Collecting a Thuja o.

[Javaman4373]

I have a Thuja in my woods I would like to collect. It has a base of about 2.5 inches and I think nice nebari. There is a little foliage near the base (the deer missed under the snow), but from about 1 foot to 5 ft it has been browsed off by deer. The tree is about 9 ft tall. I envision it as quite a short tree in a pot, with either the trunk chopped (maybe carved) or converted to dead wood. My questions are when should I collect it, how much top foliage to keep at collection, and how much root will be necessary? I saw the thread by Mattspiniken about collecting a very large Thuja where he cut roots around it in the summer, packed some sphagnum moss around the future root ball, and then collected the tree in early fall. Is this a good plan?

 

[Hartinez]

Check out this thread and quite a few others by our member @mattspiniken . His knowledge of collecting the species is vast.

A collected Thuja

This tree looks like it was born to be a bonsai. A very old tree somewhere around 150 or older. I have not pruned one live branch just a few extra pieces of deadwood so far, the tree never reached more than 3ft in the wild. Looking forward to trying to keep the nature feel of this one and...

www.bonsainut.com

https://www.bonsainut.com/search/465327/?page=2

 

[mattspinniken]

Thanks @Hartinez ! @Javaman4373 I think that is a good way to collect, but keep in mind I did not cut the roots at all when I packed it in the spring with sphagnum. I will just carefully excavate around the base and pack it with sphagnum with plastic around that. Try it!