名媛直播

Just finally got some new trees (my first 3), and have come up with a little plan of action and was hoping I could get some critique on it to make sure I don't immediately kill my first trees within a year or two!

I'm Zone 9b down here in Central Florida so we have fairly nice weather year round, except for a month or two of cool weather, and I think we have generally a long growing season. All of my plants will be kept outside

Tree number one is a typical Juniper procumbens nana. Fairly normal looking, I think I'll probably try to leave the top generally how it is and take the first branch down angled a bit and fill it out on the right side as a pad, then base it with some nice moss. I'm considering wiring it to try to pull the trunk down hard on the left, like I have shown with the red line, and then bring it back up at the apex and for ma wide canopy on the left side, with a small pad on the right possibly coming forward?

Tree number two is a Chinese Elm that I'm not quite sure what to do with yet. The bottom has a pair of branches which I think could work if I develop them to make a single pad, or maybe even curve one around to the side. The top can take the standard kind of cone shape I think! In that first picture it looks like it gets wider up the trunk than the base but I think that's just camera lighting where that branch starts, it still tapers up the length of the trunk:

For the elm, I dont plan on doing anything with it until late autumn here when the leaves fall, then i might try to wire it a bit. For the juniper nana, I'd like to maybe wire that soon to start the trunk coming down early as I've read Juniper's take to wire really any time of the year (especially down here in Florida). Otherwise I might just leave them as they are with their daily water (or more as summer comes), with bi-weekly milorganite and just let them get happy and ready for the short dormant winter, then I'll try to prune and style in january/february. I may have to prune the elm earlier as we hit the summer months though, just trying to keep the pad idea. One suggestion I received was to air layer the top off and have two elms, but that is looking a bit daunting as an absolute beginner.

I also got a piece of "sacrificial" material from Home Depot that I'm going to use to practice repotting, wiring, shaping, etc. It's this neat juniper with an interesting spiral shape.



I'm going to leave it in the nursery pot for now until the branches can grow out and become wood, but I was hoping I would be able to wire it up this weekend because I'd like to start practicing that. Looking at what I consider the front, here, I'll probably get rid of that far right piece altogether, and make the front piece curling to the right a piece of Jin, wrapped equidistant from the center as the main trunk but maybe only half height, and have the live piece continuing on a helical pattern up and around. Alternatively maybe off to the left as a cascade? Either way I really want to start practicing wiring, even if it's just the trunk, and for this cheap material I don't care too much about it

I'd love if someone could let me know how this sounds in terms of planning and timing. I've gotten some other good advice and wanted some more ideas. Thanks!

Since I can't edit the original I'll just add the additional... I went ahead and wired the sacrificial one.



Came out alright and is now going more in the shape I want in this sort of helix pattern. The front trunk that's currently going to the right and wired will eventually be wrapped around a bit more and turn into jin, and then the counter clockwise curling branch that's wired now will stay where it is now or maybe come a bit further in. Hopefully I don't kill it, but if I do it's not the end of the world

There was just a bit more then 3 hours between your first post, and you wiring the tree.

Impatience is what kils 99% of all trees.

Helix pattern? Did you actually study bonsai shapes?

Also: this plant is too young and has no potential yet. Jinning it is pointless. It does not suit such young trees.

Your elms are mallsai. Cheap, mass-produced trees in a standard and very typical, but unnatural, S-shape. These are not quality plants and are not meant to last. They may look nice to you when you buy 'm, but experience learns that these plants do not last long. Forums are full of people asking why their elm is dying.

You can prune them to maintain their current shape, but if you want ot make bonsai out of 'm, you will have to do a complete make-over. First get them in proper soil and make t hem grow abundantly. When they are strong and healthy, start making plans.

There was just a bit more then 3 hours between your first post, and you wiring the tree.
Impatience is what kils 99% of all trees.

I purchased the sacrificial juniper a few days ago and was wanting something to get started learning how to wire, which I decided to go ahead an do. I'm not particularly attached to the tree except as a learning bed to see how things happen before I mess with any other trees, which would sit for some time before I do anything other than water/fertilizer.

Helix pattern? Did you actually study bonsai shapes?

I wasn't aware that I wasn't allowed to experiment with interesting designs I liked and that I had to follow strict design shapes. I will remember that for future trees.

Also: this plant is too young and has no potential yet. Jinning it is pointless. It does not suit such young trees.

I am not jinning it, I am growing it out to eventually become jin. Is that not a thing you can do in bonsai?

Your elms are mallsai. Cheap, mass-produced trees in a standard and very typical, but unnatural, S-shape. These are not quality plants and are not meant to last.

I got the elm from a seemingly reputable bonsai nursery, not a mall shop, one that has a bunch of great reviews and many hits from people who have received trees from them.

I seem to have offended you somehow with my original post and beginner thoughts, bringing out a rather rude set of responses. If that's the case, I apologize for your time wasted in reading through it.

Lawlcat wrote: I wasn't aware that I wasn't allowed to experiment with interesting designs I liked and that I had to follow strict design shapes. I will remember that for future trees.

Great bonsai look awesome, like real trees, in nature,but miniaturized. I know the argument "it is an art so I can experiment and do my own thing and try whatever I like" but there's a reason why real bonsai look so good. Not because there are rules, but because you need to know and understand these rules before you can break 'm. Sure, you can do your own thing and make something unique, but do not expect it to look good, like a real bonsai.

I got the elm from a seemingly reputable bonsai nursery, not a mall shop, one that has a bunch of great reviews and many hits from people who have received trees from them.

Even the largest and most reputable bonsai nursery in the Netherlands sells mallsai. The simple reason is that they sell - and they do have to make a living.

I seem to have offended you somehow with my original post

Not at all, absolutely not. I do not want to be rude, but I've answerd so many of these same questions that I cannot be arsed to again write a lengthy reply. Just trying to get you up to speed about bonsai. You cannot buy a plant, wire, prune, repot and shape it and expect it to become a bonsai. Creating good bonsai takes time, and LOTS of it, skills, patience, study, patience, horticultural knowledge, patience, practice, and more patience.

Having said that:

Your second elm does show some potential. It has nice bark already, and the lower branches are useful. You may want to reduce it - a lot - by cutting it above that second branch and growing a new leader.

Yes, that's drastic and yes, it is going to take years to re-grow a decent top and branches.

Do NOT follow up on this advice. I can only see a photo and not the real tree, and there may be other options.

Good to see you get your feet wet.

You have posted a number of trees. I would recommend making an individual thread for each of them. It makes it easier to discuss them and you can update for individual trees.

Your "play tree".. What I can see the wire was placed properly, tight against the branch in homogenous loops. It looks like you took care not to damage the side-branches.

As you continue with this tree, start creating a tree, and reduce the look of a shrub.

• wire the sidebranches with much thinner wire.
  Place all the branches under the same angle to the horizontal plane and give them a light twisty motion, fitting the shape of the trunk.
• Remove any branches that are directly opposite, and reduce all places where more than 1 branch comes from the trunk, to 1 branch. Try to get a regular pattern of branches, avoiding all branches right above eachother.
• As you think keep in mind: Low in the tree branches are thicker than high in the tree. So keep branches that support that patters
• As you thin, the bottom 2/3 of the trunk should be visible from your future front, so choose a front and then see whether rermoving all the branches that come out in front works without loosing all branches the tree needs to have a crown.
• In general, the bottom 1/3 of a mature tree trunk has no or very few branches. So you can thin out there too.

If you do all this, you will see the plant change from a shrub to a tree. Next time, you probably should do the thinning first, and then do the wiring, it makes life a lot easier.

Do NOT start peeling away all the green near the trunk. The trick with bonsai is to keep green stems near the trunk to be able to cut back to. Many bonsai have little foliage near the trunk. That is a result of them being old and only having woody stems on the inside. Yours is still young and you want to keep options open in the future.
For the other trees, please make individual threads and show the trees from multiple sides; THat will help us understand the 3D setup of the tree. Looking at a picture makes it really hard to tell the structure of a tree.

leatherback wrote: Next time, you probably should do the thinning first, and then do the wiring, it makes life a lot easier.

I definitely struggled a bit to get it wrapped with all the foliage, but the "branches" were so young and green that I worried about taking anything off yet before any of them had a chance to lignify. Hopefully now with all of them still intact I'll be able to make wiser decisions later as they each grow stronger about which ones I actually want to remove!

leatherback wrote: For the other trees, please make individual threads and show the trees from multiple sides; THat will help us understand the 3D setup of the tree. Looking at a picture makes it really hard to tell the structure of a tree.

I definitely will be doing that! I was hoping to avoid creating a typical "i bought a tree help" thread and wanted to just kind of overview what I had come up with myself, but I'll definitely be making something individual for them as I start to think about what I want to accomplish. I don't think I'll even be touching either the chinese elm or the nana until next February, and I'll probably pop up a thread then with thoughts I have collected over autumn/winter.

Auk wrote: Great bonsai look awesome, like real trees, in nature,but miniaturized. I know the argument "it is an art so I can experiment and do my own thing and try whatever I like" but there's a reason why real bonsai look so good.

I suppose in my defense of my "helix" idea, when I got the plant it was already naturally making such a formation and it inspired me to try to accentuate the design that nature had already started for it. I took this picture when I first brought it home because I thought it was a neat shape unfolding. This was before anything at all done by me.

Auk wrote: Even the largest and most reputable bonsai nursery in the Netherlands sells mallsai. The simple reason is that they sell - and they do have to make a living.

Then that makes me upset that, in spite of my research and trying to find a reputable, local bonsai nursery that I can start my journey into this world, I still seem to have somehow been played and sold inferior material. I made the assumption that a nursery I have read many good comments about would provide me with something that is at least halfway decent pre-bonsai, but it would seem that is not the case. I will have to find some other way to obtain pre-bonsai material in the future.

Auk wrote: Your second elm does show some potential. It has nice bark already, and the lower branches are useful. You may want to reduce it - a lot - by cutting it above that second branch and growing a new leader.

I apologize for I may have made it a bit confusing, but I only have one Chinese Elm. The second picture is from the back, as I was hoping to show that odd reverse taper was mostly due to a branch and not the trunk being thick. The image quality was poor. I will take into consideration the idea of trimming it to above the second branch, as I have received one other comment about how I should potentially air layer it and try again. Looking at the design for other similar elms, I see that the trunk of mine takes far too wide of a curve and is unpleasant. I will consider options for it in the upcoming years.

Don't worry to much about the label the tree has. 名媛直播, mallsai.. Assuming you will spend a number of years on these trees, each of them can become a decent tree. I do not think the elm looks too bad. And, even from mallsai you can create something if you have a bit of imagination (See www.bonsaiempire.com/forum/progressions/...ught-an-ulmus-bonsai ).

It is all about technique, patience and choices. By making the right choices, applying good technique and taking time most trees can become a bonsai.