In the last few years I’ve started working more with olive bonsai. Although they do best where the weather gets hot, they can grow well in mild climates too.
As time goes by, I have less patience for species that don’t thrive where I live which makes olives a refreshing addition to the garden. Many of the specimens I’m working with are future shohin bonsai from Cesar Ordoñez at CenCal Bonsai. Cesar collects olives in a variety of sizes and styles, but he focuses on shohin more than anything else.
My process for working on these small trees has been simple. When they’ve been recently collected, I leave them alone so they can establish new roots. I repot the following winter and again wait for them to recover. During this time I remove any suckers that appear from low on the trunk or from the soil.
Once they start putting on good new growth, I’ll reduce the upper branches and let the lower branches grow freely until they reach the desired thickness. Cesar was in town this week, so we worked on a few of the trees he’s collected. Here’s what this first pass looks like.
Olive #1
Olive #2
Olive #3
Olive #4
I’m not totally sure about the front on some of these so I’m focusing on getting a single bend on the lower branches while keeping the upper branches in check. Once they start to fill in a bit, and maybe produce a few new shoots from the trunk, I’ll be able to make a better determination about the future front.
Here’s an olive that’s about two years ahead of the trees above. It’s been wired once and cut back earlier this year and it’s already putting on another flush of growth for late summer. In another two to three years, it may be ready for a spot in a shohin display.
Olive in training
During Cesar’s visit, Eric Schrader joined in for a podcast on the topic of olives. You can listen to the episode at the Bonsai Wire Podcast.
Cesar Ordoñez
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Nancy says
Thanks for the post on olives! I too have a little sumo olive from Cesar. I let it grow all summer without cutting back so it has crazy growth (5-6” long) all over. It’s still in its original pot.
Do you think for zone 4B/5A it is too late to reduce the upper branches? I will wire the lower branches now to try to look like your last pictured olive. And if I do all that, I assume I should you wait until spring to repot?
TIA Jonas
Jonas Dupuich says
Hi Nancy! I’ll defer to local growers, but I’d guess it’s safe to prune olive now if you protect them in winter. I’d wait until spring to repot unless you have enough warm weather this fall for them to get established before winter.
Sean says
Olives sure are tough. They tolerate lower lights levels too, they’ll just slow way down. Another benefit is they seem to be very readily available as raw material, there’s a couple of eBay sellers who always have tons of them. They also look great in terra cotta or training pots due to the olive green and light orange color harmony!