Here are some photos from Enfield Bonsai Group Autumn Bonsai Show held at Capel Manor last weekend courtesy of Dan from the group, thanks mate..
Best Display – John Armitage
Best Tree – Ian Stewardson
Public vote – Mark & Rita Cooper
And a gallery of the rest including club entries and even a few demo pics.
Apart from one tree a few years back, my air layers have never failed. I always use the same method, strip a ring of bark, apply moss and wrap with cling film. I can usually remove within 4-5 months. It would be easy to only post about success on the blog, but we all know bonsai has it’s fair share of failures and woe 😉
This year I did two layers, one on a Japanese Maple and one on a Trident Maple. Both species I’ve layered before.
The maple was slightly different this time as I used a cut flower pot to hold the moss in place. The Trident was done as normal.
This was the result of the Japanese Maple.
Roots only issued from one place that were of use.
Some other roots appeared but from below the layer on the parent trunk.
The tree had managed to bridge an inch wide ring to rejoin with the parent trunk.
I removed the unwanted roots and any unwanted bridging callus. I then removed even more of the heartwood to be 100% sure that bridging wouldn’t occur.
This time I opted to use root hormone to stimulate the tree. I mixed power with water to make a paste which was applied to the area where roots are wanted.
I then replaced the moss with a akadama mix with a little grit.
We will wait and see !
The Trident didn’t fair much better!
Loads of callus and very early signs of roots
As it was close to bridging, I removed the bottom but left the top portion as this will add to the future width of the nebari.
Moss reapplied and the mini tree was pruned to get a little structure into the future new image.
I’ll keep you updated next year.
When we had Robert Porch over speaking at the club last year, he was talking about how a lot of the small maples we see from Japan are air layers developed on a parent plant and then layered off. One of the techniques that is used is to ring the tree with wire at the point where you eventually want to layer. Then while you develope the tight branch structure the wire bites in and causes the trunk to swell at this point. Then when you are ready to layer you already have a wider nebari to work with.
I’ve been meaning to do this all year on a maple in my garden but only got around to it a few weeks ago. Late in the season, but maples tend to bulk up in the autumn and I intend to leave the wire on through next year and layer off in 2015. I’ll keep you posted as to how this works for me. In the meantime here are a few of the bits I’m layering off. Some better than others but I want to do as many as possible on the same tree.
Leaf size coming down nicely after another defoliation this year. Pictured front and back.
Saturday saw Phil appear in my back garden with a few new trees to get photographed 😉
Stephen cam for a look and Josh appeared with the first load of his collection coming for some Holiday care.
Stephen came down to my place on Saturday to get his Maple sorted. The canopy was extremely full and the inner branches would start to suffer unless we did a partial defoliation. This was it before we started.
As you can see we had a few other with us making the most of the day.
Look at the mess he made of my carpet.
Is that them all?
The after shot. Light now penetrates the canopy and will help maintain vigour on those inner branches.
This video shows this tree back in February being repotted.
This little Shohin Maple was a layering from two years ago. Still very early days but this is it’s strongest year so far and is developing nicely.
After first trim. Both have grown strongly this Spring and some extension shoots and larger leaves have already required removal. Both have been in a greenhouse up until now but will shortly be placed out on the benches. I find keeping them under glass until the leaves are fully hardened is a safer bet. Over the last few years I have experimented a little with defoliation, partial defoliation and just extension pruning to see how Tridents react. This is part of bonsai, constantly looking to see how trees respond at different times of the year to different techniques, feeding regimes and weather. No two years are the same and it can be hard to reach any concrete conclusions. But if this was easy, we’d all be doing it 🙂
This time it’s a mame Trident Maple. I have a stump of maple that is far from attractive. I opted to layer off the little apex.
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