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Summer ritual – decandling black pine

July 4, 2009 by Jonas Dupuich

Japanese black pine bonsai entails a set of refining techniques known as decandling.  At its most simple, it refers to the process of removing spring growth to encourage summer growth. At its most complex it involves more variables than I can address in a single post. Regardless the approach, the goals remain the same – shorter needles, shorter internodes, greater ramification.

Hats off to Saichi Suzuki of Daiju En for mastering the technique and allowing black pine bonsai to gain refinement previously limited to white pines. As a result of his work, decandling is today a summer ritual for pine-growing bonsai practitioners around the world.

The number of black pines one has determines how busy one will be during decandling season. For while the basics are simple and quickly achieved, even a small pine like the tree below can require careful work on multiple occasions.

Before decandling

Before decandling

This year the tree sent out large and very large candles which led me to remove the new shoots in two groups ten days apart. I began by removing the weaker shoots.

After cutting the weaker shoots

After cutting the weaker shoots

This made for a funny looking tree. Ten days later I removed the more vigorous shoots – the remainder of the spring growth save for a few weak buds in the tree’s interior.

Removing the vigorous shoots

Removing the vigorous shoots

Seeing the number of shoots removed on a single day provides a good reminder for how stressful decandling can be for a pine. Unless a tree is in good health and has been fed well throughout the spring, decandling can hurt more than help. Because this tree is young and healthy I can expect it to produce a generous number of summer buds.

After decandling

After decandling

Simply removing the tree’s spring growth is easy. To further balance strong and weak branches and to allow more light into the tree’s interior, I removed extraneous needles from the stronger branches. Doing this work at decandling time does wonders for the tree’s balance and makes fall work easier.

After needle thinning

After needle thinning

I’m fortunate that I only have a handful of trees that require decandling. What scares me is that I have a much larger number of young trees that will require decandling in a several years. To mitigate the increased decandling burden I’ll likely fall back on one of my favorite techniques – selling trees that I don’t have time to work on.

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Filed Under: Bonsai Development Tagged With: Black Pine, Decandling

Previous Post: « Sizing up candles
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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. tom tynan says

    July 17, 2009 at 5:00 pm

    Interesting progression and documentation of how you work on your pines…your last paragraph suggests you may offer some younger pines for sale..please keep me in mind. Tom…

  2. Steve says

    April 24, 2010 at 7:21 pm

    Hello Jonas,

    “Selling trees I don’t have time to work on” If you are talking JBP’s, I’m very interested. Just this last December, I managed to get two JBP’s and repotted them with the help of Boon’s DVD’s. They’ve become my new favorite. The two I have were badly neglected and probably overpaid for them. Please let me know. My birthday’s coming and I was thinking of buying myself a JBP specimen project for my own B-day present (05/05) Maybe I can talk to you about that at the next club meeting. *Sooner via email wouldn’t be bad either. Thanks!

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