As decandling season comes to a close, you might notice summer buds forming on some of the first trees you decandled this season. Summer buds Ideally we’ll see two buds at the end of every branch. Ideally. It’s common – and perfectly fine – to see anywhere between zero and five or more buds per […]
Decandling
Refining a black pine
This summer I recorded the process of refining a black pine for Bonsai: Journal of the American Bonsai Society. The resulting article appeared in Volume 50, Number 3. The work was a lot of fun. I took a few more photos than usual and wrote about decandling, cutback, needle pulling and wiring. Here’s a snapshot of […]
Decandling black pine bonsai – an in-depth guide
Now that decandling season is coming to a close, I thought I’d share an overview of the process taken from previous posts. Let’s begin with the obvious question: What is Decandling? There is a lot to say about decandling pine bonsai. There are as many approaches to decandling as there are bonsai professionals, and many […]
Summer work on black pine
For black pine growers, late spring and early summer offer a lot of opportunity for improving trees. Healthy pine bonsai in the refinement stage are decandled. Depending on needle density after decandling, needles can be thinned and branches removed. If necessary, decandled pines can be wired, too. Like many bonsai techniques, wiring branches is stressful […]
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 […]