Eastern white cedar, thuja occidentalis

Nybonsai12

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I've seen some nice examples of this species from older collected trees. I don't know much about them.

I've seen tons of them at local big box stores in that typical cone like shape for landscape use. They are always labeled Thuja occidentalis and then usually have some other name on the label like "green emerald" or something else.

My question is what is the difference between the collected varieties and the big box versions(aside from lack of desirable charateristics)? Are big box varieties grafted? behave differently etc? Are these flexible? what seasons are they good to prune/bend/wire?

I won't buy trees that don't have good bonsai qualities, but I will spend $10-15 once or twice a year to get something just to work on for the sake of practicing bends/wiring etc. The 50% off signs are starting to come out...

Can anybody tell me more about these? Thanks in advance!
 

Dav4

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Like other collected bonsai materials, you're hoping to get a tree with obvious age and trunk with character. I had a nice collected one purchased at NEBG a few years after I started bonsai. It had a descent base along with a tall, fairly heavy trunk and a nice deadwood shari feature that ran from the base 2/3 of the way up the trunk. It, unfortunately, was the first of a few casualties lost to the stress of new parenthood. The T. occidentalis I've seen for sale as landscape material are generally cultivars of the species and will often times be grafted. They are all super cold hardy and do well, I think, in bonsai culture. If you can find one with some character and hopefully ungrafted, I'd give it a go.
 

Nybonsai12

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Thanks for the info dave. Unfortunately I have yet to see any in big box stores with good bonsai characteristics, they are all the same mass produced, straight, taperless trunk having nonsense. But if I can find one with a decent single trunk for a few bucks I may try to beat some character into one of them for fun.
 

crust

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Nursery WC are usually not grafted and are grown from cuttings. Rarely have I seen decent WC developed from nursery stock--probably because WC don't develop good bonsai features grown as nursery stock--plus as species they kind of suck, at least compared the the cornucopia of comparable stuff you can get in nursery pots. WC are collected from the wild for the dead wood, the age, the fine and complex wood details--these characteristics don't come in nursery pots. The foliage is notoriously coarse so often wee trees a more difficult to make look fine. If I was going for a captive WC I'd go for one with special foliage. I do have a big old Thuya occidentalis congesta (very cool foliage) which may prove to be something someday--or maybe as a mother plant for grafting--who knows.
 

Dav4

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Nursery WC are usually not grafted and are grown from cuttings. Rarely have I seen decent WC developed from nursery stock--probably because WC don't develop good bonsai features grown as nursery stock--plus as species they kind of suck, at least compared the the cornucopia of comparable stuff you can get in nursery pots. WC are collected from the wild for the dead wood, the age, the fine and complex wood details--these characteristics don't come in nursery pots. The foliage is notoriously coarse so often wee trees a more difficult to make look fine. If I was going for a captive WC I'd go for one with special foliage. I do have a big old Thuya occidentalis congesta (very cool foliage) which may prove to be something someday--or maybe as a mother plant for grafting--who knows.
I believe you're right about that. I was confusing Eastern white cedar, T. occidentalis, with Chamaecyparis thyoides, the Atlantic white cedar...my bad.
 

Alain

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I don't really know what to do with this tree but I sure hope I will because I have one I got from air-layering my neighbor hedge :)

For the moment what I could tell you:
- they could develop pretty nice 'age looking' thin trunks,
- they back bud a little (some little buds are pointing out down the branches of mine),
- they are very flexible although I don't know if they hold the bend once the wires are gone (for the moment I just very loosely wired mine in order to make it straight as it was bended like a question mark over the fence of my yard);
- they seem to accept very easily deadwood works, I assume that by the fact that a bunh of branches of my neighbor hedge have lost a good part of their bark rubbing on the fence and don't seem to matter at all;

For the moment the main question I'm asking myself is: how will I get those planar leaves to become nice dense pads? Now that's a pickle:confused:
cedarleaf.jpg
 

Paradox

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I've seen some nice examples of this species from older collected trees. I don't know much about them.

I've looked at those too NY, and so far I see nothing worth playing with yet. I did buy a small one this year and repotted it to see how it will grow for fun and giggles.

I also have a 70 year old collected yamdori that I got from a workshop at the ABS symposium. It scares the crap out of me right now because I don't want to kill it. So far so good though, just been watering and feeding it.

I think they definitely are one of the more challenging species to deal with for bonsai.
 

fourteener

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The one variety of Thuja I would buy off of the shelf at a store is the DeGroot Spire variety. It is a dwarf variety of Thuja. Nurseries sell them as the type of tree you put on either side of a walkway. A Spire that grows tall but stays narrow. It's the dwarf foliage that makes it great for bonsai.

2015-05-22 08.32.59.jpg

Frond the size of a fingernail instead of the size of my palm. This is a picture from the spring on a tree with zero bonsai training as of yet. Just showing it so you can see the foliage size.
 

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Alain

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Btw: since I answered to your post I went back to see my Thuja air-layering and worked on it.
So here are 3 pictures: the branch I decided to air-layer, the roots development after may be 1 month in a pot after collecting the air-layer, the new set-up of the branch in it's training pot.
So new info on the thuja from my experience:
- they really root easily;
- they are more than flexible, hence the looping I tried on the lower branch,

The next piece of info I'll gather from this project: are they bulletproof? And they seem to be as I worked on this branch close to 2 weeks ago and it seems that it survive pretty well the experiment.

69230-cf20255d8698ae38df5f2aba1d3fda95.jpg 69231-4047a8aaf86a81da3878abe81d92974a.jpg 69232-2f075f8f65f526ca5a80dbf29875820d.jpg
 

jk_lewis

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I gave some links on treatment of Thuja sp. in another very recent thread (dealing with "Hinoki" somethingorother). They'd give better info, but snip/pinch about where marked:
 

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Nwaite

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Any up dates to this post and the trees in it?
 
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