Watching these Kathy Shaner demos provides a good reminder to work on rough stock to prepare it for styling later. 40 minutes well-spent:


It motivated me to take another look at this shimpaku stock that’s been allowed to grow mostly unchecked for the last couple years waiting for just the right opportunity. It has several good alternatives, and I’m not ready to exclude any of them yet…but several branches are unnecessary from any perspective. Best to get them out of the way now, and push that growth back closer to the trunk, and let it “puff up” again, as Kathy put it.
Several potential fronts:

Before:

Reduce branches fom 3 to 2:

Continuing this throughout the tree leaves all the design options on the table, spreads out the branch reduction over time, allows more light into the tree, and improves density in close to the trunk/main branches. Not much difference…

I often hear people saying they wish they had access to good stock and or that they cant find any stock worth purchasing. Often the journey to find good stock can be difficult but there is definitely good stock available if you know where to look.

A couple of weekends ago I visited a friend on the outskirts of Melbourne to see how his ground grown stock had progressed this year.

As you can see from the above picture, the stock was going very well indeed. There is no real secret about how to produce these results as they are a simple a matter of spending 10 years applying good technique and working the root bases each and every year.

Each year the trees have been dug up and cut back hard to encourage a fine, flat root system. Digging each year coupled with the excellent growing conditions in the…