You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Japanese white pine’ tag.
Wow, looks like almost a year since the last post. Time flys!
I’ve been doing bits an pieces since the last post, in the shed, teaching at clubs and doing the odd demo but for the most part have not been documenting much of it. Life has been pretty busy and typing up blog post is often down the to do list.
That said, i did remember to take a few (bad) phone pics of the below tree.
The tree in question was one i was gifted and had owned for a while. It was then was passed onto another friend, and then several years later it found it’s way back into my yard.
It started life as a garden nursery tree complete with pretty lumpy graft, leggy growth and circling roots. It was originally given to me as the original owner lived by the ocean and the salt spray was leading to it suffering. I nursed it back to health and cut most of it off, leaving two branches essentially. One became the main branch and the other the head. I tipped it on an angle to make better use of the swollen lower root base and gave it a first styling.
It was shortly after this first styling that i gave it to a friend who grew it here in Ballarat for probably close to 4 or 5 years.
Cut to a few weeks ago when i was visiting him and his collection and the tree ended up coming home with me once more. It had really filled in well and provided a heap of new options to explore so i decided to give it it’s second re-styling.
The basic steps i took are shown above, I removed a number of un-needed branches and thinned old needles, then made the major adjustment by pulling the main branch down with the help of a branch bending jack. From there it was just a matter of wiring out the foliage to fit the new style.
The tree sat on the back deck for a couple of days where i made a few adjustments as i got used to the tree. It had a weak first branch on the right hand side so those shoots got minimal wire but they all got mostly into place.
There is now some filling out to go but i have been feeding to build up the energy over autumn to set up next springs buds and i am expecting i will get much of the filling out i need next season.
All in all i really like this tree, and given it original owner has since passed away i am glad to have this tree back in the yard as a little memento of some good times we spent styling bonsai together. It’s also nice it spend some time with my other friend in between, it’s one of the unique things with bonsai that a tree can travel between many hands, each leaving its mark.
This pine was one I dug (liberated) locally. Essentially a weed in our native forests i was happy to stumble across this one with it’s strange movement and old bark.
It has taken a number of years to get it out of the heavy old clay it grew in and into a better soil mix.
Last year i stripped off the site soil and put it into a shallow bonsai pot (all i had).
This year i put it into a much more suitable container (thanks again Ken). It should be able to stay in here for a few years as it establishes a dense root ball. Once it’s solidly rooted i will hopefully be able to remove the support sticks.
I may post an update once i see if the grafts live or die. The variety of pine is the same as THIS one, so i think i should have a decent chance of grafting success. Fingers crossed.
I am trying to repot a handful of trees each weekend in the lead up to spring to get ahead of the growth that seems to be quickly approaching. One of the trees I potted last weekend was the below, tall Japanese white pine.
The little pine didn’t start it’s life as a white pine and in fact was collected (liberated) from a local pine plantation’s roadside where it had self sown. I collected it really only to test as grafting stock.
It had some nice bark and a strange curve atop an otherwise straight trunk. It was also very thin which meant it had a small root ball and was easy to collect.
Turns out that it took the graft really well and the white pine foliage I grafted on has thrived.
After the graft being successful I think I let it grow out for a couple of years before I cut all the original foliage off. Essentially I was able to replace the long (20cm-ish) and shaggy original pine foliage with neat and compact white pine.
After the experiment was confirmed a success, I decided I should probably do something with it so I styled the tree and finally got it into a pot.
I really like how this one has turned out for what was just an experiment. It has a lot of development and growing to do before it is any more than styled stock but I think its off to an interesting start. I am really liking the tall-ness of this tree and it has made me want to go and dig a handful more so I could graft them and assemble a group. I did have to remove the tap root this re-potting but it had few feeder roots growing from it so fingers crossed it is a quick recovery.
Just a quick post for today. I was going through some old holiday photos (mainly bonsai pics) and came across a small Japanese White Pine I had worked on in Japan.
I am really getting more and more into shohin sized trees. They are really challenging to grow well yet are easy to handle and take up much less bench space, which is a plus.
The challenge with this tree was to create enough detail in the foliage by means of multiple layers to give the illusion that it was in fact a much larger tree.
Before
After
Of course half the battle is starting with good stock which this little tree certainly falls into the category of.
Hopefully I can start producing some stock similar to this in the coming years.
Prior to the recent AABC convention, I was asked to style an established Japanese white pine that had reached a stage where it needed some work to get it back on track.
It had been worked on a number of years ago during a workshop held by Hirotoshi Saito where the second trunk was bent upwards from what was a heavy first branch. Since then the tree has grown out with the occasional branch guyed down from time to time and with some trimming to keep the growth somewhat compact. What the tree was desperately needing was a full wiring and styling.
As the tree arrived in my garden.
I cut a good amount of branches off and had to do some heavy bending to move the apex from leaning towards the back to leaning forward. Most of the work was sorting out branch structure and setting basic branch positions to prevent thickening in areas that you might not want it in the future and providing structure for the tree to grow into.
Some of the removed branches.
After a couple of days wiring.
The tree will really benefit from a couple of years growth to fill out some areas such as the apex, but it now has a solid base structure to build upon further in the future.
The graft in this trees case is quite noticeable at the moment but I think that once the white pines park begins to crackle it should start to blend in much more. How long will that take? Who knows. I think 10 years would start to see the process beginning.
You don’t see many White pines in Australia and particularly of this size. It will be a good tree to keep an eye on as it progresses in the coming years.
Nichigo Bonsai 