This thread is good illustration of what’s wrong with chop & grow. First, it needs to be renamed for what it really is: chop & watch. That’s it, just chop & watch. Maybe, if it grows exactly how someone wants it to grow everything will be alright. That never, ever happens. It needs to be upgraded to chop & control growth with wire and watchful bud pruning. Just chop & watch branches jut out at funny angles from wherever a bud emerges leads to these kinds of non-plans 23 months later to do it all over again. There is no point in letting something grow on a tree in “training” without actually “training” it to go here or do this or that. If it’s a sacrifice branch it doesn’t have to be wired, but if it is not specifically a sacrifice branch it has no business on the tree except to be regulated by the person in-charge of designing the tree. The sooner the position of a bud or emerging stem is critiqued and either eliminated or assigned a potential goal position in space to be managed, the better.
Wood which is cut off is gone for eternity. A bud that the wood grew from is relatively a zero loss if removed as soon as it is evident that it will grow wrong or is in the wrong place. A bud grows in the direction it is pointed. New buds will be encouraged to grow elsewhere just by the removal of buds. There is good movement and there is bad movement. Just because there’s a kink in the branch or trunk because of a chop or removal of some part of the tree doesn’t mean that the resulting movement will be attractive or beneficial to a design. Two branches growing from the same height on the trunk is never good short term or long term. Look at the two largest branches on this tree. Does it take two years to see that they should never be at the same height and growing in the same direction? It doesn’t take a genius to spot ungainly or ugly movement. If one of them had been removed the day two side-by side bud were spotted there may have been a replacement bud emerge in a good place. That option was foregone by the watching part of grow & watch.
Failure to make a plan, -a stick figure drawing, no matter however crude or rudimentary, is like driving to a destination without knowing where it is and without a map or address. You can’t get there if you don’t have a good idea of where you want to go.
I don’t like to be the bad guy, but the teachers here have skipped right over this lesson and the student who came here for good advice just got a pat on the ass as the teachers left to skip school. Everyone gets an F for this last two years. Time to move on, rightly.
