Apr 30 2011

Not Drawn to Scale

Not only am I not drawn to them, I hate the little buggers!! 🙂

Ian B was part of last nights royal pruning session. I had been caring for his big Chinese Elm and brought it out for a chat about how I had brought it back to life (CPR & jump leads 🙂 ) When we started examining the new flush of buds we found the biggest Scale Insects I had ever seen!! These where sorted today with a nice spray of insecticide. Before I did this I took a few photos in case anyone hadn’t seen them before. Nothing else seems to have them. I guess they grew super sized in the heat of the tunnel.

Here’s a few of them and you can also see the sticky white stuff they produce.

and evidence of the new buds.

Apr 30 2011

Larch Basic Styling

This was the last tree to be styled last night. Work finished at 1.30am!!

This is Ben’s Larch recently purchased from Willowbog Bonsai as raw material. We worked through it and gave it it’s first basic styling. There are a few options within the tree but this has been left for Ben to ponder for a while.

Ben’s relatively new to bonsai but I am impressed by his eye for a tree and his level of knowledge gained in a short time. He always asks appropriate questions and on a few occasions I am able to answer them 🙂

He wired so fast his arms were a blur 🙂

Apr 30 2011

Turkey Oak

One of my ‘Royal Bonsai’ Guests last night was Josh who brought along his Turkey Oak, Quercus Cerris. This tree was lifted from a growing bed in his garden this Spring and put into it’s first pot. He brought it along for pinching and I took the opportunity to get a photo. I must say that the photo doesn’t do this tree any favours. It’s amazing in the bark, so to speak. The pot is from Walsall Ceramics. Well, via Willowbog Bonsai 🙂

To give you an idea of the size of the Oak here’s Josh for scale.

Apr 30 2011

Root Over Rock Common Juniper

Amazingly I didn’t post anything on the blog yesterday!! The main reason being the Royal Wedding…. only kidding, I was having a bit of a Royal Bonsai Day at my house with friends coming during the day to play with trees and have a bit of Craic.

First up was this Root over Rock Juniper possibly ‘Repanda’ owned by Stephen. When Stephen bought the tree about 5 years ago it was very overgrown and he has worked hard to get the foliage chased back enough to allow for this styling to take place.

Stephen and I got to work getting the whole thing wired. Well, Stephen drank about 3 pots of my coffee in the process 🙂

Maggie kept an eye on us from a hidden location.

Fully wired but as yet to be styled.

After some basic placement it became evident that the left hand side branch wasn’t required in the design.

We even considered a more brutal pruning option. This is an option for the future but there were concerns over losing a corresponding root by removing the branch all in one go.