Nice,
Just a little advice for the next hinoki you tackle. You probably removed many little green shoots off the trunk, in favor of emphasizing the 6 or so branches you kept. I would have kept a few more of those short green shoots. The reason is, once a stem develops brown bark, in a Hinoki they seldom back bud. Your first two branches will never develop any green closer to the trunk than they currently have. In the future keep a short green shoot next to or in the vicinity of every major branch, this will be the spare that will eventually replace the older branch when it gets too leggy. As is your tree will have to get larger as foliage moves further away from the trunk with age. This is part of the reason most old hinoki bonsai are large bonsai. They must keep increasing in size. If you learn to graft you can keep them dwarf long term, but Hinoki look nice with very little work for quite a long time.
Leo do you have any specific grafting advice . Or technique. I don’t have Hinoki yet . And will admit my interest is in Thuja . Thinking if your going to graft to a wild collected tree . In the nursery trade there all multiple small foliage cultivars . Available . After all the coarse natural growth of the species being the largest negative for bonsai .Hinoki are a "cult" unto themselves, almost nothing else is like them. Hinoki and Thuja have the same growth pattern, but they are somewhat unique among conifers.
Leo do you have any specific grafting advice . Or technique. I don’t have Hinoki yet . And will admit my interest is in Thuja . Thinking if your going to graft to a wild collected tree . In the nursery trade there all multiple small foliage cultivars . Available . After all the coarse natural growth of the species being the largest negative for bonsai .
So I had a long post reply that got deleted so to make a long story short I love gemstone hinoki and I love dorf thuja primo cultivafor and here a couple of picsGot bored during a Zoom meeting, so I grabbed this Hinoki to play with. I picked it up for $10 at a local nursery. No experience with these, so I probably murdered it - but it was fun for $10.
Before
View attachment 450863
After
View attachment 450864
Yeah, I'm sure their larger plants are safer.Now we know not to chop the root balls in half on iseli nursery cypresses. As consistent aa their trees are above the ground I would expect them to be the same under the soil also.
Yup I did the same thing to one that is on the outs....i took maybe 1/3 -2/5 of the roots and its pretty much a gonner.. most of the trees I have I pretty much just Loosened this root ball and shoved them into a clay training pots I make myself. Just bought a two new ones, one of which looks very similar to the one you styled. I left most of the Foliage on because I plan on making a mixed forest planting the gemstones and the primo Thuja I'll include a picture.. they are getting somewhat harder to find now. I bought the last two on Etsy and my local nursery hasn't had any since last year. They tend to like the soil wet. I never let them dry out at all.I killed this one. Cut 1/3 off the bottom of the root ball this spring to repot - problem was the trunk was that deep. Despite the pot being full of roots, they were mostly coming from the bottom and filling upwards.
After untangling everything there wasn't much left that was actually attached. Tried to baby it, but it slowly declined.
/End thread
Thanks for the idea, I may just do that. I'll be sure to take some pictures of the process of making the mixed forest planting when I make or buy a pot for it. That's pretty much all I'm waiting for. I may put I little village in the background because the primo Thuja occidentalis look so much like little trees from 50 yards away it uncanny.@MMJNICE you should totally post a thread about your hinokis, I'd love to see more!