ÃûæÂÖ±²¥

Hi,

I've got an Alberta Spruce I want to bonsai. So far so good, I took a lot of foliage/branching out and it's still alive and happy. I have to make it seriously bare though to make it look cool and I'm not exactly sure which way to go, I want it to have a lot of Jin stuff going on.

Have a look at what I was thinking and let me know what you recon:



Thanks,

Tom

PS. Yes I know it's a bad ÃûæÂÖ±²¥ material, but I want to make the best possible out of it. I just like it

Not sure why you want Jinns, they must look natural. Some of the branches are too thick, and need thinning, and the lower branches are like spokes so at least one has to go. Otherwise let it grow for a while so you get to know how it grows and what it takes to keep it healthy

Not necessarily 'bad' bonsai material, it depends on what you do with it. Making it 'seriously bare' is probably not a good thing, at least in the short term, the tree needs it's foliage to thrive, you have almost certainly reduced that by enough for one season and I think it needs to recover from that before you do anything else. I have two of these in training, be aware the branches are really springy and whilst you can get extreme bends in them they have to be wired for a long time to set into place so there is a risk of wire cutting into the branches as they grow. An underrated species in my view.

Dave

I agree... This is not a "bad bonsai material". I think it presents several possibilities. The tapering of the trunk seems evident, it has a good strong first branch in its lower third segment. In general, presents a few branches to work with as it grows. Also, the bark seems to be a good one that will progressively look older and possibly scaled. The one thing I don?t know, because it is not clear in the photo are whether the root system is a good one or not. I mean, I can see if it is "flared" or not. Oh, and the foliage it?s suitable too. And the best of all, this tree seems healthy enough. So, in general I think is not a bad material, especially if it did not cost you too much

All of the branches on this tree are like spokes... It's really hard to make anything out of it. And yes I've notices that those branches tend to spring back, you can see by the one's I've guy-wired down that they all went upwards anyway.

I've taken quite a lot of the foliage in late June and except wiring everything in place I left it like that. It didn't die, it didn't bleed out sap that much and now it's all healed and growing new sets of needles here and there...

I was hoping to either get it into it's (more or less) final shape this season or re-pot it into a smaller bonsai pot (which means a lot of root chopping as it's quite root bound in this big pot...)

So what are your suggestions (except of leaving it alone for now). How would you have it styled?

alainleon1983 wrote: I agree... This is not a "bad bonsai material". I think it presents several possibilities. The tapering of the trunk seems evident, it has a good strong first branch in its lower third segment. In general, presents a few branches to work with as it grows. Also, the bark seems to be a good one that will progressively look older and possibly scaled. The one thing I don?t know, because it is not clear in the photo are whether the root system is a good one or not. I mean, I can see if it is "flared" or not. Oh, and the foliage it?s suitable too. And the best of all, this tree seems healthy enough. So, in general I think is not a bad material, especially if it did not cost you too much

The problem with the branching on this tree is that it has the foliage only on the end of the branches really and also all the branches are spaced out along the trunk and grow all along one hub, so you'd get some trunk then 7-8 bar branches growing like spok, then some trunk again, then some more bar branches so there was like 3-4 levels of branching. This is where my initial idea for the bare and battered look came from...

About the roots - I don't know. It seems healthy although there seems to be quite a lot of root mass in that big pot as the roots are sticking out of the holes and even going around on the outside of the bottom of the pot. No idea about Nebari as it's undeground, but I wouldn't expect anything extraordinary to be fair....

PS. This tree has costed me ?6.99 to buy

spuker1 wrote:
The problem with the branching on this tree is that it has the foliage only on the end of the branches really and also all the branches are spaced out along the trunk and grow all along one hub

Well, the branches don?t seem especially separated to me (IMHO)... I think they are reasonably well distributed and therefore I think it gives you a good overall margin to design and style this tree in a future.

As for the foliage growth only at the end of the branches... That, in fact, might be a tricky problem. I think I read somewhere that a good way of encouraging new shoots to sprout is to perform a rather strong pruning on the branches. I believe that cutting the branches back a little, forces the tree to open new buds at the beginning of the branches, and eventually you could have foliage better distributed and therefore have a much better ramification. Of course, you must realize that you should probably make a commitment between foliage at the beginning of the branches and overall length you are willing to cut back in order to obtain a balanced design.

spuker1 wrote: PS. This tree has costed me ?6.99 to buy

Really? Incredible good price for this specimen... I think

Alain

alainleon1983 wrote: As for the foliage growth only at the end of the branches... That, in fact, might be a tricky problem. I think I read somewhere that a good way of encouraging new shoots to sprout is to perform a rather strong pruning on the branches.

That advice I'd almost call... dangerous.
It's a conifer. Conifers do not bud back on branches that have no foliage; branches without foliage will die off.
Picea will not form new buds on old wood.

Links:

PS. This tree has costed me ?6.99 to buy

Really? Incredible good price for this specimen... I think

Not really an incredible good price. At least, not in the Netherlands:

Auk wrote:
That advice I'd almost call... dangerous.
It's a conifer. Conifers do not bud back on branches that have no foliage; branches without foliage will die off.
Picea will not form new buds on old wood.

Understood... Actually after reading the .PDF file I see where my mistake laid. I, wrongly, extrapolated conifers to other species. However it was an instructive reading alright.

Auk wrote: Not really an incredible good price. At least, not in the Netherlands:

Well, here in Spain, that is for sure an incredible good price... That's somewhere around 9€, which for a specimen like that would be a bargain

I know these aren't picea species, but they do just fine demonstrating my point. Actually I couldn't even find piceas for sale in quite a few bonsai web pages I just reviewed