Pyracantha Bonsai

I took my Pyracantha Bonsai to our June club meeting for a cleanup and a haircut.







Here is a before photo. The tree has not been pruned in several weeks, nor has it been weeded. A word about weeds: If you grow bonsai, especially large ones, you are going to get weeds, and the better and more fertile your soil is, the more weeds you are going to get. Weed seeds will blow in, birds will drop them, and the potting soil you buy at the hardware store often has a lot of dormant weed seeds in it just waiting to germinate. You have to stay on top of the weeding. Some weeds, especially weed grasses, have roots that will quickly fill the bonsai pot and imperil the health of your bonsai.







Here is a photo after the weeds have been cleaned up but before pruning has begun. I found this tree in the clearance bin at Home Depot about fifteen years ago. It was a spindly little plant in a one gallon pot, and it was infested with aphids, but it had smaller leaves than other Pyracanthas I had seen and it had that nice bend in the lower trunk. I grew it on in a ten gallon plastic tub for several years (a favorite tactic for fattening up potential bonsai)and I used an organic pyrethrin pesticide to deal with the aphids.





Here is the tree after pruning:

The present front will have to be changed slightly. When the tree is repotted next spring, the tree will be rotated slightly to the left to bring the apex forward a little.

Ficus: An Indoor Bonsai

Before the Web totally leveled the informational playing field, we used to get people at our bonsai shows that wanted to keep a bonsai indoors on the coffee table or on top of the television set (this was back before flat TV's). These days everyone seems to know that the best place for your bonsai is on your back patio, but for those who want a stunning centerpiece for the conservatory, here it is. This ficus benjamina thickened up in a flowerpot on someone's patio for nearly thirty years before I bought it as an old patio tree on its last legs, growing in depleted soil. Over a year I cut it back from its original four foot height, and took off two other upper trunks. I kept it in an oversized oval bonsai pot during that time, in good soil with lots of fertilizer. Earlier this spring, I cut back the roots and put it in its present pot. This is the result.

Ficus trees work well as bonsais, and are very good for beginners because they are easy to care for, and they develop rapidly, so there is no need to wait for results the way there is with a pine or juniper.

I got this bonsai for free!

Well, not quite. It was a raffle prize at my local bonsai club, and it didn't look anywhere near this good when I got it. First, a word about bonsai clubs: If you are a beginner, you should join one. Don't be shy, clubs are the best resource in the world for a hobby like bonsai. Aside from having more established members willing to share their expertise, (and the opportunity to hang with some of the nicest people in the world) you can get free stuff.

All established bonsai people have an area of their yard devoted to surplus trees that they bought for projects that never materialized, or grew from cuttings taken from a larger bonsai, or grew from seeds, or started to work on but the tree just did not inspire them and they want to pass it on to someone who will be more in tune with it.

This olive tree was a little rooted cutting in a four inch pot, and all it had was the bottom part of the trunk you see up to the first branch (but it was a lot smaller), and that had a couple of sprigs of green on top of it. I repotted it in a larger pot (had learned that much by then) and started working on bulking it up a little, because I knew then that olive bonsais were expensive and I could not afford to buy one.

Fast forward about two years, and it had rapidly built the upper branch structure you see now, and I was getting ready to sell it or put it back in the raffle (I had found a larger olive tree to work on) and my wife absolutely would not let me sell or give away this little tree, so it became hers.

One final note: Olives only bear fruit on wood that is a few years old, and last year, this tree bore fruit -- one little olive at the top of the tree -- for the first time.

Front View of the Japanese Black Pine

I just wanted to upload a frontal shot of my Japanese Black Pine bonsai at its home in my yard. This was taken a week or two after the show. Not the greatest bonsai photo ever taken -- I am better at growing the trees than I am at taking photos of them.

A Word About Display Stands

In order to be displayed at a show, a bonsai must be placed on a stand made of wood or stone, called a dai. In the photo at right, one of my precious few traditional dais is shown. It was made by an older Japanese member of our bonsai club. Sadly, due to age, he is no longer making dais. I found in my wanderings around the web that dais for smaller trees were difficult to find and expensive, and dais for larger trees were just plain nonexistent.

It took a few years of headscratching, uh,
meditation, but I eventually figured out how to make my own stands. The one that the olive tree below is sitting on is a simple one made of oak plywood, with oak trim strips around the edges, and legs made from pieces of oak 2 x 2. The legs are fixed to the top with wood dowels and woodworker's glue, and the trim strips are glued around the edges.

The photo below shows trees with companion plants. The stands for the companion plants are just bamboo placemats -- one I found in the Philippines, and the other was purchased at Cost Plus Imports.

Hi Folks! Welcome to Kuromatsu Bonsai. Kuromatsu is the Japanese name for the Japanese Black Pine, a prime example of which is shown in the photo to the right. This particular pine is mine, and was grown from an ordinary one gallon nursery plant that I purchased from a nursery back in 1994. That's right, anyone can do it, the one catch being that it takes about fifteen years.

You are actually seeing a side view of the tree -- unfortunately the display space at our club show was a little cramped. This particular tree is about 32 inches tall from the soil to the top of the tree, and the root bole is about seven inches across at the base.

This tree grows in my own soil mix, which is about 30% potting soil from the nursery department of the local big box store, 30% decomposed granite, 30% agricultural pumice, and 10% builder's sand. It is fertilized with Osmocote, roughly three to four tablespoonfuls sprinkled over the soil every four weeks or so. Japanese Black Pines should only be repotted in the early spring. However, where winters are mild, they can be repotted as early as the Christmas season.

You should only prune a tree that is healthy, and you should never cut into bare wood unless you are permanently removing a branch and do not want further growth in that area. On existing branches, do not cut back to the two year old needles; only cut back to last year's needles. Some experts will tell you to leave only three or four pairs of needles at the end of each branch and strip the old needles behind those pairs. This will only work in places where the air is very dry in the winter and spring. In places where you have fog or dank weather, the needles can be attacked by a fungus called needle cast, and the tree needs more needles to survive the winter and spring, so I always leave 7 or 8 pairs of needles at the end of each branch tip when I prune.

After this early spring pruning, the tree will sprout "candles" of new foliage. Remove the largest and strongest candles, and reduce the medium ones by half. Leave the smallest ones alone.

Follow this advice, and in two or three years, your little one gallon nursery pine will start to look like a bonsai. If you want it to develop quickly, do not put it in a bonsai pot when you first purchase it. Put it in a large plastic tub, like the ones large nursery trees come in. It will grow and develop much more quickly.