This Little Juniper Survived

Some sloppy wiring a year ago reduced my healthy little Juniper Procumbens Nana to half a tree.

August 2018

Thankfully eight months later it has made a good recovery.

April 2019 - too straight

It was still looking very straight and ugly though, so yesterday I decided to make another attempt at styling it.

I struggle with thick wire, especially on little trees,so I decided I wasn't going to risk that again. I don't want to kill what's left of the tree!

After an unsuccessful attempt to put some movement into the tree using thin wire doubled up, I decided to try something different. Instead of using a guy wire, however, I pulled the apex to the right and slightly forward using a humble cable tie - a trick I picked up at last Saturday's club meeting.

April 2019 - not so straight any more

Much better!

Unfortunately even the minimal wiring I attempted caused a little damage to the bark.

Damaged bark at base and a new bud a little higher up

Hopefully it's not bad enough to do any long term damage.

I'll probably wait another year before I prune it. If I'm lucky some of the new buds on the trunk with grow and give me a couple of extra branches to work with.

Life without roots - the cutting that refuses to die

About 18 months ago I removed a one centimetre thick branch from one of my Acacias. As I so often do when I prune my trees, I decided to see if I could that branch to root.

All summer long it was covered in foliage, leading me to believe my effort had been successful. Then one day I accidentally pulled it out of its pot. There were no roots!

I put it back in the pot and continued to treat it as I had before. It went dormant for the winter, then produced a few new leaves in spring, and its "life" went on as before.

This morning, as I was moving some of my little trees around in search of items for my club's raffle table, it got hooked onto another tree and came out of the pot again. Still no roots.

I took it along to this afternoon's meeting and gave it to an acacia lover who seemed keen to see if he could get it to root. I hope he has better luck with it than I did.