Over the past few years, as I watched and recorded my Contorted White Japanese Flowering Apricot’s development, I have been making plans for changes I wanted to implement at the right time.
A few weeks ago, I noticed the ume wasn’t growing at the rate I expected. I also remembered that the flowering I expected in the winter, while ok, wasn’t up to past levels.
This slowdown has happened before with the ume. I was able to correct it by increasing the size of the container. I had one in mind that was of the same type as the Yamaaki rope-rim pot it was currently in, but was about twice as deep and 3 inches wider. That container was a white Chinese pot. Since it was larger than the Yamaaki pot, I slip potted my tree. Within a couple of days, I saw new shoots popping out.
The other changes I planned to make came about as a result of the natural ramification my ume exhibits. Apricots are usually considered difficult trees to ramify, but mine, maybe because it is a contorted type, has always ramified easily, but this often came at a cost of dieback. Not sure exactly what I was going to do with the deadwood that was slowly piling up, I resisted the urge to prune it off. Beginning in 2012, I left the dead branches in place.
My ume is almost black. This makes for a very strong contrast in the winter with the delicate white flowers, but it also makes lime sulphur fairly ineffective as a bleach for the deadwood. The best I could get was a dark gray tone which was not visible against a dark background to set off the flowers.
I began to look around for alternatives. The solution I came up with is not traditional, but it puts light inside the tree, where it is needed to make the deadwood visible. I used iridescent pearl acrylic paint. At first, this paint had a jarring, metallic effect, but I could see over the ensuing weeks that it was slowly modulating due to weathering. This will continue.
The real benefit of the paint is that it highlighted the contorted nature of much of the deadwood.
Following are two stereo images, the first with a white background and the second with a black background. If you look closely, you can see the deadwood in the white background image, but not so clearly as with the black.
And now, the black...