The Grapefruit Flower

In February 2019 I posted a photo of a grapefruit with seeds growing inside the fruit.

Thirty months later it's time for an update.

This is the smaller of my two grapefruit seedlings showing off it's first flower.

The larger one has none.

In fact of all the citrus seeds I've planted over the years this is the first one ever to grow a flower.

Even the lemon tree I planted in the garden never flowered. Eventually I decided to move it back into a pot in the hope of using it for bonsai, but sadly it didn't survive the move.

Though citrus trees aren't ideal bonsai material, I have other citruses which have spent their whole lives in small pots, and I'm persisting with those. I feel compelled to because it was a clementine seedling which first ignited my passion for bonsai.

Autumn Colour

Spring is my favourite time of year, so I'm really jealous of all those bonsai growers in the Northern hemisphere whose deciduous trees  are just starting to bud and will soon turn green while many of mine will soon be bare.

The one consolation is the sight of these beautiful red leaves on two of my Trident Maple "weedlings", rescued at a workshop a couple of years ago when they were about to be consigned to a friend's compost heap.

The trees themselves are nothing more than sticks in pots right now:

With so many trees to care for, however, I'm planning to keep them really small, so the taller tree will soon be getting a serious chop. Not right now though, because I'm enjoying that colour far too much!

When the Weeds Take Over

This little olive tree is one of the rare trees I've bought as bonsai stock, meaning that it required a lot less work than most of my other trees do. Here it is as purchased at our club show in October 2010.

Olive tree - October 2010

I was quite happy with the way it looked in the spring of 2015 and was planning to move it to a bonsai pot but for some reason I never got around it it.

Instead it got lost among my bigger trees and I failed to notice the little Melaleuca seedling which planted itself at the side of the bag. By the time I discovered it, it was too deeply rooted to simply pull it out and move it to a pot of its own, so I left it there and waited for a suitable time to move it. And, as is my wont, I forgot all about it.

Now it had become so tall that it was totally dwarfing my poor little olive tree.

Olive tree and Melaleuca 'weedling'

Something had to be done about it. Unfortunately it's mid-summer in South Africa - not the right time for repotting trees, so that will have to wait. (It's on my brand new list of things to do in Spring though, so hopefully it will finally get done this year.)

For now I decided to cut it down to a more suitable height so that it doesn't interfere with the olive tree more than necessary.

Olive tree and Melaleuca 'weedling' after chop - January 2017

It's a shame I had to do that because the Melaleuca was growing so vigorously that I'd have loved to see how much it would fatten up with another couple of years of unrestrained growth. I'll have to content myself with trying that out with one of its younger 'brothers' - another weed which I rescued before it was established in the pot in which it took root.

Melaleuca seedling - January 2017

Sadly fattening this one up is going to take much longer. The one positive is that I was able to wire the trunk to add a little movement while it's still young and flexible.

Melaleuca seedling after wiring - January 2017

While I was at it, I tidied up the olive tree.

Olive tree, after trim - January 2017. The Melaleuca is hidden behind a piece of white paper

While doing so I discovered that it had suffered a little die-back. Fortunately I caught it now. It could have been a whole lot worse.

Most of them survived

In October 2015 I wrote about a newly acquired Stinkwood tree which was drowning in Maple seedlings.

Weeds and seedlings - October 2015

With a little gentle poking around in the surface soil I was able to extract 25 seedlings, each of which was planted in a small plastic cup with drainage holes.

23 of them survived.

For the last year they've been living largely untouched on the lower shelf of a small stand in a fairly sheltered area - a spot chosen to protect them from the hail which has left some of my better trees looking rather the worse for wear.

Now they've had a chance to grow a bit its time to start putting movement into some of their trunks.

Before starting work I decided to bring them inside for a family photo:

23 seedlings - January 2017

That was when I discovered that, while the front ones had been growing vigorously, some of those at the back were still tiny and were nowhere near ready for me to work on.

Size comparison

Clearly those needed a lighter spot.

I decided to relocate some of the other trees on the stand so that the smaller seedlings could be moved forward without compromising the position of the bigger ones.

After returning the weakest trees to the stand I was left with 15 trees to wire. I've started work but it will probably take a few days to wire them all.

I've been fairly conservative with the movement I put into the biggest tree.

Tallest tree after wiring

I'll try to be more adventurous with some of the others.

My New Maple Tree

I hope my tone doesn’t offend any beginners, but some people seriously think this is the best way to start bonsai. Some nurseries even sell “Bonsai Kits” which consist of a small bonsai pot, some soil and a few seeds.

Granted it is possible to start bonsai from seed, and I’ve tried it myself, but it takes a lot of time and patience to grow a decent tree that way. And you certainly shouldn’t be planting a seed straight into a bonsai pot because the resulting tree will always remain tiny if it’s given limited space to grow roots.

I don’t often plant seeds anymore and I didn’t plant this one. I found this little seedling growing in a pot alongside one of my trees a few days ago and I couldn’t bear to kill it, so I moved it into a cut down bottle and now I’m waiting to see if it survives.

 In such a small pot it’s not going to grow very quickly. If left to grow unrestricted, it will probably reach about the size of the tree standing to its left here in a year’s time.

The larger tree is one of the 23 seedlings I rescued from another pot a year ago. The time has come for me to make some decisions about their future. I’m hoping to move some of them into bigger pots if I can find the space to put them. I’ll probably wire a little movement into some of the trunks and I’m also contemplating experimenting with fusing a few of them together to create one thicker tree.

That’s the great thing about free material – it gives me the opportunity to do all kinds of weird experiments.

My best maple tree, however, certainly wasn’t grown this way. It was five feet tall when I bought it as nursery stock, and yet it will always be a small bonsai. Large trees need to spend years in the ground before they start their life as bonsai.

Sticks in Pots

The olive trees commonly used for bonsai in South Africa are Olea Europaea subsp. Africana, often referred to as the wild olive. Its fruit are much smaller than the average olive and aren't suitable for eating so, when one of my olive trees started producing fruit two or three years ago, I didn't bother to pick them. In due course they ripened and fell unnoticed into the surrounding pots where they took root. Since then I've been finding olive seedlings popping up everywhere.

I always move those seedlings into small pots and just leave them to do their own thing until they get big enough for me to experiment with. I know these "sticks in pots" will never make quality bonsai, but experimenting can be fun, and maybe I'll learn something that will help me with my better trees later on.

Today I decided to play with a few of those little trees.

These two were the first ones I found a couple of years back. They were planted in one pot to save space, and I've decided to leave them together.

Two olive saplings

Though they're each thinner than a pencil I decided to do a trunk chop and see what develops.

Two olive saplings after chop

Right now I'm looking at the possibility of creating a tiny twin trunk formal upright. Another option is a small twin trunk literati. Time will tell which is the better option.

The next tree I worked on is a bit younger and a lot thinner.

Olive sapling with badly wired curves

As the trunk was still nice and flexible I decided to wire some big curves in an attempt to create a horai style tree.

Olive sapling showing bad attempt to wire curves

I hadn't planned to do any pruning yet as I wanted the tree to thicken substantially first but, as a result of over-ambition combined with some really lazy wiring, I snapped the trunk.

Close up of damage to olive sapling

It's possible that the break would still have healed, but the tree would always have had a weakness at that spot, so I decided to make an unplanned cut, leaving me with this:

Olive sapling after damage was removed

I hope it survives today's abuse. It certainly won't be fattening up any time soon though.

This was my third attempt at horai, trying to copy the styling from a diagram in Deborah Koreshoff's book "Bonsai - Its Art, Science, History and Philosophy". Neither of my previous attempts worked out according to plan either.

Another young olive tree I looked at today once had a natural curve right near the base and I had hoped that it would turn into an interesting feature. Unfortunately I didn't think to push a stick into the gap to keep it open as the tree thickened. It's too late now because the gap has closed up, leaving an ugly kink instead.

Ugly kink on an olive sapling

I'm not sure what I'll be able to do with this one, so for now I'll probably just let it grow and see if that kink becomes less conspicuous in time.

I've got several more of these that I haven't worked on yet. I might do a bit of wiring on some of them but that will have to wait for another day. I've got loads of better trees that are begging for my attention so I need to work on some of those first.

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I'd like to end off with a little good news. I managed to catch the grasshopper I wrote about yesterday. It seems he has a damaged leg so he hadn't moved very far overnight. I've relocated him to an area where there are no bonsai.

I also managed to find out his name - Elegant Grasshopper (Zonocerus elegans). It sounds like he's quite a destructive fellow, so I was lucky he did no noticeable damage to my trees.

When Weeds Turn into Trees

15 November 2015

I recently wrote a post about a tree I acquired which was growing in a pot full of weeds. Only many of those weeds turned out to maple seedlings. My mission that day was to rescue those seedlings before they had time to establish themselves alongside the big tree. I'm happy to report that 23 of them have survived the move and are now happily growing in their own pots. Now I just hope I'll be able to keep them alive through the severe drought that's wreaking havoc across South Africa.

One of the problems with having a huge collection of trees is that I don't always find time to remove weeds timeously and once they've settled in, it can be quite difficult to get rid of them. And in some cases, before I know it I've got two trees of different species growing in the same pot. I've already separated a few pairs of trees this spring but haven't found time for all of them. Now, because of the drought, I'm contemplating leaving some of them together for another season. That will give me a few less pots that need watering every day.

But this week I discovered a problem with this trio.

Three trees growing in one pot

The tree I was originally growing in this pot is a Crassula, otherwise known as a Jade Plant. It's a succulent which doesn't need a lot of water and has been growing in a pot with excessive drainage holes - a re-purposed colander - for several years now. By the time I noticed that it had acquired two companions, a Melaleuca and a Mulberry, they were so well established that I've been terrified to remove them. But over the last few days I noticed that the Melaleuca was starting to take strain. Most of its leaves had turned yellow, making me uncertain how much longer it could survive where it was. Something had to be done.

Repotting trees is something that has always made me a bit nervous. Over the years I've learnt that certain species can take harsh treatment and I'm now reasonably comfortable working with those. But when I'm forced to step outside my comfort zone, I prefer to take trees that need repotting to one of my club's workshops so that I can get help if the need arises. I felt certain that I would need help with this lot.

Today was workshop day and sure enough I needed a little assistance in getting the three trees separated. As it turned out, most of the roots belonged to the two 'weeds', which probably explains why the Crassula's growth had slowed down drastically in recent times. Hopefully now that it's on its own in a slightly larger pot it will soon regain its strength and grow lots of new roots and leaves.

Crassula now in its own pot

The other two saplings are in smaller pots. I cut the Mulberry to a fraction of its height but was afraid to leave the Melaleuca without any foliage, so I will have to wait for back-budding before I reduce its height.

Now I have a nervous wait to see if my three trees survive this ordeal.

Three trees now in separate pots

Update 20 June 2016:

I'm pleased to say that all three trees are still alive.

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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