White Honey suckle bush

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 severe
pruning. 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.

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new green house

My old green house was pretty much torn up by fall storms this year & I decided not to rebuilt it at this time instead I built a new green house.

I started with cinder blocks for the walls & 2"steel pipes for reinforcement for the walls and center posts. Then I used 2x4's for the trusses to hold up the fiberglass panels for the roof. Dirt was used to fill up the holes in the cinder blocks & to help with the insulation. The floor was cleaned up and a weed barrier installed . water was installed & also electricity was run to the green house.

Here is the almost completed green house.

The outside cinder blocks are covered for added insulation. A front door has been added and bricks have been laid on top of the weed barrier & new benches for the trees were installed.
All that remains to be done is lighting & sprinkler system installed ;along with a propane furnace for heating. At the time heat is being provided by electrical heaters,just in time for the first freeze of the year.


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Excerpt from Dallas bonsai society newsletter

" Click to enlarge articles"
This an excerpt from the Dallas Bonsai society newsletter
published in September 2009.
The tree is a twisted pomegranate which received preliminary styling ,wiring ,root pruning & was potted in a chinese pot,using
lava rock mix , compost & worm castings.
This twisted pomegranate belongs to the Dallas bonsai society
and is destined to be raffled off in the Dallas bonsai society convention. Updates will be posted on its progress.

The following is an other article from the September Dallas Bonsai Society newsletter featuring Lone Star Bonsai Federation visiting artist Roberto Martinez Acosta. Roberto hails from Puerto Rico and is here to do a demonstration on a ficus subulata (nerifolia)

Update September

This is the ficus subulata (nerifolia) that was styled by Roberto Martinez at the Dallas club demo.in August.

Diane Lowe, Dallas club member is working on her own twisted pomegranate.She has a couple of air layers going and is in the process of wiring.

While visiting Bent Tree Bonsai, Diane graciously agreed to wire Dallas club's twisted pomegranate that was demo'd in August.

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Boxwood

Boxwood before/after repot and trim.






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Brazilian Rain Tree Repot

Before/after repot and root/foliage trim. Still haven't wired.

Healthy tree, ready for repot early spring.

Japanese pot

Base drainer lava

Second layer (can't really see) is home cooked compost and worm crap.

Got stick, poked air pockets, and topped with mix of calcined clay, lava, pine bark and Akadama.

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Scary 'Fukien' Tea

This is my scary Fukien Tea about 30 yrs old it looks scary huh?

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Trident Maple Make Over

I got this Trident Maple looking bad in a slab. After a few minutes contemplating I got my shears and this is what became of it. Can't wait for fall now.





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Buttonwood

I got this buttonwood from a friend and he offered me a "good deal" which I've come to consider more of a gift. Reason was because he didn't have time to train it as it deserves and trusted I'd do a good job on it so he practically let me have it.

When I got it, it was in bad shape, it had scale and leggy growth. I got it in early spring and after 2 months in my posession it still had no signs of buds.


Finally one day in April the buds showed up and I went into Edward Scissorhands mode and trimmed it all around and left two leaves on all the branches I chose to keep for the final design to promote back budding. After the new leaves reach 1/4" to 1/2" in length I plan to cut all the old leaves in half to and repeat as necessary to reduce leaf size, promoted back budding to bald areas and to densify leaf pads. The new buds will form in the axils of half-leaves remaining on the tree and emerge as a pairs of leaves.

***UPDATE 1 - 06/10/2009***


It's almost summer and my buttonwood is still budding all over. As it buds back I cut whatever is above the bud which is not going to be a part of my final design. Therefore, the energy is redirected towards the trunk and not wasted on higher up buds and leaves. I also got a new pot and is looking good what do you think?

UPDATE 06-26-2009

I'm doing windswept, wired all branches, and lime sulfured dead wood. Won't touch until next spring.

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Bougainvillea Treasure

This weekend I went Bonsai nursery hunting for a couple of hours, you know, mom and pop nursery shops with hidden treasures among their stock. After visiting a few, I ended up at an Asian nursery in Irving, TX. In their store entrance they had a small Bonsai stand with like fifteen 3-5 yr old Ficus and Junipers. These "Bonsai" were overpriced, had glued rocks in the soil and Home Depot's trademark shape that looks like an 'S'. After I looked at this stand for, I don't know 5 seconds, I re-focused on my mission and went to look at their stock out back.

20 disappointing minutes later (and yet common) I didn't find anything worth taking home and no hidden treasures and as I was heading out; a sign caught my attention..."Do Not Enter". It was their back room, and an employee was coming out of it so I browsed around until the area was clear then I made my move.

Once in the backroom, in a corner, I noticed trees piled together that looked like were dying and BINGO! Pirate found his treasure, I found 3 mother Bougainvillea trees (where they take cuttings to make new plants).They looked dead and were bone dry but had healthy foliage at the tips and green bark. I remembered it had rained recently so I knew they were in good shape. I looked around for any witnesses as if I killed someone and I pulled two of the ‘bodies’ out.

I called on one of the care takers who was Hispanic and maintained the nursery and after acquaintancing myself with him in Spanish, I asked him if he thought the owners would sell them to me. He said he didn’t know but did tell me they used them for cuttings. So he called on the boss lady and she called on the boss man and among themselves I could hear them go, "盆栽栽..Bonsai..盆栽盆"

I didn’t need to know what they were saying to realize they knew why I wanted them for and they would overprice it. Anybody else would have thought “what an ugly stump, get rid of it”. So I tried to fool them and made this expression as if to appear clueless about Bonsai, the same clueless expression I made once when my ex-lady saw a text msg from another girl on my cell phone. However, once again, the ‘look’ was useless and I admitted to them I wanted to train them for Bonsai. So she said “you can take one for $35” and I made my choice.

Once I got home, before it repotted it, I put it in bucket of rain water for a couple of hours while I messed around with other work. When I got to it, the first thing I did was cut a thick root that was growing out the drain hole. Having in mind the ‘vigorous look of the tree’, I didn’t want to mess with the roots much so I got a saw, cut it in half and then I gently felt around for thick roots to cut. I also noticed the legendary mycorrhizae on the root mass which I tried to keep as much as possible. I put it in a ‘grow box’, added some of my compost and topped with lava rock. I cut dead branches and left most of it intact and will ‘grow and trim’ as it back buds until I reach the main trunk by next season I hope, but who knows.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do with this piece but it will be good. I wonder what color the paper bracts are and I know I will be putting my dremel tool to use on this baby. This concludes EPISODE 1. Stayed tuned, coming soon EPISODE 2, in Spring 2011.

Part 2

Well it has been 2 long years (which consisted of 14 excruciating long days) since I last posted and said I would do any training on this treasure. This bougainvillea only had growth in the top when I found it neglected in the ground, took it home and repotted it. As it turns out, it responded very well to repotting so much it bud back all over to the main trunk. I figured it would take months to do so but it only took 14 days.

As you can see I removed more dead branches which I could have removed on the first session but sometimes you just have to wait. You see, you can look at a tree one day and not see anything you can do...YET. But then one day you come out to water it and then IT HITS YOU AND YOU SEE IT. It's like a mathematician trying to solve a very difficult problem but he can't solve it so he just sits there idle but then he figures out a way to answer it and he starts writing on the board like a maniac.

Same with Bonsai when it hits me, I start to prune away like Johny Depp in 'Edward Scissorhands', seen that movie? Anyway, at first it was better to not prune so much for maybe a seemingly useless branch might fit in a design I had not seen yet or someone else might bring to my attention. In the same way, a seemingly useless branch might be just that and end up being pruned anyway but always lean towards less pruning as opposed to over doing it.

I also hollowed out one of the branches which had bud also and was extremely careful to get not even an inch near it. That bud actually survived and still growing. So that concludes this session and now I will wait and continue to clip and grow and ramify. I will have another training session next spring (for real this time).


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