December jobs

Having a few days off over Christmas is getting a few essential tree jobs done. Earlier in the year I submit a picture for consideration in the Noelanders show and it was accepted so the guy wires were removed 2 weeks ago to see if the branches would hold in place (I didn't want to have them removed on show day and the branches pop up ! I think if this happens it is better to leave them in place).

The two guyed branches had been hollowed underneath completely out of sight 4 months ago, and the combination of wire holding and branch healing has set them perfectly. If just a wire had been used the tree would keep springing back for a year or more.

As the branches were holding properly the upward new growth tips were wired flat and the algae washed from the bark. I few smaller branches were moved a little to balance the gaps and foliage pads but on the whole the tree has been kept as natural as possible. I felt the lower branch on the right was a little too long in the submision picture so I shortened it a few inches. I'm pleased with how the tree responded last year - lots of my bonsai food, the root reduction and repotting, the rain......the tree seemed to thrive through it all and has come on so far over the 4 years I've been styling it.

The pot is Tokoname, made at the Seizan kiln by Mr.KATAOKA Katsushi. This is a fairly old pot that was imported directly to the UK by Anne Swinton some years ago. It was home to her Ginko for many years and is the actual pot pictured with the Ginko in her book. Over time that tree was sold but died, another tree (juniper) ended up in the pot and I bought it, so got the pot. Funnily enough I didn't know about the pots history until a few years later but soon wanted the pot for a better tree, so out came the juniper !. The hinoki has been repotted 3 times in 4 years, smaller each time, and every timee the pot has been a mass of new roots. I may let the tree go 2yrs to restrict the roots a bit and slow the vigour - this will tighten the foliage up in future years

 Finding a nice stand here isn't that easy, especially for larger trees so I bought one from Japan and had it shipped over. The service from J Bonsai (bonsai network japan) https://jbons252.securesites.com/ssl_index.html was superb and the stand was in the UK in 3 days. Then it takes the UK delivery service over a week due to xmas getting in the way but the main think is it is here, in perfect condition and in time for the show.

The roof at the side of our house has a fair bit of lovely silver moss on it so new years day I will get the roof ladder out and collect some to moss the pot. Then i will liquidise some fresh sphagnum moss and mix it with water, spread a thin layer on the soil and add the surface moss on top. This is a little more work but keeps the top dressed moss looking so much better as there are several days involved with the Noelanders show. Equally importantly the Hinoki does not like drying out so the sphagnum layer keeps up humidity while the tree is traveling and in the show.

Two other xmas projects are on the go too, so more posts to follow very soon.

Bonsai Bags - Fertilising made easy

Over the last few years I've been getting good results with granular, pelleted type of feeds -initially using products like Biogold, Nakuro etc and then for the last 2 seasons with a fertiliser I formulated in the factory specifically for bonsai. With all the feeds they were scattered on the pots like normal and are left to leach slowly into the pot - but they come with several down sides.

• Can wash off, wasting fertiliser and money
• Clogs the granular soil up as it waters down into the pot - effecting drainage and airflow over time
• Some products completely cover the surface in mould - annoying if you show the trees
• Once spent they can be messy to remove or scrape off

Recently several bonsai growers have been using tea bags to contain the fertilisers and these solve lots of the above problems, but add a couple of others to the list

• They get soggy, split and spill the contents into the pot again
• Critters can easily run or fly away with them

Here we have a 4 week old tea bag containing my powdered feed - I turned it over and it has disintergrated so not a perfect solution.

BONSAI BAGS

This lead me to sourcing a fine nylon mesh fillable and re-usable bag which we managed to do - but they were white, pastel blue or pale pink !! The trials (with the blue ones) went very well so we placed an order to have them delivered in a nice natural dark brown and now they've arrived things are going really well as many benifits become clear. I'm filling the bags with a powdered version of my fertiliser recipe which combines intantly soluble ingredients with slower delivering elements - with these combined ingredients I leave the bags in place for 6 weeks for most normal situations.

Once filled the bags are added to the pot - they can even be lined up with specific roots to channel feed to key branches and areas

Once placed the bags are watered to soak the ingredients, begining to release the solubles instantly and starting the bacterial action that will break down the fertiliser into plant usable compounds.

Above we see a newly watered bonsai bag positioned on the outer edge of a pot - and that is taking care of the tree fertilising needs for the next 6 weeks - (The tree above will have 3 bags).

Not only are the bags a neat tidy way to hold the fertiliser in place, but they actually do a better job as can be held in place on sloping sections of a pot. Here I use the loops on the draw strings to fasten the bag to a root on a 45 degree slope on a juniper bonsai.

These nylon loops can be used to attach the bags to roots, guy wires, tying in wires etc and this stops birds and creatures disappearing with the bags - I've found the brown bags are not spotted so easily either.

In the picture above I am using the bonsai bags to concentrate the feed at the roots that feed the live veins of a needle juniper rather than in the areas of dead wood.This picture shows just how neat and tidy the brown bonsai bags are...

 The beauty of this method of feeding the trees is the neatness and speed with which spent fertiliser can be removed, the bags refilled and the free draining soil conditions maintained. Another added bonus comes when a tree is off to a show as instantly the fertiliser can be removed and the bag popped on the tree next door.

I have the brown bonsai bags in stock in packets of 10 and can send them to any country if anyone wants to try them out.

£2.45 / 10 + postage,  £19.50/100

We also have a combination starter pack with 250gr of the powdered fertiliser and 10 bonsai bags.

£5.99 + p&p

Just email us at info@aqualabs.co.uk for orders etc, or add any questions to the comments section here.

Cheers for reading Marcus

Up the Reds -

This tree captivates me more than any other. For 4 years I had searched for a really nice red maple (acer palmatum)  and while we had seen lots of 'nice but normal' ones we had failed to see the tree that stood out from the mass produced crowd. As is the way, when you actually stop looking so hard the tree just pops up when you least expect it and this is exactly what happened. We had gone up to the inlaws in Sunderland - which is great as its only 45 minutes from Willowbog - and for a change Mandy and her Mum had come along for the drive. You walk through the shop and into the nursery and we literally stopped in our tracks 2 steps in as a bright red acer was sat on the 2nd podium ! This was actually funnier (to me) than it sounds as I go to Willowbog for the rugged wilderness, high quality wild trees and chilly howling  wind (and just up the road for £3 you can drive the Kielder Forest rally stage - 12 miles of forest track, awesome !! ;-)  the entire surroundings inspire you to buy a weather beaten conifer or at a push a sheep grazed Hawthorn so to be confronted with a twisting, turning intensely delicate acer caught me by surprise.

This picture was from a couple of years before my story, and shows Peter deep in comtemplation wondering if it's going to be frosty that night, while sheltering my tree from a Northerly wind !

We all left the nursery that Saturday, (without the tree) but I was back Sunday morning as I knew this was the one - even Mandy said at dinner the night before " are you going back for it?" - she knew too.

The tree came back to Cornwall that weekend and here she is in June that year, 2011. Why did this one stand out ? - the taper in the lower trunk, perfectly flowing into wonderfull roots that evenly grip the soil. There are no ugly roots - no thick poking out or straight roots and no gaps where there should be roots. (The branches are very well placed as most of the lower ones were grafted into place too). This acer has come from a grower that took their time and did things properly to produce a high quality piece of material.

Which acer is it?
It almost looked too good to be a Deshojo - the leaves are very bright and very fine - but the tree is an incredibly well done graft of around 35 to 45 years old so is a 'true variety' tree from a high quality original stock plant of some description - either  Deshojo or a Beni Maiko were in the running in my mind 2011. The original japanese named varieties were strictly chosen from unusual seedlings and unique hybrids if they showed quite specific traits - maybe leaf colour, leaf shape, growth habit, etc and these few trees would have been the stock plants that made all others mostly via grafting or sometimes layers and occassionally cuttings.

I used to work with an acer 'creator' who worked all his life for Hilliers Nurseries trying to make new named varieties and it was a very lengthy process - made even harder these days as there are already so many existing ones. Over the years there can be dilution of a popular named variety as other silimar looking trees are used as stock plants, sometimes a seedling comes up looking about right and gets named etc and before long the variations within a variety are huge, making lots of confusion !

The tree was in a lovely shallow japanese cream oval but was drying out very quickly in Cornwall so I did a summer repot into a nice modern chinese unglazed large oval -  just combing out the roots a bit, no root pruning. The larger pot is because the plans for the tree are to grow it out a bit wider on the lower branches. Over the next few months the foliage changed through purple-ish, to green, to early autumn shades of orange.

 

 

First winter all the branches were wired and March the buds started expanding so the tree was whipped out of the pot and all the roots under the trunk base were pruned off so I could get the tree back down into the pot from the raised little hill it had grown itself onto. Now a little planning ahead with the repot so the tree does not get an uneccessary disturbance in a year or two - i have positioned the trunk quite a way to the right ready to balance the long branches to the left that will be grown over the next few years. The longer root run in this direction will increase the speed and strength of the branches above, while the moisture and humidity below will support the increased foliage.

Red acer variety traits

I've been looking into the actual differences between the named varieties in the red (coralinium) family as just about every red bonsai is labelled Deshojo and have now found a few clues  from the original definitions and descriptions

• Deshojo has strong leaves that are 6-7cm long on 2-3cm petiols of rusty red brown, - New foliage was described as shrimp pink to red
• Shin Deshojo was a new (in 1965) improved version with brighter colour and the ability to hold the colour for longer in spring - it is described as 'fire engine' red.
• Beni Maiko is probably a very close relative of the Deshojos but the leaves are naturally a little smaller and appear much closer to the branches as the petiols are shorter at 1-2 cm. The give away in identifying Beni Maiko though is the leaves that form later in the year - they are often mis-shapen, sometimes strangely curved or rippled on their surface

Because of the hard root prune the bud expansion stopped and the tree remained static for about a month while new roots grew. Once the roots were recovered the leaves carried on opening during mid to late April

Later in the year the new leaves will show which variety this is - in the earlier picture with the Hawk moth some leaves look irregular on the surface, and coupled with the finer growth I think we may have a fine Acer Palmatum Beni Maiko, but if the leaves stay quite similar all year the tree points to Shin Deshojo - the age is about right as it was defined in 1965.

May 7th, 2012

May 17th, 2012

PHOTOSHOP VIRTUAL OF THE PLANNED STYLE

Booty-ful but prickly

This is the story of the actual tree that inspired me to enter and love the hobby of bonsai. For a totally unknown reason one day 20 odd years ago I went to visit the Japanese Garden and bonsai center at St Mawgan, near Newquay, Cornwall. I came away with a little £5 tree as you do ! and the desire to return again to study the trees. There was a row of the owners trees there - the 'inspirational ones' that make you go out and buy a little one - every nursery has them. Most of this row of trees had come from one collection that had been sold a few years prior - all Japanese imports - a deshojo, a trident, a taxus cuspidata, a kiyohime and a Juniper rigida. They were totally inspiring, especially as I was new to the hobby and good trees were thin on the ground back then too. The tree had been in the UK 25 years at this stage so was certainly acclimatised and was probably not going to die

As the years moved on (18 more years) the tree was hanging in there but always out of my price bracket - the bugger kept getting more expensive !! To be fair the tree was not getting the exact methods and techniques needed to refine it so it had the more natural appearance of thin weeping growth which was very sparse due to the tree sitting under shade netting. Circumstances changed a bit and I also could see tree material like this becoming very hard to get in the future so I saved up for a year to buy the tree. As it was basically mine but not paid for I started feeding the tree and turning it every couple of weeks. Late summer 2009 and a row of new buds popped all along the old bare branches so the tree was paid for and put in the car.

The tree was too weak and too sparse to do anything with really so I fed hard and pinched strong terminal buds for a year, repotting it the following spring into my prefered open texture soil mix. We then moved house so tree work went on hold for another season but the tree was getting much stronger and putting on lots of new growth.

 Year 3 - June 2011- this is 100 times more foliage than it had!!         And more improvement by Sept

Over wintered and its spring 2012

Completely by chance I was corresponding with Peter Tea of Aichi-En about pots and their rims! when I sent him a couple of pictures of this tree for a few hints. He passed on some great advice and said to consider the back as the new front  - so it is time to expose the trees booty

Tucked away at the back of this tree was a lovely section of natural very aged deadwoodand this is the trees area of beauty and interest so the tree was turned, tilted and strapped to my turntable.

There is a dragon or a wild boar in the wood too

reading between the lines Peters advice was to understand and work with the differences between Needle Juniper and shimpaku rather than to confuse or mix the styles -so with the needle juniper use the sharp spiky deadwood, make the pads quite sharp and rigid looking too, make the needles, pads and deadwood complement. With the shimpaku juniper the scale foliage is soft, the pads are styled rounded and cloud-like and the flowing lines of the deadwood and live veins work as soft curves. He sent me two pictures of trees from this years Kokufuten exibition to show the differences in styling and they are the most perfect way to see the different way to style the two varieties so I will share them here for everyone to see.

Here we have a world class needle juniper and I studied it and found a similarity I could use with my tree - above is a twin trunk design and my tree had a long bottom branch that was due to be drastically shortened. I decided to take a chance and try to raise the angled down branch into a new upright trunk as this would give lots of foliage to make the right side of the tree from. I wrapped the lower branch with raffia and attached a fence wire strainer with doubled up 2.5mm copper wire, gradually tightening the strainer and slowly winching up the branch. I was very suprised but over a few hours it is up and the only main crack is 'safe' as its gone length wise with the sap flow rather than across it.

This one change has transformed the potential outcome for my tree as the number of potential branches on the right side has more than doubled, and the new 'branches' all have foliage close to the new trunk too, a great bonus. Now I am shortening the long straggly branches and starting the basics of the new pads - but no fine wiring to the tips of every shoot yet -just pointing the tree in the right direction

Halfway through the work and the rough idea is coming through now

April 23rd and the initial wiringand placing of the branches is done - the strainer has been taken off now it has done its job and been replaced with a copper tension wire - much neater ! I'll let the tree recover from the wiring and concentrate on pinching and shaping the individual pads from now on.

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Quite a transformation and the tree has a new front and style for the first time in the 45 years it has been in England. Lots of refining and pinching to do from now on .

A few more tweaks to the pads and lots of little hanging shoots were cut off and here we have the styled tree

                                  2 weeks later and the tree is repotted at the correct angle

you havent seen Peters Blog check it out - its a great read .....Peter Tea Blog