Last week I had a night at my garage for the guys who do one to ones with me. I needed a hand getting a large Scots pine bent into shape. This was an old tree collected from a bog back in 2012. This is the tree at the time of collection.

This was it a few weeks ago, sitting outside where it’s been for the last 3 years. It’s been chopped back a few times to remove unwanted trunks and branches and to help chase back the foliage.

The idea was to create a twin trunk image from the remaining foliage. However it’s always good to have a Plan B!!

Here we have the tree placed into the workshop after a 4 man lift. Took a coat of paint off the door on the way in!

Some deadwood will need to be worked.

Help from the chaps in getting the raffia applied.

And then my Plan A went out the window lol. When bending the lighter of the two trunks I managed to snap it beyond the point of repair/survival. I was a bit amazed at the time to be honest as I hadn’t applied that much pressure and the trunk had been raffia’d, taped, and cable-tied. On closer inspection later I noticed a weak point where a branch had died previously, but still…

I was quite pleased with how calm I remained. Nothing I could do to change what had occurred, all I could do was look for options within the remaining trunk to create a tree. The original plans for this trunk had to be dropped and the whole tree evaluated to select another styling option. Once done we again got to work and did a little more bending, this time with no mishaps.

This is how the tree finished before the guys had to head home.

As the branches where all hanging at weird angle with buds pointing towards straight down, I felt that it would be better to fire on and get the tree fully wired so all buds were facing up to help with vigour. In some cases this was exaggerated on the weaker buds. This is how the tree turned out. I actually had another smaller branch break, again with hardly any pressure applied. Some trees just seem to be a pain in the arse!

A first step on a long journey, a lot of back budding will be required but the tree is budding strongly this year. I’m pretty pleased with the result, possibly a better image that I was aiming for with the twin trunk image.