think of this flat-top BC. And if you haven’t already done so, sign up for our BC wish list for 2020. Plus consider a workshop – buy a BC and do the initial styling in year one, the perfect way to kick-start a great BC bonsai.

A Huckleberry Bonsai For 2020

by | Nov 27, 2019 | Blueberry, Care, Flowering, Potting, Pruning, Styling, Wiring

So it’s time for Thanksgiving weekend, and aside from overeating that can only mean bonsai fun for me.

I collected this Huckleberry, Vaccinium sp., this past winter. Except for minimal training work, I’ve just let it grow to get established. With the weather see-sawing back to warm (we went from 22F overnight last week to 70F overnight last night – yeah, that’s South Louisiana weather!), I figured why not learn something new.

Where’s the front? I’m not sure yet, but that doesn’t stop me from starting the trimming process. Huckleberries are vigorous growers, so I’m very confident in my design fleshing out next year regardless of what I do now.
More pruning of long stuff.
Now that’s pruned back good!
It does take a while for Huckleberries to put on some good root growth, but this one did its thing in just a year. Like I said, I just let it grow this year without trying to rush things (today’s the day to rush things, right?).
More wiring, shaping, and into a pot by Lary Howard. I switched back to this front. The leader will be cut back in spring, once it buds out at the first node. I left it long in case of dieback. I think this composition is nice. The slanting style isn’t my favorite, but now and then you come across a tree that just insists. I always like to go with the flow whenever possible. Let me know what you think. I’m personally very fond of Huckleberries.