As is often the way, I planned to do some minor maintenance and ended up spending many hours over several days restyling one of my trees.

It’s 3 years since I last wired THIS tree. Its always been a strange one (which is part of the reason I enjoy working with it) and its a tree I have been working it over a long time frame now. Like many of my trees it wears the marks of bad decisions and mistakes, but now that it is showing some age in the bark, i feel most of that can be forgiven.

It all started with pulling needles. The tree had be de-wired a year or two prior and been left to grow. the foliage, particularly after last season, had become dense and the yearly task of pulling needles and pruning shoots was due in the lead up to winter.

As seems to be the way, as I plucked the first branch, I began to think about its positioning. I set about wiring a piece of reinforcing bar into the tree so I could pull the main branch back and to the side a little. From there I was doomed, now the foliage of the branch was not well aligned and I knew I would not be able to help myself from wiring that branch and from there, the rest of the tree.

As i pulled needles i also cut branches, removing a number from the upper 1/3rd of the tree. I also wired the first branch and one of the directional branches in the apex. By pulling the main branch back, it allowed for a slight change in front and these wired branches confirmed I could make it work.

You can probably also notice on the left side a few branches roughly tied down to test potential positions prior to fully wiring.

Wiring was split over 3 days, juggling family activities and work. This actually broke up what would otherwise be a fairly arduous task into manageable sessions. Post wiring, I am pretty happy with where the tree is at now. It’s another one that feels like its found it’s feet with this year’s work.

Cutting off the handful of branches I did has really exposed the upper trunk and shows off it’s movement well, and this contrasts with the bolt upright trunk below. This makes for a pretty strange combination but one that i think is interesting and a very unique tree in Australia, if not further a field.

It does remind me a fairly famous trident maple from the Aichi-En in Japan which I posted a pic of years ago in this post. If only this pine would develop over the years to that quality and standard! I can only hope.