Nichigo Bonsai

Good bud, bad bud.

June 17, 2013 in Bonsai Techniques | Tags: buds, Japanese Black Pine, Pinus thunbergii | 3 comments

Over the years while growing black pines I have always strived for more buds. Each year i tried to get back buds to form and most times I was successful although sometimes the tree I was working on would show signs of promise and then wave them in my face as it took them away again.

What am I talking about? I am sure you have all seen them; those small buds that form and give you hope, only to swell but never open, and then after a few seasons growth, wither and die.

A few of the buds in question.

As far as i can work out, these are needle buds and or weak adventitious buds that for what ever reason can never really get themselves into gear. Even after candle pruning the rest of the tree theses buds often still sit and do nothing. The most frustrating thing about these buds is they always seem to appear right where you want them which makes seeing them die all the more difficult.

I have tried a number of methods to awaken them but none have worked. I have had them in both shaded locations and spots where they get full sun, on bottom branches and in the apex, on strong growth and on weak. Nothing seemed to work no matter where they occurred or what I tried.

But there is still hope. At the convention a month ago Ryan Neil talked about these buds and passed on a technique I had not heard of before. He said these buds could be awakened by slightly damaging them with a scissor cut done at the same time you candle prune. That is to say that when you cut the candles, you also make a small incision into these sleeping buds. He said it was this damage that would trigger these buds to put out a flush of growth at the same time as the cut candles re-grow their second flush.

As we in winter at the moment I have not yet had the chance to try this method out, but I look forward to trying it this coming summer. Hopefully it is the answer to this annoying sleeping bud issue.

Ryan Neil, AABC 2013.

May 24, 2013 in Bonsai Shows, Nurseries and Events | Tags: AABC 2013, Ryan Neil | 4 comments

At the recent Australian Association of bonsai Clubs (AABC) convention in Canberra I was lucky enough to see Ryan Neil both demonstrate and conduct work shops over the course of three days.

Ryan works on a juniper.

For those that didn’t make the convention, you really missed out. We are very lucky in Australia in that we have a large number of foreign demonstrators and teachers visit. In fact, during a conversation at the convention we counted 5 foreign bonsai demonstrators alone this year who were coming over the pond to share their bonsai skills and passion.

What set Ryan apart from most other demonstrators I had seen was the clear way in which he explained concepts. All the demonstrators on the world circuit are capable of creating good trees, but very few of them are as excellent at communicating their ideas and methods. Ryan was excellent at this as well as his obvious skill in bonsai itself. In fact he talked non-stop throughout his presentations and demonstrations while moving between the tree he was styling and a white board, where he would draw diagrams to further make clear concepts.

Ryan and a red pine from the National Bonsai and Penjing collection.

Ryan’s skills obviously did not stop at presenting, he had a confident and logical approach to styling, wiring and bonsai health that he was also able to convey both through his work and interacting with the audience.

He worked on 3 trees over the course of two days which my camera only really captured the final image of one well. He styled a Juniper, a scotts pine and an old red pine from the national bonsai and Penjing collection.

The red pine after some structural wiring.

I think it would be safe to say that every one in the crowd learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed the weekend. Ryan has certainly left Australia wanting more and hopefully we will see him return at some stage in the future. Perhaps he can revisit this red pine once it has seen some further refinement in his absence.

The finished Red pine demo tree.

The results obviously speak for themselves. Ryan put on a great show and openly shared his knowledge over the course of the 3 days. For any one that has the chance to see him or learn under him I would suggest you take up that chance, I certainly will again should I get the opportunity.

AABC 2013 Exhibition.

May 23, 2013 in Bonsai Shows, Nurseries and Events | Tags: AABC 2013, Exhibition | Leave a comment

This weekend past I was lucky enough to see Ryan Neil at the AABC national convention in Canberra. This is a national convention that is held in a different city around Australia each year. The exhibition is one of the key components of the convention and I look forward to seeing what each city has to display each year. Unfortunately my camera didn’t deal well with the low light in the exhibition so only a few pictures were in focus and those are in the gallery below. Enjoy.

: Banksia

: Juniper?

: Privet

: Azalia

: English Elm

: Fig

: Paper bark.

: Chinese Elm

: English Elm

More needle work

April 30, 2013 in Bonsai Maintenence | Tags: Australia Bonsai, Australian Bonsai, Japanese Black Pine, Needle thinning, Pinus thunbergii | Leave a comment

As the season rolls on I am slowly getting to the end of my needle work which in turn will mark the time to begin preparing the deciduous trees for winter.

The tree below is another that has been slowly developing over the years and with another wiring and another years candle pruning I think it will be close to exhibit-able.

The tree has appeared on the blog before HERE where you can see the progress it has made and the ramification it has gained. It also makes obvious just how much it needs a re-wire.

Before the work

After a the needle plucking.

Yet another of my trees that desperately needs a re-wire, it will have to get into line behind all the others that I plan on doing this winter.

Needle work continues.

April 23, 2013 in Bonsai Maintenence | Tags: Australia Bonsai, Australian Bonsai, Japanese Black Pine, Needle thinning, Pinus thunbergii | 2 comments

This weekend gone by I got some time to do some needle work on a few more trees. One of which has featured on this blog before. It’s a bit of a strange tree and people either like it, or want to cut off the first branch. I like the first branch and as a result i haven’t cut it off just yet and actually now the tree is filling in a little bit more I am beginning to like it more than I did at first.

Looking a little shaggy

Probably the part of blogging I am enjoying the most is how it has forced me to catalogue my trees as they progress. If you look at this tree 2 years ago HERE you can see that the tree has really improved over that short time. Looking at it day to day on the benches it is easy to lose perspective and feel like the tree is not progressing. It is only when you see a picture from a year or two ago that you realise just how much it has changed.

Needles removed revealing nice, new, short growth.

I am very happy with the progress I have achieved with it over the last couple of years and hopefully if I can keep this momentum up for a few more the tree will be well on the way to being exhibit-able.

I doubt if this tree is ever going to be everyone’s cup of tea but I think that it is now on a path where it will grow into a convincing image.

The start of needle work

April 18, 2013 in Bonsai Maintenence | Tags: Australia Bonsai, Australian Bonsai, Japanese Black Pine, Needle thinning, Pinus thunbergii | 1 comment

Its been a good year for growth in my garden which is always a bit of a double edged sword. A good seasons growth means that all your trees will have progressed and built further to their structure, ramification etc. but with lots of growth comes lots of maintenance.

With my pines this work takes longer and longer times. As the trees ramify the number of shoots double each year in turn doubling the time it takes to maintain them. As trees become more dense fingers can no longer reach areas of the branching so tweezers are employed which again can slow things down a little.

Here in Australia we are beginning to slip into autumn and it is time to shoot prune the second flush of growth and do needle work on the pine’s remaining growth.

The first tree off the bench was THIS little black pine.

Before the work.

Finally it is beginning to look like it belongs in a bonsai pot. you can see in the before picture how nicely the needle length has come down compared to the long needles attached to candles that were not pruned in spring due to them being weak. These weak candles now have strong buds at their tips getting ready for next springs flush.

After removing old needles.

After a few hours work things begin to look a whole lot neater. The new length of the needles is much more suited to the trees size and over all the tree is beginning to look more in proportion. Next step is a re-wire which I hope to complete some time this winter and then a re-pot into something a bit nicer.

Something different.

April 10, 2013 in Bonsai Shows, Nurseries and Events | Tags: Display, Makoto Azuma | 1 comment

Its been a busy start to the year and as a result the posts to this blog have been a little slow. Hopefully in the coming weeks I will get a bit more spare time and will be able to update more regularly.

One bonsai related thing I was able to attend was an exhibition that featured a work by Makoto Azuma. I am sure many of you have seen works by him already as they do pop up from time to time on various bonsai blogs and websites, but for those that don’t know of his work it may be worth having a look at his site linked above.

His work is interesting from a bonsai perspective because he creates botanical sculptures that challenge ideas of controlled growth, display and the interaction between nature and man. His works often utilise bonsai in various states, frozen, dissected and scientifically maintained.

In the case of the exhibition I visited he had created a sealed container that automated all phases of a plants growth, and in this case the plant happened to be a bonsai which in its self had been highly manipulated to create its form.

The contained bonsai

The container watered the bonsai, controlled the fertiliser, humidity, temperature, airflow and light that the bonsai received while also serving as a means of displaying the bonsai in what almost looks like a museums scientific glass specimen case.

Humidity and temperature monitor.

Although the bonsai inside the case was not the best example of a black pine I have seen, what I did find interesting was the way that when a bonsai was displayed inside a container that made visible all the manipulations to growing conditions that modern practices use, it highlighted the stylistic manipulation that we as bonsai growers do and that the plant inside the box had received. It really got me thinking about what it is we do as bonsai artists.

So often the discussion about our art revolves around styling differences and the bonsai it-self. I tend to think that the display arrangement and or the environment in which it is displayed says as much about the overall composition as whether or not you subscribe to ‘natural’ or ‘cookie cutter’ schools.

The bonsai in a box.

It is interesting that when you see this exhibit that the bonsai takes somewhat of a back seat in the overall composition and the object as a whole (glass case, bonsai and gallery room) all work together to present what was to me a new way of looking at the art we do.

Will you see similar displays at your local show any time soon? Probably not. But it does raise interesting questions about how we present our trees and in turn what stories those presentations tell. What can our bonsai represent? What does combining our trees with other objects say? Perhaps it is time to start thinking outside the box in terms of what it is we wish to convey to the viewer when we exhibit out bonsai and try something outlandish from time to time. If you look at contemporary art, the space and arrangement of the art objects is as important as the objects themselves and perhaps it is this aspect that we as bonsai artists struggle with.

I recently visited MONA in Tasmania and came across a room full of tribal masks. Each mask was lit by spot light which alternated from one to another in an otherwise dark room. After flicking through several masks the light stopped on a Picasso portrait. It was this juxtaposition between the masks and the portrait that hinted at where the Picasso painting had possibly taken its inspiration from. It had combined many works that individually were all impressive in their own right into a collection of works that once combined told the viewer more that what the individual works could tell on their own. An interesting concept when thinking about bonsai display.

For those wishing to see it ‘in the bark’ the exhibition is on until the 20th of this month at ‘Broached East‘ gallery Level 7 388 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Australia. If your in the area I think it is well worth a visit.

Some more info about the show is HERE

Nebari, incorrect techniques and their results.

March 5, 2013 in Bonsai Maintenence, Re-potting | Tags: Nebari, technique | 3 comments

I have had a number of old deciduous trees go through my collection over the years. Often they arrive in various states of neglect or dis-repair due to ageing owners, lack of interest or lack of knowledge. What has been interesting is the results of this lack of technique and or application.

I think most people are aware of what they should be doing. Most beginner books say something along the lines of “cut all downward growing roots off to form a flat root-base”. In essence that is correct. But why?

Is it to get the roots to fit in shallow containers? Partly yes.
Is it to encourage a flaring nebari? Partly yes.

There is one more reason that is rarely discussed or talked about when talking about root work.

What we want roots to do in a bonsai container is counter intuitive to the plant we are growing. We want a shallow root system close to the soil surface. This area of the soil profile is horticulturally the worst place in the pot to grow roots, and here in lies the problem.

The top few centimetres of soil are those most likely to experience temperature changes and drying out, both of which are no good for roots. Yet this is the area of soil we need them to occupy to form a good shallow root-base.

Correctly pruned root base

The above image is a vertical slice through the center of a well-formed nebari.The hairs on either side are roots and the triangluar shape is the nebari and lower trunk.

Idealy you want roots on the outside radius of the root base so that as the tree grows the nebari slowly gets larger. These roots however are occupying a zone that is not ideal for them. In order to keep them active in this zone you must force them to stay there.

To do that you remove all downward growing roots. These roots are more protected under the trunk and head straight for the cooler more temperature and moisture stable soils lower down in the pot. If you leave them on year after year the bonsai will preference these downward growing roots which are in better horticultural locations and the roots you actually want to keep around the edge of the nebari will slowly start to die back.

Incorrectly pruned root base result.

What you end up with is something like the above drawing (this shows a tree which had a well-developed nebari and was then incorrectly maintained). All the roots on the edge have died back and only roots underneath the trunk are growing. Now the nebari will not grow in size around the edges but instead grow underneath the trunk and slowly make the root base less and less shallow requiring deeper and deeper pots to house it.

These downward growing roots often push the trunk up and show the edges of the nebari so that it appears somewhat like a blob of melted candle wax. Not ideal. Not natural.

If left in this state for a long time the edges of the nebari can begin to develop areas of dieback that will often spread from the edge of the nebari up toward the trunk. All in all a bad result.

So if you have deciduous trees that are beginning to form nice root bases be sure to ALWAYS take off the downward growing roots. It is not just to fit the tree into the pot but it is mainly to ensure your roots grow where you need them to and this will keep your nebari developing correctly well into the future.

Japanese Black Pine Cuttings.

March 3, 2013 in Bonsai Shows, Nurseries and Events | Tags: Japanese black pine cuttings | 1 comment

Neil over at Shibui Bonsai has just posted some very interesting results of taking cuttings from Japanese Black pine seedlings.

Photo shamelessly borrowed from Shibui bonsai

He essentially is getting two plants from every seedling as opposed to the standard method where the original roots are thrown away. His strike rate has been excellent and with seed in Australia often being scarce doubling your stock shortly after germination is a great thing!

Anyway, have a look, it is well worth a read.

http://shibuibonsai.com.au/japanese-black-pine-cuttings/

Oh and Neil also grows some excellent stock in a range of species which can also be found on his site, http://shibuibonsai.com.au/.

Japanese Maple Project.

February 25, 2013 in Pruning | 4 comments

I am continuously telling myself I have enough trees and that I need to reduce the collection. Well, that only works so well, much like the tree that is the topic of this post, bonsai keep finding their way into my backyard.

The maple, October 2012.

I saw this maple at a local show last year and while talking with the owner, he let me know that it may be for sale sometime in the future. To cut a long story short, I bought the tree early this year and it has since sat on my benches while I got to know it.

A few things drew me to the tree initially. The tree had age. Old grey bark is a sign that the tree has been around for a long while and cannot be achieved via short cuts. The nebari was another feature that drew me to it as it was really starting to flare nicely at the soil level. This is a really nice feature that can only get better with future work as I develop the rest of the tree.

Since it arrived in the garden, I have fed it, watered it and tried to work out what my plan for its future might be. It has responded well and even survived a large gum tree branch falling onto it. It took two people to lift the branch off but luckily all the trees under it survived with only a couple of small broken branches. Very lucky.

Today I decided that I would start the tree’s re-styling. I first cleaned the nebari and removed the surface moss. For this I used an old tooth bush and clean water. Old tooth brushes really come in handy for this type of work. I then cut off the heavy apex and replaced it with a small branch below.

The cleaned nebari

The apex pruned back and a small branch below wired into place.

On a couple of the larger cuts I trialed using two cut pastes at once. First I applied a liquid paste from a tube. I like this type of cut-paste but it tends to soften and wash off during extended periods of rain which is why I applied a second layer of cut-paste putty over the top as a waterproof layer. I also like the putty on it own but I find it sometimes dries out too quickly and or doesn’t seal as well as the liquid tube style pastes. Hopefully this will give me the best of both worlds.

Another double cut-paste pruning cut.

I know there are those out there who don’t believe in the use of cut-paste and are quietly smiling away to them selves at my overkill, but without starting a debate on the issue, I have tried using cut-paste and not using cut-paste and at least where I am living it seems using it gives better results than simply leaving the wound to its own devices.

After removing the apex it was time to address the areas of the old branches that had thick growth at their tips and or sections where too many buds had been allowed to grow and knuckles had formed. When faced with this type of issue the only solution is to cut out the offending growth. It does seem like you are setting the progress of the tree back a little as you are removing some of the visual bulk of the branch but down the track you will end up with a branch with much better structure and a far superior winter image.

Thick twigs at the tips of the branches look heavy and take any idea of grace away from the branch structure.

So I cut out the offending areas. I will re-build the fine tips with the back budding that the pruning will no doubt trigger.

Since the tree had been on a heavy feeding program it has begun to show results. Buds have already started to swell along the branches and the trunk which makes me confident that the pruning will continue to trigger new buds for future ramification. Interestingly some of the buds that woke up along the trunk were almost at soil level and on really old bark.

There are buds at the base of most branches or former branches.

Some buds low down on the trunk on old wood.

Buds at the base of a branch damaged by the falling gum tree branch.

More buds.

It’s easy to prune large branches when you know they will be easily replaced by buds at the base.

I think the tree had previously been on a very low dose and or no dose feeding program. This meant that when I started to flood it with fertiliser it literally started jumping out of its skin (or bark) with back-budding. I imagine next season this will only be amplified once it is re-potted into a fresh mix and the compacted roots get some space and start to run a little.

After correcting a few of the structural issues I had a think about the future style of the tree. I decided that the trunk line would be complimented nicely with a second trunk. As it turned out I had a small branch in just the right position at the base of the first branch to wire up into the new trunk. This will be left to grow free for the next few seasons to thicken and elongate.

A usefull branch wired up into its new role as seccond trunk.

A useful branch wired up into its new role as second trunk.

After doing work such as cleaning and structural corrections you get a good idea of the trees faults and features which makes for a nice way to ease into re-styling. In this case it made the decision of changing the front easy. The old front had a root that had grown across the root-ball and fused a long time ago creating a slightly awkward look when viewed from that side. The Back of the tree showed a much nicer nebari and the now left first branch exited the trunk from a much nicer angle. The newly wired up apex gives the appearance of much nicer taper and adds a little movement from this new front as well.

After the work. A little bare for now but the bones are all there to make a very nice tree in the future.

For now the tree will be fed and left alone until re-potting time early next spring. Then after the first flush of spring growth hardens off I plan to fully wire the tree and any new growth that has developed from the buds that are forming now. I am really looking forward to getting into the root-ball and seeing what it looks like under the soil and where I can make improvements. It has the start of a fantastic nebari and it will be fun taking it and the rest of the tree to the next level.

Nichigo Bonsai

Good bud, bad bud.

Ryan Neil, AABC 2013.

AABC 2013 Exhibition.

More needle work

Needle work continues.

The start of needle work

Something different.

Nebari, incorrect techniques and their results.

Japanese Black Pine Cuttings.

Japanese Maple Project.

My photos

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