I recently spent a few days in Western Australia working with the Bonsai Workshop group in Perth. I have been working with the members there over a number of years and always enjoy my time there and am constantly impressed with the quality of trees it’s members present.
While the members grow a whole host of species many of the WA native species turn up, some of which i think are the best in the country for bonsai. The local paperbarks are definitely up there. I will go out on a limb and say Melaleuca cuticularis or salt water paperbark is the hands down best Australian Native bonsai species (controversial i know) with Melaleuca Rhaiophylla a very close cousin that i also like.
You might even say i love working on them……..
It was no surprise to see several of these turn up for workshops, with one Melaleuca Rhaiophylla presenting to be readied for exhibition.
It was a nice tree as it was but had a few adjustments that needed doing to correct its flow.
The problem was, that to make these edits, we needed to use wire. Heavy wire.
For those not familiar with paperbarks, their A4 like bark is fairly stark white. More a recycled ream than bleached roll but pretty white none the less. As you can imagine, black, large gauge wire sticks out like sore thumb, against this white bark.
So, we began to test ways to disguise the wire.
We tried all the usual ways, hidden guy-wires, keeping wire within foliage masses and trying to keep diameters light. But none of these usual tricks were going to work. We needed some structural wire on some fairly visible, heavy branches.
Which lead me to the first idea.
Sticking a flap of bark with cut paste over the wire we had applied. For what is a very low effort fix, it worked fairly well. The wire wasn’t invisible but it was only really visible on close inspection.
(note the nespresso machine in the background of the above pic, this is a true sign of Western Australia’s bonsai clubs blazing ahead in workshop comforts providing a constant flow of espresso delivered caffeine)
With the start of some success in hiding the sinful wire, I came up with method 2.
I was able to extract some long thin strips of bark from both the back of the trunk and a tree growing outside the workshop venue which i wrapped around each strand of heavy gauge wire. This was then wrapped around the branch in much the same way you would a normal wire on a branch.
It worked pretty well. It was able to camouflage wire of gauges and in areas where the first technique would really work very well.
We tried the technique on the next tree. It needed wire on the two lowest branches, one on the left and the other on the right.
with branches wrapped and moved into position the effect was pretty good. Almost undetectable up until very close inspection.
With a couple of weeks weathering on the wrapped bark i think it will be even more hard to detect.
All in all a pretty funny but innovative way to disguise wire on paperbark species. It was suggested to name the technique the ‘Joe wrap’ but i suspect this was to deflect the blame away from the owner for turning up with bark wrapped wire at an exhibition as much as anything 😅.
All in all an interesting couple of techniques to keep up the sleeve if you are growing paperbark species. There may be other stringy barked type species that you could also do this on so probably worth having a closer look at the bark on the trees you have on the benches at home.
