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Hey.

I have an Picea glauca spruce that was bought as christmas tree. It's about 1m tall and it was outside all of the time.
What would i lilke to know, when is the best time to start styling? Of course i would repot it, would just like to prune, style and wire it.
Thanks!

Where are your location and what is the weadher and temperature right now?

Tropfrog wrote: Where are your location and what is the weadher and temperature right now?

Not just right now, but what is expected.

Last week here the lows were significantly above freezing, then three days of way below, now back up to way above. Absolutely crazy weather. Summer is uniformly hot. Winter is uniformly not uniform.

Picea glauca is common to areas with lots of snow. SO they are well tuned to being frozen and having branches bend. I would not hesitate styling now. And in really cold weather situation, protect the plant by moving it into a shed for a few days. Just a light nicht time frost is no issue.

LocationSlovenia
USDA Zone7b
from -5C - 5C

What about pruning and hard pruning? Is it safe to do it now? And if not, when is the best time to do that?

Svarog wrote: What about pruning and hard pruning? Is it safe to do it now? And if not, when is the best time to do that?

You're not that far from me (I'm basically right on the coast from you). Pruning a spruce now is perfectly fine in our climate.
My (small) experience with spruces, tho, is that they are very susceptible to hard pruning and they like (or, in some cases, pretend) a lot of foliage on, otherwise they wither and die.
So "hard pruning" is better operated in multiple steps, possibly never removing more than 20-25% of the foliage in a single year, and moving to the next pruning session only if the plant is healthy and recovered well from the previous one.
Add that it doesn't backbud (making compacting the tree hard), that it does often pretend a lot of foliage (making styling hard), that it has extremely flexible branches (making positioning hard, as they always go back to the previous position) and you have a plant that is hard to turn into a decent bonsai; and the reason why you don't see that many people doing christmas-tree -> bonsai conversions.

At least, not really successfully.

That said, I have one with which I'm still trying to do the same, over here :lol:

Thanks for all the info.
Have read about this species that is not exactly the best for turning it into bonsai. But, i figure that is an excellent learning opportunity considering that it was bought specifically as Christmas tree.
If i don't use this one for learning it would just end as another regular tree at my parents backyard (they leave near the forest so i plant stuff there if i don't need them).

Any advices which style is one of the best options for this species? The trunk line is pretty straight.

Svarog wrote: Any advices which style is one of the best options for this species? The trunk line is pretty straight.

That depends a lot on how much effort you want to put in it. You can manage to bend the trunk, but obviously you'll never turn it in something contorted.

Anyway styling is indeed the hard part. Search a few images of spruce bonsai and get your inspiration, but in general what you want to do is keep handful of branches to provide most of the foliage, and remove the rest except for a few finer ones to build the apex. And considering what I said above, it'll be a long, long process, as you can't really prune away everything else in one go and expect the tree to survive...

Great info.
So basically, i should prune about a (max) quarter of branches / foliage per year and i should be pretty safe?
I understand this videos are for learning purpose ( ), but in this video Ryan removes more than a half for foliage. So the base line is, i should not be doing this?