Turn Japanese Maple Seedlings into a Clump Style Bonsai, Part 1 | Bonsai-U

what's up everybody welcome back to a brand new episode of bonsai you this time around I'm going to show you how to take small seedlings or cuttings and turn them into a cob adachi or clump style bones I like the one you see right here [Music] okay so over the last few months ever since we started bonsai you in early 2020 I've been getting a lot of requests from viewers out there who want to see more deciduous or broadleaf content on the bonsai you platform well for those of you who have known me for a number of years or if you've ever visited a say n you'll know that I'm very passionate about deciduous and broadleaf species and we actually have a lot of those projects here at the nursery one of my goals here at a say n is to take native US deciduous material and broad leaf material and turn them into beautiful bonsai similar to what you see in Japan if you think about how things were developed in Japan over many many decades many many centuries it really just took a handful of people looking for the best native material they could find there and then really focusing on the long term aspects of development with those species and that's why you see such beautiful deciduous and broadleaf bonsai in Japan today well the cultural differences between the US and Japan have sort of set us back a little bit in terms of deciduous development because it takes such a long time to develop beautiful broadleaf and deciduous trees but I'm hoping through this platform to kind of change your outlook on developing these species and sort of shift your mindset to more of sort of a long-term orientation now the tree that's right beside me here this is a tree that I actually put together myself when I was 16 years old now I'll be 34 coming up here and not too long so that's well over a decade's worth of work that's gone into this particular tree now I say that not to discourage you but to inspire you hopefully to start to think more long-term when you're developing your deciduous trees and I want to show you kind of the process of how I built this tree when I was 16 years old now when I did put this tree together way back in the day I did it at a workshop with a good friend of mine bill Val Venis many of you guys would probably know who that is he runs international bonsai up in Rochester New York and he's also the brains behind the u.s. national show which happens every other year in the States so when I went to the workshop bill handed me about nine Japanese maple seedlings and told me to put them together in a clump so that was sort of the focus of the workshop was how to build these clumps but being 16 years old getting these tiny little seedlings looking at them I was thinking what am I going to do with this these just look like little twigs they're not gonna into anything interesting well I followed Bill's directions in the workshop and I'm actually going to show you how this works in this bonsai you video here and over the subsequent basically 17 years I slowly developed that tree into what you see here now what I want to do in this video is show you that initial setup where we actually put the seedlings together then I'm going to show you a tree that was put together a couple of years ago so you can see where we need to progress sort of in the early stages of the development of these trees and then I'm going to take you through the repotting process on this particular tree right here so you can see what the underside of the root ball looks like so first things first let's pull out the Japanese maple seedlings and we'll talk about how to actually put them together to create a clump style bowl inside like this alright so here is our tray of Japanese maple seedlings now when you're putting together a clump style or Kabu da cheese style bone side you want to select for deciduous species that have very very small leaves and within a deciduous species you want to find a particular cultivar or variety or variation that has small Internode's and small leaves because otherwise you're gonna be fighting against those large leaves forever if it's a tree that can be defoliated say like a trident maple which is another great tree to utilize for this technique even if you can do foliate that plant if it's got large leaves on it it's never going to really develop nice fine ramification which is of course one of the goals with creating deciduous material really our goal is to show these trees in winter when they don't have any leaves so you can see the fruits of your labor over the course of 10 15 20 30 40 years however long that tree has been in development so these trees right here are all selected for a very very small leaf size they're all seedlings from the same parent plant as well now I want you to think about this here when you're selecting material as well ideally you want to find plants or seedlings from the same parent plant and you want to select out from that seed base plants that have nearly identical characteristics so if you're using a seed tray if you're collecting seeds from the ground for example if you're growing say a hundred seedlings in a tray like this you're going to have some genetic variation there's going to be some genetic mutation from seedling to seedling that's just how nature works so out of those seedlings you should be able to select out a hand full of those seedlings that have very very very close very very similar aspects in terms of the looks of the leaves the size of the leaves the size of the inner nodes the reason you want to select for plants that look essentially the same is because when you put these together and they actually fused at the base they're going to look like one tree you don't want to have one of those trunks on the tree have leaves that are 4 centimeters across or a couple inches across and another tree in that clump have leaves that are only a half an inch or like 1 centimeter across it would look very very weird you're also gonna get the leaves opening up at different times you're going to get different colors on the tree which you know for me it looks a little bit contrived to do that I'd much rather have something consistent when I'm building a clump style tree so it looks like one plant that's sprouted right from the base and that's really the goal that we're going for here so with that in mind again you want to select four trees that have very similar leaf characteristics that are all from the same parent plant if you're using seedlings now another option that's actually probably a better option is to take cuttings off of a parent plant that has great characteristics if you take cuttings off of a Japanese maple or Trident maple or any other deciduous species all of those subsequent cuttings are going to have the same genetics are going to be genetically identical to one another so you won't have to worry about variation in leaf size they'll all be exactly the same so that would be my main recommendation is if you can take cuttings use cuttings to build these clump style trees now again we're gonna be using seedlings here but I've actually selected out from a tray of seeds those from the same parent plant with very very similar characteristics so I'm not too concerned about them having weird variations once they start developing into a clump style tree so what we're gonna do is pull a handful of these guys out of here I'm gonna show you the process of how to attach them together at the base okay so the first step here is to take a bunch of these little seedlings out of the tray now I don't necessarily want to take all of them out I think it's gonna be too much of a pain to repot them later so what we're gonna do is just select out a few that look like nice ones and you know when you're building a clump style tree eventually you want to have multiple trunk sizes so diameters in terms of the thickness of the trunk and also the heights of the trunk at this stage in the process though it doesn't really matter we can select all that are the same size we can select various sizes it doesn't matter because they're very young and we're going to let tops on these essentially elongate and grow so I'm not concerned at all with them having variation right now we can correct for that later no problem at all and as a matter of fact it's better to select little seedlings that actually have relatively thin trunks so we can put a little bit of wire on them and add some motion so they look quite cool we'll actually do that in the second or third year after the trunks have fused together but let's go ahead and pull out a handful of these little maples here and I'm actually just going to cut these guys out there far enough apart that which should be a-okay here just cutting the roots of these out and separating them here all right so that's plenty plenty of roots to work with right here now these seedlings here are about I think they're two year old seedlings which is just about right if they're any older than that if they're any thicker than that like I said it's really hard to actually put them together and then put a little bit of movement and motion in them so you know one to say maybe three year old seedlings max is what we're looking for when we're creating a little forest like this or a clump style rather speaking of forests if you're creating a force there are a couple of ways to approach it you can do a similar thing where you select out a species or a cultivar or a variety of a particular deciduous tree that has very similar leaf characteristics to it to keep everything consistent you can select for multiple different leaf sizes and leave variations to make it look a bit more natural for example or you can mix and match species which is really cool if it's done well it's a difficult thing to do but there are some fantastic examples in Japan as a matter of fact my Oya kata Fujikawa saw his jacket as a Brocato was very famous for creating forest plantings and for creating them using multiple species so if you haven't seen Saburo Kato's book believe it's called mezzo spruce rock planting and forest planting bone size something like that you can get that book and there's some really great examples in there of mixed forest plantings I definitely recommend that you check that out so in terms of the number of trees that I want to put together here in clomp style what we're looking for is an odd number and really we want a clump of somewhere between three to nine trunks now I recommend that you start with nine because inevitably one of those trunks or two of those trunks or maybe even several of those trunks over the years will die off they'll either get suffocated out by the other trunks by the roots of the other trunks or they won't get enough water or enough light so I would recommend that you actually put more trees in at the beginning than you think you might need so maybe you want to create like a five trunk I would start with nine and you can always work your way back from there and again some of the trunks may not look that interesting in the long run so you may want to actually cut those out yourself if they don't look nice in the actual design so again more is better to begin with and then you can always reduce it from there all right how many do we have now we got one two three four five six let's pull out three more there we go okay all right let's set the tray on the ground and then I'm gonna show you how to actually put these together in a clump okay so now that we've got our nine little seedlings right here all set up and ready to go what we're gonna do next is work on the roots just a little bit here to make them easier to fit together and to also help promote lateral root growth so you want these roots to spread out and create a nice radial nebari so these being seedlings they're all gonna have somewhat of a little tap root so what I want to do is go through and remove that tap root to start with we want to make sure we have enough find fibrous roots further up if we cut the tap root off that's not gonna kill the seedling if you don't have enough of these fine fibrous roots right here I recommend that you replant the tree possibly even do a little bit of a ground layer to create that radial nebari on here and then you can go back and cut off that tap root but most of these right here look like they're going to work just fine so we're going to cut off all the tap roots on these guys to make them easier to fit together and again to promote that lateral root growth some of these actually don't have much of a tap root on them anymore so it makes it a little bit easier here this one's actually quite fine by itself this guy looks pretty good we'll get the soil off of here as well so that we can make sure to fit these guys nice and snugly together with one another now in doing this you want to make sure that every once in a while you're spraying the roots with some water just to keep them from desiccating so I'll keep a spray bottle handy as you're doing this yes that these look pretty good this looks excellent right here get some of this soil off and the final one here all right looks pretty good all right now for the fun part we're going to actually attach these trunks together at the base so I'm gonna back the camera up just a little bit here so you can see the full length of these trunks as we put them together and then I'm gonna show you the base of the trunks up close once we actually attach them all right so with our little seedlings here what we're gonna do is select out the largest of these to begin with and they're actually quite a few that are somewhat similar in size but it looks like probably this guy here or this one here our two largest ones in terms of the diameter at the base that's gonna end up being kind of our middle main trunk and we're gonna build the rest of the seedlings or the clump style around that one particularly large trunk so I'm gonna put both of these kind of side-by-side right next to one another here and in the future we can let one of these growth to become the main trunk but I at least want to get them close together and those are going to be kind of our starting point right here now as you're doing this you want to make sure that you're getting the bases as close together as possible if they're touching that's even better if not not that big a deal because as they thicken over time they'll actually grow together and fuse together but if you can get them together right from the get-go year that much further along now you don't have to score the base of each of these seedlings to get them to actually stick together and adhere and fuse so I'm not gonna worry about taking you know sandpaper or grafting knife or something and exposing that cambium layer to make them actually edit here over time naturally they're just going to graft and essentially fuse to one another naturally on their own all right so now that we've got those it doesn't really matter how we build the rest of these around this but I'm gonna go sort of in a radial pattern for the most part and again I'm gonna work these guys in to get them as close as possible down here at the base and if we need to cut some of the roots that are sticking out we can but if we've got most of soil off of here and we're just dealing with seedlings you really shouldn't have to cut many of those roots off a little bit more dirt in here we could potentially pull out though all right so the radial surface roots on the larger one here there's some gaps in between those surface roots so I'm going to stick some of the smaller seedlings through those gaps like so again to get them nice and close alright and again we're trying to build this sort of in a radial pattern around those larger trunks there are larger seedlings but there really isn't much rhyme or reason to this in general it's just sticking them together and trying to get them to fuse or adhere at the base from the get-go okay so now that we've got them all really close together here at the base what we're gonna do is actually tie them together at the base so they don't come apart in the pot or during the repotting process here in a few minutes or over the course of the next year now there are a couple of ways to tie these together one would be using a zip tie like this this is a decent option although it tends to bite into the base of the trees a little bit now a better option in my opinion is to use a piece of rubber and a piece of aluminum or aluminium wire depending on where you are in the world now the reason I like to use the rubber here and the aluminium wire is so that it doesn't actually bite into the base of the tree this is much less likely to bite in then that zip tie is so we're gonna be utilizing this today around the base of the plant now I've cut a piece of rubber here that's way longer than the actual size around the base here when we actually tie this together the reason being is I want this to actually overlap here at the end I don't want the wire touching those new little seedlings or the trunks of the seedlings at the base at all I want only contact with the rubber so this piece of rubber is a little bit longer than the actual circumference here of the base of these seedlings so first thing here what we're going to do is stick the aluminum wire through the rubber and this is size 2.5 aluminum here which that will hold quite well that's about the right size for seedlings this size if you're working with seedlings they're a little bit smaller you might do a 1.5 mil or a 2 mil but for these since they're a little bit larger we're gonna be using this two points life here now what I want to do is make sure that I'm attaching this right at the very very base just above the nebari here so that we can get those trunks to fuse right at the base of the trees here again we're gonna take this twist it at the end right here and then I'm going to use the gin pliers here to really crank on this and twist it and I'm right-handed so I'm always going clockwise here when I pull in twist that goes for this type of thing or if I'm securing a tree and a pot with the wire or if I'm using a wire for a guy wire for example always pull and twist clockwise it's just much easier that way all right so gonna get that nice and tight on there right at the base now you don't want to be tightening it so much that it ends up biting into the trunks or the seedlings and potentially killing them but you do want it tight enough that it's going to get those guys to stay close together and adhere over the next growing season all right so what I'm gonna do here is just shorten this up so it looks a little cleaner all right and that looks pretty darn good right there now the reason I'm leaving this extra long right here is because we did again leave that rubber wrapped inside the wire if I cut it short it's likely to unravel on spiral and come apart so I'm leaving this extra long looks ugly but it doesn't really matter this is all gonna get buried underground anyway over the next year so that brings us to the next step in this process and that is to plant this thing in a container so let's do that next all right so the next step in the process here is to pot up our new little clump right here now I recommend that you use something that's going to be fast draining and provide a lot of aeration or oxygen penetration to the root system you're going to get much faster adherence of the trunks much faster thickening and just better development in general so for the first potting what I'm going to be using here is a net pot or a colander this is often called a pond basket as well these will be dropped into ponds and plants will be planted in there to grow up to the surface of the water so in any case these work really really well right here you can get them at various outlets all over the internet so I'm gonna plant this in a very free draining soil mix and the soil mix that I use is algae blend from Japan it's about a 3/16 inch particle size and it is 50% akadama 25% cue which is a river sand and when I say river sand I don't mean very fine paver sand again that River sand is going to be a 3/16 inch particle size and then 25% lava rock this is going to give us a very fast very free draining mix it's going to allow the roots to search for that water we quench that we do it over and over again you're going to get a lot of rapid growth out of the plant over the first several years so I'm going to fill this up we're going to put the tree on top of it right here all right so I filled the basket up about a little more than halfway so we're gonna set this straight down in here and this is a nice flat bottom to this here and we're actually gonna be burying this in the pot so I'm not really concerned about tying this in with wires but I am gonna wiggle this down just a little bit to make sure that if there are any little air pockets underneath the root system that we're eliminating those because that could potentially kill the plant if we do have air pockets there now after I wiggle this down into here I'm just gonna fan the nebari out on the surface here just a little bit so it's kind of radial that way again we get that nice sort of lateral movement with the roots and a spreading of the base of the tree and then the final step here is just to fill this up with the same algae blend on the top here and I'm gonna work it in a little bit with a chopstick okay so that does it for putting together the initial setup of a clump style of Cappadocia style bonsai now the next up here is gonna be take this out and obviously water it until all of the water turns from brown to clear and then we're gonna put it out on the bench and in about a week to two weeks or so we'll start fertilizing this tree this coming year I'm just gonna let this tree run for the entire year and then coming up in the second year will actually take this tree out see if the roots have fused and then we'll start making selections in terms of the heights of the trunks and potentially putting wire on the trunks as well to get some added extra movement to them and kind of fan them out to make them look just a little bit more aesthetically pleasing now what I want to do next is take a tree that I actually made last year in the same manner we're going to take it out of the pot and see if those trunks have fused at the base and then I'm going to show you sort of that next step in the developmental process so let's jump into that next okay so this is one of those projects that we put together last year this is actually a Trident maple but it was done in a very similar manner to the last tree the only difference with this one is that we actually did use the zip tie here at the base and what's really cool about this is that we tightened it so much that it actually started to bite in a little bit because this was buried up a little bit higher it actually started to ground layer itself in other words it started to produce rootage above zip tie and it's starting to produce it really in a radio pattern which is great so this is a benefit of using a zip tie or just a piece of wire with no rubber is that you can actually sometimes get them to ground layer and create essentially a nice nebari or a 'new nebari on top of that zip tie or that wire so in the case of this tree that's exactly what's happened the trunks are nearly fused at this point but I think it needs about another year to really hold on tight so we're gonna leave that zip tie on here I took it out I pruned a little bit of the longer roots that were coming off the bottom and we're gonna put this back into another net pot just like the last tree now once I get it in that net pot in the case of this tree since it's a little bit taller a little bit further along I'm actually going to tie it in with wire into that net pot and then we're gonna style some of the trunks on here but to put a little bit of motion in those and show you what that looks like one more note here if you notice this tree only has four trunks in it right now when we put it together last year we used five seedlings and one of them died this is why you want to use multiples more than what you think you're going to want to end up with so as many of you guys know the number four in Japanese is a bit of a taboo number because it's pronounced in the same way as the character for death so it's like the number thirteen sort of in the West so you know having four trunks is not necessarily an ideal situation but for right now I'm going to leave them as they are we're gonna replant them and then maybe at some point down the line I'll cut one of those trunks out that's not going to work in the final design but next step we're going to pot this guy up okay so now that we've got this potted up and secured in the container here what I want to do is add some wire to all of these trunks to get a little bit of motion and movement out of them to make them look a bit more interesting so what I'm going to be using here is aluminum wire this is a 2.5 Miller now of course depending on the thickness of the whips that you're working with or the seedlings that you're working with that will determine the thickness of the gauge of wire that you're using here but in this case a 2.5 mm just fine we might have to double it up on the thickest of the seedlings here but this should work pretty well now what I want to do is cut this wire about 1/3 longer than the length of these right here because what we're going to do with this is actually stick this into the soil so I'm gonna go right up against the base of the tallest tree actually this is the tallest tree right here so we're going to up against the base of that I'm gonna come from the backside here I'm gonna push this all the way down to the very bottom of the container here and that's gonna give us a nice secure holding for this wire so when we actually move the trunk it doesn't slip and slide all over the place now as I'm putting this wire on I'm going at about a 45 degree angle which is pretty typical for working with broadleaf material they tend to be a little bit more brittle than working with conifers or at least most conifers anyway so a 45 degree angle is gonna give you a little bit of extra holding power if this were a conifer I'd probably knock that up to like a sixty degree angle because it's not really necessary to have such a tight pitch on a piece of coniferous material again depending on the species alright so we're gonna take this all the way up to the very end here and as you can see we got a little bit left over which is totally fine I'd rather have too much than too little alright and we're going to go through and do that with the remaining trunks on here and then I'm going to put them into a nicer position [Music] okay so I ended up doubling up on three out of the four trunks with that 2.5 Miller now typically what I recommend is that you do that rather than putting on a piece that's super thick that might actually bend it you know just as a single piece because if you put a really thick piece of wire on here you run the risk of damaging the bark or cracking those seedlings in half so I recommend that you use one size down or half a size down and then double up just for safety's sake now the next step here is to set these trunks so what I want to try to do is create some sort of sinuous look something that you know it looks like it's supposed to fit together basically in other words I don't want some of the trunks going one way some of the trunks going the other way and then the movement not to match I want everything to look consistent throughout so what I want to do is start with our main trunk here this is our tallest and thickest one so it's actually slightly on the back side as its planted now again this thing may shift completely around we might end up using the other side and the long run is the front but for right now we'll look at this as the potential front for the tree so I want to start with that main trunk I want to take it to the rear first and then forward and then some movement side this side this is going to give us depth and it's also going to give a side-to-side movement where you look at it from the front it looks quite interesting so for the depth portion we're gonna take it towards the rear just a little bit here then back around and then we're gonna bring it forward a little bit of side-to-side motion all the way to the very top here it looks pretty good to start with alright now the next step is to set the secondary trunk here the one that's the second largest so we're gonna do that and what I want to do is try to mimic at least the first portion of the movement of that first trunk here so I'm gonna take it to the interior here to get a little bit of motion we're going to bring it back this direction and again I'm going to take it out to the side and this one's going to come a little bit further forward since it's on the front side of our main trunk here that way we're building depth front to back so it doesn't look so one-dimensional or two-dimensional we want that 3d kind of look to this trig when we view it from all angles all right so that feels pretty good right there now the next step is gonna be the next smallest Strunk which is this guy here now I don't want all of these go in the same direction I do want them to fan out and away from each other to be a true clump style we're not trying to build kind of a windswept type look we wanted to look like a big broadleaf tree that you might see growing in a field somewhere so I do want it moving this direction but I also want the movement of this trunk to mimic again the main trunk line here so we're gonna take it out back up a little bit back out again and instead of whipping the apex back in the same direction to the left there I'm gonna have it actually finish coming out to the right here and that's going to give us that outward movement that we're looking for here that feels pretty good right there all right and the final trunk of course is our little guy over here so I'm just gonna mimic the internal curve or the first curve here of that secondary trunk and again since the tree is on average moving to the left I want the apex of this one also to move out to the left as well that's something along those lines that's a pretty good start for you know setting up a tree like this and get you that general movement in it now the next step here is to make sure that we don't let this wire bite into these trunks if you've ever worked with deciduous trees you know that if the wire bites in at all you'll forever have scars they'll never really heal over and they'll always look pretty ugly so we really have to keep an eye on this to make sure that it doesn't bite in what that means is as the leaves flush out here once they harden off by here in Tennessee anyway about mid-may that's about the right time to cut the wire off sometimes they'll thicken up faster and you have to cut it off earlier but ideally if you can leave that wire on through the first flush of growth hardening off that usually is enough to set the trunks or at least get them to stay somewhat in position of course you'll have to rewire them say you know next year for example at the same time just add a little bit more motion to them but hopefully we'll be able to get it to stay by essentially mid-may now at that particular point in time once the leaves start hardening off then we'll start fertilizing this tree at that point blowing the thing up and trying to thicken certain trunks especially that main trunk here I want that thicker than the their trunks in the future so I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of bonsai you in the next episode we're gonna jump into actually looking at that fully developed a cob adachi style Japanese maple that I showed at the beginning of this episode and I'm gonna take you through the steps of repotting that looking at the underside of the roots and really showing you how to develop a nice radial spreading nebari on a cob adachi style tree thank you guys so much for checking out this episode if you like what we do here make sure to LIKE and subscribe down below and if you really want to support us you can click on the link in the description down below it'll bounce you over to our website where you can make a donation to support Bolin tell you going forward we want to thank you guys so much for checking out this episode and we'll see you guys next time take care [Music]

Channel: Eisei-en Bonsai

Views: 1,604,207

Keywords: bonsai, bonsai-u, maple bonsai, kabudachi bonsai, clump style bonsai, eisei-en, Bjorn Bjorholm, style a bonsai, create bonsai, wire bonsai

Id: XsaMNDTA65M

Length: 29min 42sec (1782 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 19 2020