Korean hornbeam can grow dense with little effort. To encourage interior shoots, I need to thin the foliage. I do this by cutting new shoots back to 2-4 leaves and completely removing extraneous shoots from overly dense areas. Korean hornbeam – July, 2011 After removing the unnecessary leaves, I decided to lower a few of […]
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Evaluating bonsai
As we prepared to begin a judging exercise at this month’s Bay Island Bonsai meeting, Morten asked a good question. It was something to the effect of, “Is the highest scoring tree the most valuable tree?” I knew the two were closely related, but had to think for a moment before coming to a conclusion. […]
Decandling shohin black pine
Decandling Japanese black pines is the process of removing spring growth to produce summer growth. If we decandle early in the season, we give summer growth more time to mature and produce long needles. The converse is also true – decandling later produces shorter needles. For this reason, we typically decandle shohin pine bonsai about […]
How to create seedling cuttings – Japanese black pine
I began to describe the steps required to grow Japanese black pine bonsai from seed last year, but left off just after planting the seeds. I ended up abandoning last year’s batch as only a dozen seeds sprouted. I tried again this year with much better luck. Due to a cold spring, the seeds took […]
Defoliating Trident Maple
Despite relatively cool temperatures this spring, my trident maple has been growing vigorously. I removed the large leaves and trimmed new shoots in April, and found the tree full again in May. May 2011 – the long shoot that appears to emerge out of the tree’s apex was previously earmarked for an approach graft To […]