Welcome back to Quarantine Bonsai News! I'm your host, Lydia Shea.
As I write, yet more snow drifts from the heavens. Yes, we must continue to shuffle trees from cover to rare sunshine and back as temps swing between 60 and 30. Keep up the diligent work! Sometime in the next few months we should get some sun for more than a day...
In other news, our first club zoom meeting kept the traditional etiquette rules, and politely held to the two primary subjects for conversation; the weather, and everybody's health. Hopefully our next zoom meeting on Tuesday, May 19th, at 7pm, will not only be better attended, but will also expand a little more into bonsai show & tell and/or question session. I'm sure we all would appreciate being able to see other's trees now that they aren't winter bare.
Our club, though mixed in bonsai experience, now has more members with trees that are transitioning from early stages to more ramification and refinement phases. We would like to provide more info about this process so members can make the most of the early growing season. In our President, Brian's, words about it: One of the big challenges in building bonsai, after the trunk and primary branches have reached the desired length and thickness (i.e., transitioned from the development phase to the refinement phase), is stimulating interior growth. Trees tend to rapidly put on new foliage at the tips of branches. Weak or dormant buds & other interior growth sometimes don’t thrive if the tips remain too strong. That is why we sometimes prune back to interior buds in late winter and very early spring. However, in mid- to late- spring other options emerge for many species: we manipulate the hormonal distribution by pinching or trimming strong foliage tips. Having opened up the interior to light and air flow is one prerequisite for success at stimulating interior growth, but suppressing terminal & apical dominance is another. In most trees, by mid-spring the hormone auxin has accumulated in the growing tips, preferentially spurring growth there. Many species respond well to pinching or trimming these tips before the growth gets too far. Examples are: removal of the central stems in newly opened Japanese maple buds; pinching strong candles of single-flush pine; pinching or trimming strong tips of several other elongating species such as yew, spruce, and fir; decandling the strong first flush of double-flush pines. Removal of the auxin in the tips prior to a tree having invested too much energy in those tips allows another hormone, cytokinin, to become dominant in the branch. Cytokinin then redirects growth energy to interior locations. For many deciduous species, the new growth at tips should be partially trimmed back only after it has “hardened off” in late spring, by then having “repaid” the energy deficit incurred by its own formation.
For more information about this pruning process, please check out our bonsai into page or get in touch with us (info on our contact page), or consult a recently (last 5-10 years) published bonsai book by an artist of repute.
Thank you for tuning in to Quarantine Bonsai News! We'll be back with more news right after we ship all our wasp spray to Washington State for the murder hornets...
As I write, yet more snow drifts from the heavens. Yes, we must continue to shuffle trees from cover to rare sunshine and back as temps swing between 60 and 30. Keep up the diligent work! Sometime in the next few months we should get some sun for more than a day...
In other news, our first club zoom meeting kept the traditional etiquette rules, and politely held to the two primary subjects for conversation; the weather, and everybody's health. Hopefully our next zoom meeting on Tuesday, May 19th, at 7pm, will not only be better attended, but will also expand a little more into bonsai show & tell and/or question session. I'm sure we all would appreciate being able to see other's trees now that they aren't winter bare.
Our club, though mixed in bonsai experience, now has more members with trees that are transitioning from early stages to more ramification and refinement phases. We would like to provide more info about this process so members can make the most of the early growing season. In our President, Brian's, words about it: One of the big challenges in building bonsai, after the trunk and primary branches have reached the desired length and thickness (i.e., transitioned from the development phase to the refinement phase), is stimulating interior growth. Trees tend to rapidly put on new foliage at the tips of branches. Weak or dormant buds & other interior growth sometimes don’t thrive if the tips remain too strong. That is why we sometimes prune back to interior buds in late winter and very early spring. However, in mid- to late- spring other options emerge for many species: we manipulate the hormonal distribution by pinching or trimming strong foliage tips. Having opened up the interior to light and air flow is one prerequisite for success at stimulating interior growth, but suppressing terminal & apical dominance is another. In most trees, by mid-spring the hormone auxin has accumulated in the growing tips, preferentially spurring growth there. Many species respond well to pinching or trimming these tips before the growth gets too far. Examples are: removal of the central stems in newly opened Japanese maple buds; pinching strong candles of single-flush pine; pinching or trimming strong tips of several other elongating species such as yew, spruce, and fir; decandling the strong first flush of double-flush pines. Removal of the auxin in the tips prior to a tree having invested too much energy in those tips allows another hormone, cytokinin, to become dominant in the branch. Cytokinin then redirects growth energy to interior locations. For many deciduous species, the new growth at tips should be partially trimmed back only after it has “hardened off” in late spring, by then having “repaid” the energy deficit incurred by its own formation.
For more information about this pruning process, please check out our bonsai into page or get in touch with us (info on our contact page), or consult a recently (last 5-10 years) published bonsai book by an artist of repute.
Thank you for tuning in to Quarantine Bonsai News! We'll be back with more news right after we ship all our wasp spray to Washington State for the murder hornets...