Jay Wilson
Shohin
This is another of my native oaks.
Water oaks are iffy when it comes to bonsai. The leaves are pretty big and if you defoliate, they tend to come back even larger. I have gotten some leaf reduction by regularly trimming back to the first or second leaf on a twig.
In my experience, water oaks tend to lose twigs fairly often and because of this, they don't ramify to fine twigging very well.
Over all, I'd rate them as an average tree to work on for bonsai. Fun to play with, but difficult at best to make a good bonsai from.
That said, here is what I would call my best effort so far. I've kind of neglected this tree, so I had to do a fairly hard trim on it.
Before and after a defoliate and trim.
Edit: I tried to take a couple of more pictures from other sides but my batteries died. Maybe later.
Water oaks are iffy when it comes to bonsai. The leaves are pretty big and if you defoliate, they tend to come back even larger. I have gotten some leaf reduction by regularly trimming back to the first or second leaf on a twig.
In my experience, water oaks tend to lose twigs fairly often and because of this, they don't ramify to fine twigging very well.
Over all, I'd rate them as an average tree to work on for bonsai. Fun to play with, but difficult at best to make a good bonsai from.
That said, here is what I would call my best effort so far. I've kind of neglected this tree, so I had to do a fairly hard trim on it.
Before and after a defoliate and trim.
Edit: I tried to take a couple of more pictures from other sides but my batteries died. Maybe later.
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