Mid December /January/February are prime months in the Dallas/Ft Worth area for collecting suitable trees for Bonsai.
If you know someone who owns some acreage & they allow you to collect trees from their property, consider your self lucky. When the weather turns cold every bonsai enthusiast I know starts hunting for a new place to go digging!There are certain rules : get permission from the land owner / be sure to cover any holes you've dug/& try to leave it like you were never there...no trash ect.
You are hunting for a tree that you can
turn into a respectable bonsai in 5 yrs or less.
This 30 yr. old honeysuckle happens to be on my property so I dug it up yesterday on the last day of January. The latter part of 2009 a larger tree had fallen over and broke most of the branches.
I think the mishap gives it a rugged look of survival and I've started to dig it up.I cut most of the roots already except for the large tap root . Notice the size of the trunk
Having used the saw to cut off the sizeable tap root the honey suckle is laying on its side.
This side shows a good shot of the root ball. It will have to be thinned out quite a bit to fit it in the training container.
Here is the honey suckle potted up after some severepruning. It is potted in a large shallow black nursery pot containing lava rock with compost and worm castings. The gray spots you see on the tree is lac balsam used for the sealing of cuts.
This is the other side of the bush. The pictures are kind of deceiving the nursery pot is quite large and heavy it took two people to move it in to the green house.
We had a few days of sunshine & unseasonable temperatures which resulted in buds starting to swell & show you can see some in the middle right of this picture.
Buds are starting to break in the center of this picture so I'm not going to take any chances with this honey suckle, it going to stay in the green house until all chances of freezes are over; wish me luck!
I will post on its progress in the spring.
