I collected this American elm, Ulmus Americana, in May of 2018. It’s not a bad piece of material. The trunk base is 2″ in diameter, and I chopped it at 16″. It didn’t take long for buds to show up all over the trunk.
Within two months I was wiring like crazy. American elm is a very vigorous species. One of the best features is leaf-size reduction – from 5″ in the wild to less than 1/2″ in a bonsai pot. You can’t ask for much more than that!
One more good thing about American elm: it ranges all the way from Canada down to Florida, and west to Texas. So winter hardiness is not an issue.
What about Dutch elm disease? I’ve grown quite a few American elm bonsai through the years, and I’ve never had a problem with it nor have I heard of anyone else who did. There appears to be a relationship between the height and age of specimens in the wild and susceptibility to DED.
Here is today’s shot. In less than one year, I have a complete and nice set of branches on this elm. I’ll be pruning back hard in about a month or so, and that will encourage back-budding and ramification. I may even go ahead and slip-pot into a bonsai container.
Let me know what you think. Do you grow American elm?
I have several elm seedlings in my garden (4-5″ tall) Can I begin with one of these? or is it better to cut a thicker section. That said, can I cut from a branch or does it have to be a trunk?
Ann, I’m not sure I understand what you mean by cutting a thicker section, or cutting from a branch. You can grow American elm from seed – they grow pretty quickly in the ground, much less quickly in a pot. You can make cuttings easily, and grow them either in the ground or a pot. Air layering can be done, but it’s a trickier technique.
Hi Zach, It’s just that your post shows trunk cuttings. just wondered if seedlings would work OK.
I see where the confusion came in, Ann. I trunk-chopped the elm. When you say cuttings that implies a totally different thing. If you’re growing seedlings, by all means prune (chop) back the trunk to develop movement and taper. This is exactly how I got this tree to the state it was in when I posted the blog.
When you cut a branch back hard, like you mention on this America Elm, how much do you cut off?
Is it grow and clip after the cut back? And, by any chance, did you take any photos of the hard cut back to show the direction?
And, is branch thickness a visual judgement? Or is there some sort of natural nature formula?
It depends on the development of the individual branch, John, in relation to the goal, so I can’t give a one size fits all answer (no pun intended). It is usually grow and clip after cutback, but sometimes a second or third round of wiring is needed to set the position of the main branch and sometimes a secondary branch needs positioning. I never wire tertiary or smaller branches.
I’ll have to revisit this tree at some point, so it’ll be easier to see the progress. As for branch thickness, it is visual judgment for the most part but there are proportions to keep in mind. Branches are ideally 1/4 to 1/3 the thickness of the trunk where they emerge, with the smaller branches scaled down accordingly.
Zach, when you collect trunks, do you chop ALL of the feeders off and use root hormone? I collected a beech stump this weekend and in order to get it into a flat, I had to cut all of the feeders off and there are only long structural roots and I covered the tips in rooting hormone, then potted in straight pumice…
Vinnie, I don’t set out to cut off the fibrous roots but I don’t worry about them either. Just dust the large cut roots and pot ’em up. Be sure to cut those large radial roots back enough to fit a bonsai pot. Beech has a very high success rate, so yours should make it.
I was on the fence about it, since they looked very bonsai-like due possibly to deer browsing leading to a a lot of branching but now that they are planted and leading out it might be too disruptive to re-dig them to plant in a pot.
I recently found two small American some with a 1″ to 1 .25″ trunk diameter at the base. I planted them in the ground to let the trunk thicken even though they had grown into quite a ratified structure naturally. Would these be the way to go or should they just be potted straight from the wild?
My rule of thumb is to not collect a tree from the ground and then put it back in the ground. With that said, if you aren’t satisfied with the trunk thickness the fastest way to thicken it would be to put it back in the ground.
Elms are my favorite trees to harvest. Most of mine are Winged Elm which grow everywhere up here in N.C. They don’t seem to be vulnerable to DED either since we have some very large ones on our property. Please keep an update on this because I have a couple at the same stage that I don’t know where to go with them.
Will do, Doug. It seems that most of our native elms except for American have good resistance to DED.
Good development. Perhaps it would be wise to allow it to develop in this pot.
I’ll see how fast those branches thicken up. That’s going to be the key.