Olive Tree Trimming

[Warnold]

This Olive (Olea Europaea) has been growing quite well. I would like to give it a trim to hopefully induce more smaller leaves. Any help?
Thanks!

 

[faker]

What are your goals with this tree? Personally, I would be more concerned with establishing the structure of the tree than focusing on leaf reduction at this point. Leaf reduction is usually a final "refining" step on a nearly complete tree. You may want to start by reducing points of branching to two and envisioning what you would like the final tree to grow into, either mentally or with a sketch.

 

[Bonsai Nut]

This Olive (Olea Europaea) has been growing quite well. I would like to give it a trim to hopefully induce more smaller leaves. Any help?
Thanks!

Pruning it will not induce smaller leaves. If you wait until late spring (like March) and defoliate it, it will push new growth in late April or early May that will be smaller... but more importantly, being an olive, it will backbud everywhere.

However... when you do this you will slow down trunk thickening significantly.

 

[Shibui]

Another case of it depends what you want from your bonsai.
If you will be happy with a small olive with a thinner trunk and rounded top you can trip any time.
Some of us want to have strong trunks that look really old so we aim for much thicker trunks that look mature. That takes many years to develop. Even allowing lots of growth thickening the trunk still takes many years.

Small leaves seems to be a factor of how many branches you have. After a number of years of trimming the branches will have ramified with lots of smaller shoots and leaves reduced naturally. I have not found a quick way to reduce leaf size.

 

[Crazy Diamond]

You need to built a trunk and a ramificatiom first, then you can focus on reduce the leaves, in Olives its easy to reduce them so no worries

 

[Warnold]

Thanks for all your advise. I do want to increase trunk size and keep tree healthy. I'll trim the tips back a little and let her grow.