Late spring is a great time to decandle healthy black and red pines (see “Decandling” for details). It’s also a good time to thin dense areas or remove extra needles that didn’t come off in fall. Over the years I’ve found it relatively easy to decandle pines at the right time, but hard to do […]
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Decandling field-grown black pines
One of the most fun stages of development is when the trunk has reached the desired size and the focus switches to improving branch density. The black pine below was field-grown at Lone Pine Gardens in Sebastopol, California. For the past few years I’ve been slowing the tree down in an effort to develop shorter […]
Pinching candles on small exposed root pines
While repotting a batch of two-year old pines this past winter, John Eads and I paused to create a handful of miniature exposed root bonsai. We hadn’t intended to make small trees, but when we found that the roots we were working with weren’t as good as we had hoped, we decided to make exposed […]
Young pine work with John Eads
Earlier this year I spent a week working on young pines with John Eads of Left Coast Bonsai. We pruned and/or wired almost every young pine in my garden to give us a chance to review the approach for trees at different stages of development. For some of the younger trees, the work was simple. […]
Mid-repotting report: Japanese red pine
This week I finally got around to repotting a red pine forest that hadn’t been worked on in a while. Midway through, I paused to take note of the different techniques I was using to do the work. Midway through the repot I’d started by combing out the mat of roots growing along the bottom […]