With some down time over the Christmas holidays, I finally got around to re-styling THIS TREE. It had been growing mostly untouched for a couple of years and had well and truly outgrown its former style.

Above: How it began.

As it had been left to grow a lot of the growth had become leggy and a lack of routine thinning had left fewer amounts of interior growth than i would have liked.

To get started, I began by pruning. I thinned and removed heavy and unneeded branching, upward and downward growing sub branches, thinned the foliage and generally cleaned up the structure.

Above: Half way through the pruning.

As I worked I also started to play around with new front angles and didn’t mind it from a slightly counter clockwise rotated position.

Above: the branch that met an early end.

I began to wire as I pruned so i could get a better sense of what branches I needed and what could be cut off. All was going well until i made an error. I wasn’t paying enough attention and when I cut off one of the branches in the top of the tree it was difficult to see from my angle that there were two branches in the branch cutters jaws…….. and as a result, i cut the key branch on the right side off.

The branch wired back on for a before comparison…..
……. and what i was left with.

Well, what was done was done so I continued wiring and worked a front that was much closer to the original. I was pretty annoyed with myself but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do. All in all everything was not lost but i was kicking myself for making such an avoidable mistake.

Above: Post wiring

The ‘finished’ result is a good place to be for now. The styling is pretty sparse due to how much foliage and branching i removed but the trunk and deadwood are now very much more prominent.

Above: the obligatory deadwood close-up

You can probably see that the wiring I applied is only on major branches and sub branches. As this is a restyling, I will need to develop the foliage over the next 12 months or so to fill in and tighten up to this new style, so I didn’t bother fine wiring and hence the slightly scrappy appearance.

Above: the original front, natural light and a hand for scale.

As the canopy fills in i think i will further fine tune the front. As you can see from the above image that original front is not bad but i still think i prefer the one i ended up with that is slightly rotated anticlockwise. We will see if this changes as i grow some of the branches and get some more width to things (something that i wouldn’t have to wait for if i hadn’t cut off that key branch!)

It is interesting comparing this and my other small Kishu to the itoigawa i have. It is certainly more difficult keeping these kishu small and compact compared to the itoigawa. That said, the branching stays much finer on these so i guess you have to take the good with the bad.

Next post might be an update on one of my itoigawa trees…. we will see.