Three Weeks After the Show

I can't believe it's already three weeks since our club show. Time is really flying and as we move from spring into summer some of my trees are growing like crazy. I decided it was time to see what progress my show trees had made in that short time.

I was amazed to see the change in my Stinkwood tree. This is what it looked like at the show:

Stinkwood as it appeared at the show

Since then the branch structure had largely disappeared behind a mass of big new leaves. (Sorry about the bad camera angle hiding the base.)

Stinkwood with three weeks of growth since show

I might have left it like that for a little longer, but this tree has a crazy idea of seasons, waking up in late winter and going dormant long before my other trees. As I'm hoping to get some better ramification going I need to maximise its growing season so I did something approaching a Walter Pall hedge prune - nothing too dramatic, just reducing the volume of foliage to allow light to get to the inner branches which need it most. I'll do more selective pruning while it's dormant, and by then I hope to have more options to choose from.

I was much gentler on my other show trees.

Schotia - 30 October 2016

My Schotia had hardly put out any new growth since the show. The only useful bud of any substance was this one, though I spotted a couple of other buds which are just starting to swell.

Aside from that it had pushed out this unwanted bud on the trunk:

Removing that was the only work possible on this tree. As it grows slowly, I'm not sure how much more I'll be able to do this summer. Ramification may take a while on this one.

My olive tree is starting to look a bit messy, with lots of little buds pushing out all over the trunk:

Some of those buds will need to go before I lose track of which branches I really want, but I'll leave working on this tree for another day. There's been a change of plan for its future design since I originally discussed it back in April, so it really needs a post of its own.

As for my little ficus, it's starting to look a little untidy too, but I decided to hold back on the next trim for a little longer. I'll probably trim the top growth soon, but I'll let the lower branches grow for a while so that they can thicken up a bit more.

With top branches wired

Meanwhile I noticed that the wire on the upper branches was starting to bite, so I removed that.

After removing the wire

The branches held their position reasonably well so I didn't bother to rewire them for now. There's plenty of time to do that later if required.