Transforming more Neglected Bonsai

i keep getting trees that customers bring to me either because they don't know what to do with it or they're scared to do anything to them or they feel that i can do magic to the trees so these five trees were brought to me by a lady who i would say is typical of a lot of people who have bonsai they just either buy the bonsai or are gifted the bonsai and they literally do nothing to the tree they think that the trees will look after themselves to a certain extent it is correct they also do some work because the history of all these trees is very very interesting and as you can see they are all badly overgrown look at that juniper in that small pot look at that maple beautiful nebari beautiful trunk in that small pot and look at this white pine if ever a tree has lost its way it's this one completely lost its way that one is not too bad because i've already done some pouring through that and then this tree is the most interesting of them all this tree if you look at the roots look at how the roots have gone round and round at the bottom it wasn't in this pot it was in a very shallow oval pot but i put it here because i wanted stand it upright so that was the original root ball of the tree she told me the history of this tree i don't know history of the other trees but this history is most interesting she purchased this tree in 1970 which is 51 years ago and i think most of you may not have been born then 1971 and she bought it from tokonova bonsai which was one of the largest importers of bonsai in the uk at the time it has since i think for the last 15 or 20 years i've gone into liquidation it doesn't exist anymore so this was bought in 1971 and i can believe it so if it's 50 years as a bonus eye i would say this tree could be at least 80 years old because it would have been this high in 1971. i've come across many trees that were purchased in the 1960s and they have stayed uh very healthy and firm so there are many of these trees knocking around in the uk which have been imported from japan in the 60s and 70s and this is one of them so you are in for a treat because each of these trees is so complicated you must be wondering ah now peter chad has been caught you know what can you do with trees like this if ever there were problems these are problems whenever you have a problem don't look at the wider picture and get uh flummoxed or worried about how can i overcome all these problems if you deal with a problem one at a time they will all sort themselves out so let us treat them one at a time starting with the simplest ones but because i want to save this lady some money i'm going to use some of the pots that i'm going to take the trees out from so that i don't have to use new pots many of these trees i would say have not been done for about 30 or more years so look at the root ball again if ever this tree is spot bound this is one it's almost like a rock it is almost like a rock look at that you can't even break it up look at that but yet the tree struggles to survive so it just shows that these trees are very very resilient extremely resilient trees now this poor white pine i think it may have been repotted at some time i think what has been used is almost like garden mud so let us see if i can take it i have to bring a couple of special tools if you just home in on that while i go find the tool oh i just noticed that this tree is producing a corn struggling to survive i bet the seeds have germinated somewhere in her garden so using this sickle a sticker is a very useful tool because we can cut around the edge of the pot and loosen the tree and this will help get it out if you're into a serious repotting this is a very essential tool very very useful tool to have around and this again is an orderly weeding tool ordinary garden tool and i use this as a lever to lever the root ball out sometimes if the tree is that pot bond the pot breaks hopefully i try to save all the pot so i don't try to waste anything i know some nurseries are so lazy they just smash the pot they tell the customer oh it's too hard to take out i'll just smash it there you are and whoever potted this up has just used all the garden mud but i think it's okay there's a little bit of mycelium so the tree is not too unhealthy that is that one but the difficult one is going to be this one this maple you can see it is so pot bound so so pot bound it is tied in my god this is a slightly in curved pot i would say i don't want to waste anything if i can help it i will try not to have to smash the pot i can feel it is spot on i can't even get the sickle into the soil it is as bad as that it's amazing how this tree has survived the wire has been passed through the route that's completely embedded in the trunk i don't think i can even get that wire out [Music] so if ever there was a neglected tree this is certainly one of them [Music] well i don't say neglected in a bad way because the tree is alive so full marks for that [Music] but badly potlight too smaller but because it's been kept in a small pot you look at the roots the negari is beautiful absolutely beautiful wait till i work on this and those of you who are more experienced can probably see the solution straight away again judging by the soil i think if we just use ordinary teeth soil again goes to show how resilient plants are given a chance they refuse to die i envy plants in a way because they outlive us as human beings many of the trees that i purchased from other people many of these specimens that came from japan in 1962 i'm the third owner and the two previous owners lester souls they've gone to the lovely place up in the sky so the trees outlive them but at least they're remembered for their trees and that's a wonderful thought i'm trying to be as careful as i can sorry if this is annoying anyone who thinks that this is such a tedious and boring task but try to be careful [Music] so i'm now going to tease the roots but before i do that i just want to show you something that i just spotted on this tree and if you hold it on the camera it doesn't often get observed but this is what we call a scale insect and inside there is an insect can you see that is what you have to kill off you know they suck the sap of the trunk and they cause a lot of problems to maples many of the acer family sycamores plain trees they all are very prone to this type of scale insect and if there you are you see there's another one here you gotta spot it and squash it or kill it now before i go any further let me just put you out of your misery rather than get tangled up in all the branches this tree has lost its way so i think i need to bite the bullet and bring it back to some sort of reasonable shape far too big [Music] i think that is more of a manageable size i hope you agree with me straight away the proportions have come back [Music] i've only pruned like that long branch that that's all i could and it's looking better and this is the part the white pine was in so i think it would sit comfortably in that pot so that is the plan of action and this tree i can use this pot so i've saved her two pots so let's tease the roots i won't show you the whole process when i tease it i will show you how long i dare say the roots of musk have gone round 20 times in a circle it's like doing the 10 000 meter run don't break it all let's see how long it is let's disentangle it i have once disentangled the root ball of a juniper and you won't believe it was about six foot long the roots and the pot was only like four inches in length so this pot is only six inches or eight inches at most so after about another 10 minutes we managed to disentangle the roots and it is that long you must be asking me why am i doing it at this time of the year because it's breaking all the rules you know these are usually done before the tree comes in to leave and surely if you do it at this time of the year you're going to endanger the life of the tree but again with everything if you know what you're doing then it is okay what i'm going to do to minimize the risk of the tree dying is i'm going to defoliate the tree as much as possible and the reason why i'm defoliating the tree is so that it doesn't put strain on the roots when a tree is in leaf it needs the roots to pump the moisture to the leaves to supply the leaves with moisture so if you interfere with the roots at the wrong time like when we do repotting it will stress the tree very much because it cannot get the supply of water but if i defoliate that means remove most of the leaves i'm making the roots do less work so if it is doing less work it is not stressing the tree so that gives the tree a much better chance of survival so if you do your analysis and figure out what is good for the tree then you can always work out a solution so i'm not as crazy as you think with most of these things after all it's rudimentary science science teaches you that if you analyze the process of growing and what works and what doesn't work what plants need you can devise a system to overcome these potential problems so by defoliating most of the leaves taking most of the leaves off i'm putting less strain on the roots normally i would grow this tree again in complete moss but i'm going to do a half warehouse that means i'm going to put a little bit of sphagnum moss and a little bit of soil around it so let me prepare the pot i put the mesh i put the wire and as i was mentioning a minute ago because this tree has had quite a lot of root removed and at not really the correct time of the year i'm going to surround it with some moss doing the proverbial peter chan moss trick this again is a new zealand moss this is the best quality moss we get moss locally but it's not as good as the new zealand moss and i'm going to tie the tree in temporarily it's just to prevent the tree from rocking about so that's the moss but around the moss i'm going to put soil this is our standard bonsai compost mix so it's a halfway house it's most surrounding the roots and then soil surrounding the moss different people will devise different methods of making their trees survive so if you understand the trees and what works for you that's fine i always hate to impose my views and say only my way works no everyone has a fund of knowledge that they have built up over the years and they are also quite clever in what they do i think one of the biggest mistakes in life is to assume that you know everything if you think you know everything then i think you know nothing so there you are that's how i potted it up and the most important thing is that because we have this greenhouse facility where we have a very damp and humid atmosphere it will help to bring the tree through i'm also going to seal the ends although these are small cuts i will still seal it because every little thing that we do to help the tree has to be done so these ends can lose moisture and if they lose moisture it puts stress on the trees so even little cuts like this i've sealed up with the sealant normally i don't bother with very small cuts but in this case because i've been very severe with this tree i have to do that so now if you look at this tree it looks much better than what it started off life as so that is that one done we will now deal with the chinese juniper often mention that there are some books and some japanese growers in fact they will jet every grain of soil of the tree and start afresh i don't like doing that because i found that that can be very stressful on the tree so i will just loosen the soil get some of the old soil off but you see i haven't taken all the soil off and now let's see what part i can put it in i think that part which the maple was planted in that would be a good size pot so i'm not cutting any root you notice so i'm going to pop this up wires on every single branch bar this one and i think this is going to be the shape of the tree i'm giving a little twist to it to tighten the branches to bring it close as i say i'm always amazed at what a little bit of water can do change the shape of these trees so basically i'm just trying to put the whole thing in a conical shape and there you are it is a big change from what it was before and the original pot shouldn't be used because it's not the right one so we're going to put it at this angle in this micro pot we don't need to spend masses of money on a new pot so this angle of planting and we will show you the tree again okay so this tree is going to form a separate video because it's going to take quite a while i love working on projects like this because it is like not just a jigsaw puzzle it's like a major major problem that you have to find the solution for now when you've got an overgrown neglected tree like this what do you do and where do you start to begin with the tree trunk is so stiff and old mind you she purchased this tree in 1971 and it was imported probably from japan maybe in the 60s so i reckon this tree is over 80 years old since when it was first started as a bonsai and it's completely lost its way it's just a shrub it's what we would call a piece of raw material so the conventional bonsai would not work for this tree it must have been just a straight tree which that is the leader and some other branches are gone the small shoots have grown too low so it's completely lost its way so i assume that this lady is giving me a free hand and i'm going to style it in the way i think it's best for this tree so looking at this tree i can see that there are some branches both thick and thin so let's keep the trunk straight that is given i cannot change that there are many things in life you cannot change so let's live with that i will show you again what this lady has done she's tried a bit of wiring and all she has done is used a bit of aluminium wire and tied the branches close together hoping that that is called wiring it's amazing how many people do this and they think that this is wiring a tree no way so that is her attempted wiring which i don't think really works so let's get rid of that and what i had in mind because it has some smaller branches i'm going to make it like a tall tree that you would find in the forest in north america there are plenty of them like these giant redwoods tall giant redwood tree so let us begin by taking some of these longer branches off and start again you can make bits of gin with it this is very long take this off already it's looking a bit smaller okay i won't take much more off at this stage let me introduce a few bits of driftwood so making gins we don't want the gins to be too long so let's just make some short gins it's really tearing the wood back and give a torn effect and then you can take your time to refine it [Applause] i like the roots the surface roots it's weird but it gives an antiquity to the tree look at these gnarled old roots so some of these can also be ginned back so again to show you what we do we just make a sloping cut away from the branch and then we pull it to the face that you can see the front of the tree is this side i forgot to mention that this is clearly the front i wouldn't dream of using any other side because it's fairly open [Music] like that so you can see that we're shortening the entire tree i don't know about that we will decide in a minute so let us start by wiring some of these and see where we got rest assured all i'm going to do is wire every single branch that can be wired and then we will arrange the branches where we want it to be this is going to be quite a transformation i can already envisage this tree in my mind's eye what it looks like so so there's going to be a lot of warranty in fact this is an instance where i'm not going to spend hours just showing every tiny bit of wiring i know you'd say that it's not boring but i feel it's boring so [Music] it's a lot of wine to do okay as i said i'm not going to show everything i'm just going to show you what i'm going to want then when i've done the wiring i will show you wiring is something you can't really rush so quickly [Applause] just love these other branches [Music] so that's going to be wired like that i'm not sure about this lowest branch i might take that off and then these long branches we have to deal with somehow they're far too long for the design it's really very very heavy it won't bud this person has not trimmed it at all in all these 48 or 50 years that she's had the tree you can already see the tree because i'm going to wire some of these down like that that one may eventually go but let's see what we do with the top here that's the crown i probably don't need all that crown again looking at the tree from this as the front you can see already the tree looks different radically changed so that one can go down so [Music] [Music] look at all that taken off that's a lot so we're just going to wire the rest and we will see what outcome we get so that's going to be wired so i'm going to show you what it's going to be like so i'll just apply some thick wires and we will take it from there okay so this project has taken me longer than i expected i've already worked about three hours on it and i've only got that far and see i've cut quite a lot off usually when i work on a tree i don't cut too much and look at all that foliage so i think i have taken about half the foliage off and it's still not that so you see the image of the tall parkland tree i'm trying to make but i'm not fully satisfied with it because the top is still about uh too wide i need to bring it tighter to make a conical shape so i've done some wiring at the back if you come close you see i put wires on it but i haven't bent it so i'm now going to bend it down to make the branches hang downwards if i put the tree now there's a front and back this is the front of the tree so i'm going to bring these branches down as you will know by now i always like to make these branches look old and all branches are branches that hang downwards so this is what i'm going to do make it hang downwards like so i've got to wire some of these pads still and you can see it's still top heavy there so i need to make this more conical shape like this so i'm going to put more wires on it and see if i can make the thing more conical like that can you see that effect so that the top is more conical rather than a flat top so i'll carry on wiring and then you will see the finished result so i think i've finished the tree i don't want to tinker too much with the top i know i can bring it more into a conical shape but at least it gives the impression of a very mature tall parkland tree the branch on the right there's a case for cutting it off over here and making gin but it's nice over there you do get trees in nature which have a long lower branch so i wouldn't rush to take that off if i took it off the tree would become very ordinary so this makes the tree special so i've managed to get more or less a crown shape a dome shape and i've only used a mica pot that micro pot only costs 39 pounds so that won't break the bank the original pot was an oval uh japanese unglazed spot but as you can see it is much smaller so i'll give this tree a chance to grow nice formula upright tree so there you go i've managed to solve this design problem so i hope you enjoyed this video so let's review the trees there's the chinese juniper in the middle this is the japanese white pine that we restyled into that shape small chinese juniper kept in that same pot and that maple we reduced it to half the size and hopefully when the new branches come it will look different and this chinese i just pruned it i'm afraid i didn't get a before picture but it was twice the size that you can see now so this customer has five trees so i hope she will be very happy and we've taken almost the entire day six hours to work on all these trees and with me working very fast so there you are i hope you've enjoyed this video [Music] you

Channel: Herons Bonsai

Views: 474,774

Keywords: Herons Bonsai, Bonsai, Bonzai, Herons Bonzai, Herons Bonsai Nursery, Bonsai Nursery, Peter Chan, Bonzai UK, Peter Chan Bonsai, Outdoor Bonsai, How to care for Bonsai, How to look after bonsai, Indoor Bonzai, Outdoor Bonzai, Evergreen trees, Japanese Garden, Zen Garden, Pruning, Pruning Bonsai, Large Bonsai, Garden Trees, Acer Palmatum, Maple Bonsai, Chinese Bonsai, Japanese Bonsai, Bonsai for Sale, how to care for neglected bonsai

Id: JuGmeQnGkhA

Length: 38min 40sec (2320 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022