Sunday 26 February 2012

Native decisions


My hawthorns are budding out now. They will do another year in pots ( or maybe the beds ) until I do anything more with them. They get some cutting back and basic training at this stage to stop anything really silly from happening. They are in much larger pots than the beech trees so I'm happy to let them go on another year further.

The beech's and oaks still show no signs of coming out of dormancy. I keep them lightly fed and don't let them dry out.



This is one of my copper beech trees that I bough at the hedging nursery 2 years ago and grew on in a pot. In mid winter I chopped it down to 1/3 of its height because the wind kept on blowing it over. I took it inside a few weeks ago and got all the leaves off it so that I could have a good look at what was going on.

I'm starting to think about getting this one into a bonsai pot. Trunk is ok thickness and it will continue to grow further - but I'm keen to play with the branches and ramification. As I don't know the behaviour of beech's that well this will be purely to learn more and not destined for greatness.

The lesson learned from the hedging nursery is that they can be completely bare root this time of the year without much damage and a high degree of success. 



This is my old green maple 33 days after being root pruned and put into that new pot. I think I'm getting the technique right now. I'm startled at the vigour - it's needing daily water now - its been cut back quite a lot already. The top is being kept back to 1 node and I'm letting the nice horizontal lateral branches develop. I think a defoliation mid season will give wonderful results late this year.




Here is where i bought that maple several years ago. I'm pleased with what I have done with the material that started at the checkout at the local M&S.



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