Looking for Ideas

I mentioned the convention our club hosted in 2013 when I discussed the olive tree I worked on at one of the workshops I attended.

At that workshop one of the delegates was working on a large cork bark elm. As I'd never seen a cork bark elm for sale, I was delighted to receive one of the branches she removed from her tree and was really happy when the cutting rooted. This is what the little tree looks like nearly three years later.

It will never be a big tree, but the trunk diameter of 2cm (0.78 inches) is acceptable for a tree with tiny leaves like an elm has. Unfortunately it has a few problems:

• there are no low branches
• it's too straight after the first bend
• it has bad reverse taper at the first bend.

About a year ago I took the tree to a workshop where I was advised to air layer it at the first bend. This would have solved both problems and would probably have given me two trees to play with. Unfortunately I never got around to doing it.

With spring on the way I realise that now is the time to act if  I don't want to waste another season. But before I commit to the air layer I thought I'd see if  there was a better option. I haven't taken it to my club yet and won't be able to until the middle of August, but I've found that I get some good suggestions online too, so I shot a quick 360° video  to include with this post.

Do you think I should go ahead with the air layer, or can you suggest something better?

Spring Came Early

Well actually that title is wishful thinking, but some of my trees certain seem to think that it's true.

A case in point is the mulberry tree I rescued from my pavement a few months ago. Under normal circumstances I would have left it outdoors unprotected through the winter. However the root system is so new that I wasn't prepared to risk killing it, so, since nighttime temperatures started dropping below 5°C (41°F) I've been putting it out during the day and moving it into my greenhouse at night.

On 1 July I noticed the first signs that the buds were starting to swell, and now, less than three weeks later, it's already got quite a lot of young foliage. This photo of a young leaf was taken two days ago.

I wasn't surprised to see this happening to a tree in a sheltered environment, but yesterday I had a glance at what remains of the parent tree and discovered that the buds on that one are starting to swell too. It's growing right next to a west facing wall, but that's all the protection it gets from our "cold" winter nights.

Cold, in my climate, is still relatively mild of course. The lowest we've been so far this winter is 2°C (35°F), though it's likely that things will get worse before they get better. In fact, despite the fact that today has been pretty warm, the forecast for the next week is worse than anything we've had the whole winter. We're also expecting some unseasonal rain.

The good news for me is that spring really isn't that far off. By this time next month I expect to see new foliage on a lot of my deciduous trees.

Time for Work

I'm embarrassed. When I welcomed you all to my new home I said I hoped to get all my content moved here by the end of June, possibly accompanied by some new posts too. I'm afraid I've been rather lazy. I've been spending far too much time procrastinating online, neglecting both my blog and my trees.

Last night I finally moved the last of my old posts, so I've got no more excuses. It's time to get back to work on my trees. Despite the fact that it's mid-winter in South Africa, some of them are really crying for attention.

Expect some new posts really soon. Hopefully this time I'm not promising something that won't happen.

Mother Ficus

Mother Ficus is one of my oldest surviving trees. She's the ancestor of every Ficus Natalensis I own.

I found her in the bonsai section of a local nursery about ten years ago bearing the label "Ficus", with no indication of what variety she was. All I knew was that she wasn't a Benjamina, which was the only variety of Ficus that I owned at the time, but that was enough to convince me that I should give her a home.

She was an ugly little tree with a trunk about the thickness of a pencil and terrible branch structure, and once I'd bought her I didn't really know what to do with her. Back then I didn't know enough about bonsai to have the faintest inkling of how I could improve her appearance. Instead I decided to propagate what proved to be the first of many offspring - the tree which appears in my introductory post and is also the subject of an article which I published at HubPages several years ago.

A few months after I joined my club I decided to see if something could be done to make her look better, so I took her to a workshop. The organiser took one look at her and recommended a trunk chop. Instead of an ugly tree, I went home with a sorry looking stump about three inches high, uncertain whether she'd live or die.

Eventually a few weak buds sprouted at the site of the chop but by then there was far stronger growth coming out of the base of the trunk. This was not what I had expected!

Once more I took her to a workshop.

"That's your tree," I was told.

My teacher was referring to the strong new stem coming out of the roots. I wasn't delighted when he told me to remove what remained of the old trunk, but reluctantly I followed his advice. Now all that remained of the tree I'd bought was the roots.

Eight years later Mother Ficus is happily living in a bonsai pot and has been on show at my club a few times.

Mother Ficus - June 2016

She'll never be a show-stopper but she's a far better tree than I ever hoped she would be. Her biggest weakness is her poor nebari (roots) but hopefully in time I'll be able to fix that too.

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Linking up with NF Trees n Bushes.

Welcome to My New Home

This blog was born on 11 September 2015.

In early May I began to contemplate moving it to a new domain, so I stopped writing updates. Not blogging about my trees has really been hard for me, but I didn't want to continue until I found it a new home. About a week ago I finally committed to Blogger and slowly started rebuilding my blog.

Right now I'm nearly half way through posting my old content and by the end of June all my old posts should be here, hopefully accompanied by some updates on the trees I wrote about in those posts. And I can't wait to introduce you to some of the trees I haven't written about before.

A Vigorous Olive Tree

In October 2013 my bonsai club hosted a convention attended by members of the bonsai community from all parts of South Africa. The headliners at this convention were three foreign guests, among them an American called Rob Kempinski.

In addition to hearing the speeches, I was fortunate enough to attend one of Rob Kempinski's workshops.

In the build-up to the convention I realised that most of my trees weren't worthy of a workshop of this calibre, and luckily I was able to buy an old olive tree which had been collected from the wild a year or two earlier. This is what it looked like just before the workshop:

October 2013 - before initial styling

At the workshop the best possible branches were selected and Rob Kempinski also did a bit of carving for me, as well as refining the jin at the top with a blowtorch. After the workshop it looked like this:

October 2013 - after initial styling

I then left it to grow for a while so that the lower branches could develop, but did the odd bit of tidying up work as this tree has a tendency to put out lots of buds on old wood.

New buds forming on trunk

I have to remove these regularly, otherwise the entire design of the tree will be lost.

By August 2015 those lower branches had thickened up a fair amount and had been trimmed back so that the tree was starting to resemble a proper bonsai. In addition, a little more carving had been done at my club's workshops.

August 2015

However the tree had one major issue which was really worrying me. As the tree had originally had very one-sided growth, the lowest branch on the left was actually a back branch which had been pulled to the side. It looks okay in the picture above, but from the back it looked really ugly:

Rear branch pulled to side

This is where the tree's tendency to produce lots of buds helped me out. Within weeks after this photo was taken, a new bud had appeared exactly where I wanted it.

New branch forming in front of old one

Once that branch had grown long and strong enough for me to be sure of its survival, I removed the old branch and wired the new one into position, with the tip pointed upwards to encourage it to grow vigorously and fatten up.

After removing old side branch

At the same time I repotted the tree, changing the angle slightly to make the top jin a more dominant apex.

December 2015, after repotting

In February I took it to a workshop where I was persuaded to remove the lowest branch, a decision I still sometimes question.

Lowest branch removed

Hopefully by the time the new branch has fattened up I'll be able to convince myself that it was the right decision.

Repotting the tree in fresh soil seems to have increased its vigour. Despite removing the new buds in both February and March, a month of neglect meant that the whole structure of the tree had disappeared behind a sea of new growth.

Olive tree, overgrown after one month of neglect

After a quick tidy up this week, it now looks like this:

April 2016

Aside from developing the new branch, there is still quite a lot of refining to do. Those pads look quite unbalanced to me, and I can't help feeling that the lower jin is too heavy. As I don't do my own carving it will need another workshop soon.

Updated photos can be found here.

In Search of the Perfect Tree

My search began as the result of a visit to Reddit's bonsai group which recently announced that they would be holding a Nursery Stock Contest. During the course of the contest, a period of approximately six months, participants are required to transform an ordinary nursery tree into bonsai.

By rights I should have ignored this contest and got on with reading other discussions of interest. I'm by no means the most skilled in the art of bonsai, so I know that I stand no chance of winning. What's more, last year's winning tree was a Juniper and as a rule I try to avoid working with conifers. And perhaps worst of all, I live in the Southern hemisphere, so the contest runs over my winter - not the ideal time for developing the branch structure of a tree.

So, did good sense prevail? Not a bit. I want to be part of the fun, so I went out looking for a suitable tree.

I soon came across this guy:

Ficus Nitida as purchased, April 2016

It's a Ficus, one of my favourite species. That's a big plus. By my standards it's quite a big tree, one I'm barely able to lift. Unfortunately the low branches are very thin and that thicker upward-pointing branch half way up the trunk was dead. The taper's not great either, but hopefully thickening up those lower branches will help. That's certainly not going to happen within six months though, so this certainly isn't competition material. I bought it anyway.

The next candidate came from my bonsai club which recently held what is known as a New Talent Competition. To be eligible for this competition you must have been a member for less than ten years. I've been a member for just over eight. Each participant is randomly allocated a tiny Juniper Procumbens Nana and given about two and a half hours to style it. Instant bonsai isn't my thing and as I said, nor are Junipers, but I felt I should challenge myself.

This is the tree I received:

Juniper Procumbens Nana unstyled, April 2016

On such a small tree, the branches were rather thin and not very well positioned so I decided to go for a literati. I ended up with this:

Juniper Procumbens Nana after styling, April 2016

Rather late in the day I realised that I should have left more foliage higher up and made the tail a bit shorter, but I was scared to remove any more right now so it looks rather unbalanced. In time I hope to improve on that.

Before the competition I had considered using this tree for Reddit's contest. However it's far too small and insignificant.

I knew I needed to look elsewhere.

Monday I visited another nursery, where I saw a couple of trees that interested me but they didn't feel right for the contest either, mainly due to the fact that I felt I'd want to do air layers before I started styling them. Obviously that isn't possible during the time allowed. I left with nothing.

Tuesday I found a tree I liked somewhere else:

Feijoa Sellowiana as purchased, April 2016

This one's a Feijoa Sellowiana. Not a tree I've often seen as bonsai, but I already have a thicker one which I rather like and I'd been considering buying another for some time.

Once again I'm not really sure this is contest material. Although I'm prepared to cut back hard, I don't see the prospect of much new growth over winter. But I'll start work and see what happens.

After buying this tree I still felt the urge to go back for one of the trees I'd seen on Monday, so this afternoon I went and bought this guy:

Euonymus as purchased, April 2016

It's a rather slender Euonymus which could probably do with a couple of years' unrestricted growth before I start work on it, so I probably shouldn't even consider it for the contest. Thankfully it was really cheap, but it's yet another tree to take space in my overcrowded bonsai area.

And so, while I'm really trying to reduce the size of my collection of pre-bonsai, cuttings and seedlings, over the course of the last couple of weeks I've acquired four new trees. And I'm still not sure I'm even going to enter the contest.

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Update: 17 July 2016

In the end I didn't enter the contest because I knew that none of my material was really suitable, but I enjoyed the hunt.

I've started work on the Ficus and the Feijoa, but if I don't lose patience I'm still hoping to fatten up the Euonymus before I even consider styling it.