The 5th U.S. National Bonsai Exhibition is just a few months away. The event will be held on September 10th and 11th in Rochester, New York – home to William N. Valavanis, the force responsible for bringing the event to life. As always, there will be demonstrators from around the world, a large vendor area, […]
Bonsai Development
Bonsai Development posts form the heart of Bonsai Tonight. Learn about varieties like Black Pine, Shimpaku and Japanese Maple, techniques like Decandling and Grafting and Air Layering, and bonsai features like Deadwood.
Decandling a red pine forest bonsai
Although I’ve only posted a handful of explicit bonsai experiments, I tend to think of all bonsai work as experimental. We know what happens when we cut – some amount of foliage is removed from the tree we’re working on. What we don’t know is how exactly the tree will respond. We may have a general idea […]
Pulling needles on black pine
Density is a key concept in bonsai. We want young trees to develop good density. With mature trees, we aim to maintain density. Density, it seems, rarely takes care of itself. Some of the young pines I’m developing have been decandled for the past several years. This has dramatically increased the trees’ density. Dense foliage […]
Balancing vigor on black pine
The term decandling gets a lot of attention. Rightly so – it’s a key technique in the development of black and red pine bonsai. It’s the technique that helped me get from here: June, 2013 to here: June, 2016 in three years. By itself, however, the technique is fairly limited. Cutback and needle-pulling are equally […]
Stimulating new buds on cork oak
My recent posts on cork oaks feature trees that were removed from the ground this past winter. The goal for those trees is to simply get healthy and develop strong roots so they can withstand further work next year. The cork oak below was removed from the ground in 2015 – one year earlier. The tree […]