arakawa slit pot grow results

Here is my ground grown rough bark maple,put in slit pot with half inch trunk,this is a pic from today after four or five seasons,can't remember which,not sure if I should go with the twin trunk or not.what do you think?sorry about the bad photos.

I love the bark!! Nice graceful movement, decent taper in the first half of the tree.. PI think that first branch is more of a secondary trunk- "like" branch than an actual dual trunk style, but it is probably necessary to keep it and it should look nice and natural eventually.

Great tree overall! Good job!

Nice tree Mike! Arakawas are awesome maples to have. I think no collection is complete without having one. In my opinion I'd remove that second trunk/branch. As your eye moves up it draws attention away from the nice zig zag movement of the tree. I generally don't mind these thick branches that act almost as second trunks but in this case I think it needs to go.

Mike I have read that it is hard for new growth to come through the rough bark. Will you do anything special to promote the new location that you want limbs?

Thanks

Thanks for the kind words,I decided to do away with the sub trunk,branch.I haven't had serious issues with back budding on any palmatum that I've owned,I have the lower branch structure placed where I need it to get things rolling.

Mike as the bark develops on your arakawa, you will notice that it becomes difficult for adventitious buds to develop. You can always get around this issue by thread grafting if it's ever needed.

It might be worh considering a few options to speed up the healing process if you are going to remove such a large branch.

1. You could try the technique where you cut their the branch had way, leave it in for a year or two to encourage some h&r pealing before removing the rest. This starts a callous on the wound, and should leave you with less to heal once you cut the rest of the way through...

2. I have seen people describe a method where your leave a flap of bark below (I only read about this a few times and cannot actually recall the full technique, but I think it is in Naka's first book) that is large enough to cover most/ all the wound, then tie the bark down to hold it over the wound until it fuses... I was thinking this might be a good one to try on an Arakawa so that you do not wind up with a large swath of non- corky bark right in the middle of all that gorgeous stuff... Just an idea I have read about and never tried myself.

Regardless, his tree has the bones TJ be a very nice, LARGE bonsai. I hope you turn it into a masterpiece and keep us all well informed of it's progress!

Hello!

Eric Group said:

... ...2. I have seen people describe a method where your leave a flap of bark below (I only read about this a few times and cannot actually recall the full technique, ... ...

Click to expand...

This -or a similar- technique is applied by Mr. Hans van Meer, known as "the Van Meer technique" and you can read about it here http://ofbonsai.org/techniques/styles-and-styling/the-van-meer-technique