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.

The Screaming Stinkwood Tree

Among the photos I used in my post about the trees I displayed at our club show last weekend was a shot of a rather boring stinkwood tree. The only thing it appeared to have in its favour was a fairly thick trunk.

Suggested front

I acquired that tree off my club's raffle table towards the end of 2012. At the time it was sharing a pot with a young Pyracantha which had taken root in its pot, so my first priority was to separate the two trees. I took them along to a workshop the next day and, once they had been separated, I asked my mentor for a bit of advice regarding styling and accepted what appears in that photo as being the best front for the tree.

Over the next tree years I did very little work on it. Then, late last year I took it to a workshop attended by members of various clubs from my area. I had a special person in mind whose advice I wanted as stinkwood trees are one of his areas of expertise.

Although I don't know him very well he was most helpful and even did some heavy carving on the back of the tree. When he was done I asked if that was still the back and was rather surprised when he replied in the affirmative. As he was the expert however, I accepted his opinion though I was never totally convinced that he was right.

Fast forward to October 2016 and my preparations for the show. I always planned to display the tree showing the "correct" front and when I arrived at the venue, I placed it that way on the display table. However every time I looked at the tree it just felt wrong and I expressed my doubts to many members before the breakthrough moment when one member looked at the gaping hole in the "back" of the tree and said it reminded him of Edvard Munch's painting called The Scream.

That was all the affirmation I needed to go with my gut and I immediately turned the tree around to show this front:

My preferred front

I don't care how many people tell me I'm wrong. It's my tree, and to me the carving is its most interesting feature, so it deserves to be seen. Now I just need to create the canopy the tree deserves.

Trees in training for less than five years

It's showtime at my bonsai club this weekend.

In bonsai terms that should be one of the highlights of my year, but unforeseen circumstances have prevented me from dedicating much time to my trees over the past month and this week I found myself totally unprepared for the show. When I looked at my small collection of trees which are actually in bonsai pots, only one looked vaguely show-worthy but not really the way I'd have wanted it to look for putting on show.

Fortunately the club has introduced a section for trees which have been in training for less than five years, and those can be displayed in training pots. So I looked around to see which trees I could display in that section and cut my options down to four on which I did some preparation today.

These are my options:

1. Schotia Brachypetala

Schotia - before tidying up for show

This tree has been growing quite vigorously since its early spring pruning. Initially I planned to do no more than rewire it, but in the end I went a little further and ended up with my tree looking like this:

Schotia - ready for show

Though it appears that I did some drastic work, only one branch was pruned. The rest was merely reducing the volume of the large compound leaves so that the branch structure became a bit more visible. Though I'm not convinced the tree is looking its best right now, removing that foliage actually helped me to notice a few branches that had been wired in the wrong direction. That should benefit the tree in the long term.

2. Celtis Africana

Celtis Africana

This is one of my bigger trees and has quite a nice trunk, with a few secrets which I'll keep for a future post. Unfortunately I haven't put much time or effort into ramification yet, so the top isn't looking that good.

3. Olea europaea subsp africana (Olive)

Olive

This tree has had a bit more carving done since I last wrote about it in April. Since then it had put out lots of new growth all over the trunk, but I tidied that up for show purposes. I'm not totally happy with the style though and plan to let the branches grow out further for the rest of the summer.

4. Ficus Natalensis

Ficus Natalensis

The smallest of the four but one of my favourite trees. This one was propagated from a root cutting and has been grown with very little input from the members of my club, so this more than any of the others feels like 'my' tree. Although the scars may bother some people, I like them and feel they almost make the trunk look like a little person.

Unless I have a last minute change of heart I'll be taking all four trees along to the show set-up on Friday. Hopefully all will be regarded as good enough.

A Celtis from the Raffle Table

This is a tree I won on a club raffle in August 2015, right at the start of the South African spring. It's the Celtis Africana (White Stinkwood) which put in a brief appearance in my post Drowning in Seedlings in early October. At that stage it looked like this:

White stinkwood bonsai in training

My main emphasis in that post was on the weeds that accompanied the tree, many of which turned out to be Trident Maple seedlings. I'm happy to say that my rescue job was successful and I now have 23 baby maple trees growing in repurposed plastic cups.

But back to the Celtis. Though it's by no means my fattest tree, it's about 50 cm high, making it one of my tallest.  I actually prefer short, fat trees, but sometimes I'm forced to work with what I've got. It's already a little shorter than it was when I got it because the apex was really heavy and was growing off to one side.

I pruned it hard in early summer and it's been growing quite vigorously since then. This is what it looked like before its latest haircut:

Before pruning - March 2016

Today I decided to tidy it up a bit, removing branches that were growing straight up or down and shortening some others. However I've left some branches long as I need those to fatten up a bit before I prune them.

This is how it looks after pruning:

After pruning - current front

I'm not particularly happy with this tree though. Despite the fact that several people told me I'd won a nice tree, I've got a couple of issues with it.

For starters I'm not too happy with the big gap between the two lowest branches on the left. The previous owner had tried to force another branch into that space but it had been pulled across the front of the trunk and didn't look right that way. In any case it was very close to the remaining branch, so the gap wasn't that much smaller.

Aside from that I'm not convinced that this is the correct front for the tree. The base looks really narrow and misshapen from this side:

Current front

There are two angles from which it appears to have a much better base. Unfortunately neither really fits in with the current styling of the tree.

The first option that presented itself to me was this one:

Second option for front

It's wider, but imperfect because there is a big bulge just above the roots. Although this angle works well with the direction in which the apex is growing, the first branch points directly to the front and I'd be forced to remove it leaving no low branches at all.

After pruning - second option for front

Probably the best option if you consider the base in isolation, this one has a nice spread without the bulge:

Third option for front

Once again it presents problems though. The first branch is now pointing to the back, which isn't ideal. To make matters worse, from this angle the apex is growing towards the back too.

After pruning - third option for front

I took this tree to a workshop a couple of months ago and was advised to live with the current front, but I'm not sure I want to. I think I'll take it to my bonsai club's next meeting and see if I can find someone who has a creative way to solve my problem.

I'm even prepared to do an air layer and turn it into two trees if need be.

Drowning in Seedlings

Although I've got hundreds of little trees growing in my bonsai area, only a small proportion of them are trees I bought. A few others were gifts while several more came from my club's raffle table. The vast majority, however, are either trees I propagated myself or ones which came into the world uninvited.

The last category consists mainly of seedlings that popped up in my garden or in one of the pots in which an established tree was already growing. I affectionately refer to those as my "weedlings" because a weed is really just a "​wild ​plant that ​grows in an ​unwanted ​place" (*). And once removed from the place where they are unwanted, my weedlings are free to become little trees in their own right.

White stinkwood bonsai in training

At the end of August I won the above tree - a white stinkwood (Celtis Africana) - on a club raffle. At the time the weeds were a lot less conspicuous than they are in this photo, but I chose to let them grow a bit before removing them, just in case some were worth saving.

Weeds and seedlings growing alongside my tree

This week I took a closer look at the weeds and discovered several Trident Maple seedlings growing among them. So, realising that it wouldn't be good for my tree or the seedlings for them to continue living together, I set aside some time to rescue the seedlings and move them into pots of their own.

The first thing I did was to pull out all the unidentified weeds. I felt a bit guilty throwing them away as I couldn't be sure that there weren't trees of another species among them, but my space is limited so I had to be selective. Once the weeds were gone I faced the more difficult job of gently lifting the maple seedlings out of the soil with enough root to sustain them while ensuring that I didn't disturb the roots of my white stinkwood more than necessary.

Finally I placed each of my seedlings in a makeshift pot (a plastic cup with drainage holes in the base). I now have 25 seedlings recovering in a sheltered area outside. I'm not sure what I'll do with so many, but my first goal is to see that they all survive.



(*) Definition from Cambridge Dictionaries Online

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