SU2
Omono
TL;DR--- When trying to make a new apex-upon a stump/trunk, and simultaneously using the base of that new apex to "close the chop-wound", how do you gauge how far to let those top primaries/leaders go growing before you reign them in? I'd left the top-most primary('leader') to just grow tall like several feet long on most of my BC's, also allowed side-primaries to grow where their collars were helping close the chop-woundings, anyway I realized to my dismay that, in approaching it how I had, that I was[possibly] setting myself up for inverse-taper down the road I dunno, maybe this inverse-taper (what's being caused in the photos below) is minimal-enough that, so long as I'm reeling it in now, it's fine IE during the time I'm developing&refining the apex maybe that'll be enough time to know the trunk will regain taper / smooth-out in the chop-area....that is my hope but am here seeking guidance so I don't have to learn the hard way and find myself having to re-create & re-close a new chop-wound because I'd over-grown the 1st ones! Am now thinking "Just hard-prune them back and begin treating them more as in-refinement' branching, not "growing for girth" anymore..
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So.....
BC-specific info is great although I suspect the principles will be similar/same on most bonsai that're in "this situation", specifically I mean a bonsai you're creating by:
- collecting a large yamadori who requires a trunk-chop upon collection, that you're:
- budding&growing a large "leader" primary branch right by / at the chop-wound site, and are:
- relying upon that leader's branch-collar to "roll-over"/callous-over the chop-wound, simultaneously achieving two goals (closure of the wound, and creation of the base of the new canopy/apex that's to sit-atop that chop-wound)
BC's are overly-aggressive when it comes to their wound-closure IME, leaving far bigger scar-tissue for any actions than comparable actions on other species (and BC's tops are the bane of my work in the garden right now!) so figure it's the best example-species here but am also dealing w/ this on Maples and wanna know what's "the guideline"!
Do people have any "rule of thumb" for The Time to Finally Touch/Cut/Intervene on that Leader-Primary? Do you go by % of chop-wound that's closed-off? Or by the relative girth of the leader, relative to the trunk it's growing from?
Example 1: BC, maybe 1.5yr old, top leader-primary's girth was getting to the point that I was afraid of inverse-taper so, after this pic, I went and did pretty hard-prunings of these branches (I should note that, in many of these situations, I approach it by "2-stepping" insofar as I do a first "hard prune" to the branches and, days later once I see the back-budding, do a second round of pruning so I can ensure I've pruned-back to the lowest pair of active nodes/backbuds) This guy has a side-branch also assisting w/ wound-closure, in fact I suspect that if I carved it that the wounding would be near-closed but I don't see any benefit to carving its top just yet:
the base/collar of this leader-primary is easily 80% of the trunk-girth where it originates, and there's that opposing primary who's also "closing the wound" although this ^ guy is a good (IMO) example of actually leaving "extra top-trunk" on (I suspect it provides "insulation"/comfort for the top of the wounded trunk while the new primaries are growing & forming an enclosed-trunk (through the years, of course!)
I pruned ^ this guy back really hard, only on those top shoots, basically seeing it as "I don't want much-more girth on that leader, so I'm going to prune-back to its lowest pair of viable buds and "re-start" my top-growth", kinda a "round 1 refinement" of this guy's leader....but I fear I went too-far on a pair of older BC's...
"BC1" and "BC2" are my real worries, I noticed the problem & quickly got on-top-of some work to address it, gonna start w/ "BC1":
BC1 got a hard-prune of all top-of-trunk primaries, leaving him like this:
but that's ^ not enough IMO as I really wanna slow growth at this collar (or, rather, "keep its growth in-line w/ rest of tree"!!), so did my usual '2-step pruning' approach and, after it'd lived like ^ that for some days and back-budded to my liking, I pruned (and just removed nodes/bark to achieve same effect) all the extra buds, bringing most of them back to just 1 or 2 buds:
(here's two more pics/angles of BC1 after getting that 2nd prune, you can see I did 'skin' some of those branch-bases but the intervention was done thinking "OK these are getting too-fat and, if un-checked, will create major inverse-taper by the time the wound closes; But, by hard-pruning back to these lowest, bottom-most pairs[or single!] of new buds, I'll thwart more runaway growth at the chop-wounds **and** simultaneously have begun 'creating my apex' ", would love to hear people's thoughts/opinions on how I approached this one!!!
AAAAAAaaaaand last but certainly not least, 'BC2'.....this guy is 4' tall(the trunk/chop-wound's height) and 2.75yrs in-container, I'd been letting the top-primaries just "run wild" while trying to close that wound & develop taper-into-the-apex on my BC-stick, had even allowed a pair of side-primaries to grow-from the sides of the chop-wound, I removed those entirely before these pics but their effects of having fattened the sides of the wound should be apparent:
[gotta love how the collar/callousing "split" the latex caulking I'd put in there, spreading that white ring half an inch outward ;P ]
This guy's got even-worse leader-to-trunk size ratios, here's side-views:
[ah, there's one of the side-primary's scars, still not calloused-over, I'd removed the side-primaries the second I realized the taper-problem, and got right on making BC-interventions a priority!]
So with that ^ guy, the amount of "above-chopwound growth&girth" is much higher, relatively, than on the other two I've shown. I hard-pruned all primaries at/above the wound, doing my 2-step process which I'm only on step-1 of right now (IE I've brought all of those top primaries back hard, expecting about 2-3X as many buds as I'll actually want, but I keep an eye on it and, as they develop, I rub-off or cut-off the higher buds so that, on each branch, I'm able to have the usual "split to 2" w/o risking die-back/losing any particular branch )
What do you guys think of my approaching of chop-wound-healing // apex-creation? Obviously this is "step 1" in apex-creation, but a necessary step nonetheless, so am really in-the-dark here & hoping for advice, I cannot tell if I'm doing it close-to right OR, if I am erring, I'm not even sure if I'm intervening too-early or too-late....I know many have a knee-jerk reaction of "just let it grow" but clearly if I let the top go un-touched on that last one (BC2) then it'd certainly have a 'flare' at its chop-wound (or, at best, just be ram-rod straight / lack any taper) For context, I chose my chop-wounds' heights on these trunks with relatively-squat canopies in-mind, kind of want short/dense/tight branching in their crowns and, w/ BCs' apical-dominance, I suspect that once you've gotten "the bones" / "the structure" of those top/leader primaries to somewhere around 75%+ of their final girth, that it's best to stop growing-out and start working them for ramification (while still allowing all the lower, side primaries to elongate as their girth still needs a lot of growing!!)
Thanks a ton for any&all insight on wound-closure // avoiding inverse taper at the closure-point(s) // apex origination, I know "the basic concept/gist of it" but I don't wanna shoot myself in the foot by closing a chop-wound in just 3yrs only to realize I'd done so by creating inverse-taper from leaving my sacrifice-branches on for too-long, or letting the leader-primary run too-tall...I'd had this idea in-mind that ~80% of "final intended girth" is a good time to intervene & stop the primary/leader from further 'real' growth (reverting to a clip&grow, refinement-type approach, working on orientation & aesthetics not on growth/girth), would love people's thoughts I mean hell I've even thought "Maybe you could get-away with a little inverse-taper at that spot on the trunk IF that spot is 'the top' of the trunk and all the primaries go outwards" (IE the main stem/trunk splits to several sub-trunks at the same spot, this happens in nature often enough and some reverse-taper solely at that spot is OK when styled/done that way, IMO), but for BC's like this where that wound location is just intended to be "part of the final trunk", well, I'm just not sure how thick I should be getting the primaries, and/or how healed I should get the wound, before 'backing off' of unfettered primary-growth!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So.....
BC-specific info is great although I suspect the principles will be similar/same on most bonsai that're in "this situation", specifically I mean a bonsai you're creating by:
- collecting a large yamadori who requires a trunk-chop upon collection, that you're:
- budding&growing a large "leader" primary branch right by / at the chop-wound site, and are:
- relying upon that leader's branch-collar to "roll-over"/callous-over the chop-wound, simultaneously achieving two goals (closure of the wound, and creation of the base of the new canopy/apex that's to sit-atop that chop-wound)
BC's are overly-aggressive when it comes to their wound-closure IME, leaving far bigger scar-tissue for any actions than comparable actions on other species (and BC's tops are the bane of my work in the garden right now!) so figure it's the best example-species here but am also dealing w/ this on Maples and wanna know what's "the guideline"!
Do people have any "rule of thumb" for The Time to Finally Touch/Cut/Intervene on that Leader-Primary? Do you go by % of chop-wound that's closed-off? Or by the relative girth of the leader, relative to the trunk it's growing from?
Example 1: BC, maybe 1.5yr old, top leader-primary's girth was getting to the point that I was afraid of inverse-taper so, after this pic, I went and did pretty hard-prunings of these branches (I should note that, in many of these situations, I approach it by "2-stepping" insofar as I do a first "hard prune" to the branches and, days later once I see the back-budding, do a second round of pruning so I can ensure I've pruned-back to the lowest pair of active nodes/backbuds) This guy has a side-branch also assisting w/ wound-closure, in fact I suspect that if I carved it that the wounding would be near-closed but I don't see any benefit to carving its top just yet:
the base/collar of this leader-primary is easily 80% of the trunk-girth where it originates, and there's that opposing primary who's also "closing the wound" although this ^ guy is a good (IMO) example of actually leaving "extra top-trunk" on (I suspect it provides "insulation"/comfort for the top of the wounded trunk while the new primaries are growing & forming an enclosed-trunk (through the years, of course!)
I pruned ^ this guy back really hard, only on those top shoots, basically seeing it as "I don't want much-more girth on that leader, so I'm going to prune-back to its lowest pair of viable buds and "re-start" my top-growth", kinda a "round 1 refinement" of this guy's leader....but I fear I went too-far on a pair of older BC's...
"BC1" and "BC2" are my real worries, I noticed the problem & quickly got on-top-of some work to address it, gonna start w/ "BC1":
BC1 got a hard-prune of all top-of-trunk primaries, leaving him like this:
but that's ^ not enough IMO as I really wanna slow growth at this collar (or, rather, "keep its growth in-line w/ rest of tree"!!), so did my usual '2-step pruning' approach and, after it'd lived like ^ that for some days and back-budded to my liking, I pruned (and just removed nodes/bark to achieve same effect) all the extra buds, bringing most of them back to just 1 or 2 buds:
(here's two more pics/angles of BC1 after getting that 2nd prune, you can see I did 'skin' some of those branch-bases but the intervention was done thinking "OK these are getting too-fat and, if un-checked, will create major inverse-taper by the time the wound closes; But, by hard-pruning back to these lowest, bottom-most pairs[or single!] of new buds, I'll thwart more runaway growth at the chop-wounds **and** simultaneously have begun 'creating my apex' ", would love to hear people's thoughts/opinions on how I approached this one!!!
AAAAAAaaaaand last but certainly not least, 'BC2'.....this guy is 4' tall(the trunk/chop-wound's height) and 2.75yrs in-container, I'd been letting the top-primaries just "run wild" while trying to close that wound & develop taper-into-the-apex on my BC-stick, had even allowed a pair of side-primaries to grow-from the sides of the chop-wound, I removed those entirely before these pics but their effects of having fattened the sides of the wound should be apparent:
[gotta love how the collar/callousing "split" the latex caulking I'd put in there, spreading that white ring half an inch outward ;P ]
This guy's got even-worse leader-to-trunk size ratios, here's side-views:
[ah, there's one of the side-primary's scars, still not calloused-over, I'd removed the side-primaries the second I realized the taper-problem, and got right on making BC-interventions a priority!]
So with that ^ guy, the amount of "above-chopwound growth&girth" is much higher, relatively, than on the other two I've shown. I hard-pruned all primaries at/above the wound, doing my 2-step process which I'm only on step-1 of right now (IE I've brought all of those top primaries back hard, expecting about 2-3X as many buds as I'll actually want, but I keep an eye on it and, as they develop, I rub-off or cut-off the higher buds so that, on each branch, I'm able to have the usual "split to 2" w/o risking die-back/losing any particular branch )
What do you guys think of my approaching of chop-wound-healing // apex-creation? Obviously this is "step 1" in apex-creation, but a necessary step nonetheless, so am really in-the-dark here & hoping for advice, I cannot tell if I'm doing it close-to right OR, if I am erring, I'm not even sure if I'm intervening too-early or too-late....I know many have a knee-jerk reaction of "just let it grow" but clearly if I let the top go un-touched on that last one (BC2) then it'd certainly have a 'flare' at its chop-wound (or, at best, just be ram-rod straight / lack any taper) For context, I chose my chop-wounds' heights on these trunks with relatively-squat canopies in-mind, kind of want short/dense/tight branching in their crowns and, w/ BCs' apical-dominance, I suspect that once you've gotten "the bones" / "the structure" of those top/leader primaries to somewhere around 75%+ of their final girth, that it's best to stop growing-out and start working them for ramification (while still allowing all the lower, side primaries to elongate as their girth still needs a lot of growing!!)
Thanks a ton for any&all insight on wound-closure // avoiding inverse taper at the closure-point(s) // apex origination, I know "the basic concept/gist of it" but I don't wanna shoot myself in the foot by closing a chop-wound in just 3yrs only to realize I'd done so by creating inverse-taper from leaving my sacrifice-branches on for too-long, or letting the leader-primary run too-tall...I'd had this idea in-mind that ~80% of "final intended girth" is a good time to intervene & stop the primary/leader from further 'real' growth (reverting to a clip&grow, refinement-type approach, working on orientation & aesthetics not on growth/girth), would love people's thoughts I mean hell I've even thought "Maybe you could get-away with a little inverse-taper at that spot on the trunk IF that spot is 'the top' of the trunk and all the primaries go outwards" (IE the main stem/trunk splits to several sub-trunks at the same spot, this happens in nature often enough and some reverse-taper solely at that spot is OK when styled/done that way, IMO), but for BC's like this where that wound location is just intended to be "part of the final trunk", well, I'm just not sure how thick I should be getting the primaries, and/or how healed I should get the wound, before 'backing off' of unfettered primary-growth!