Horticultural VS Aesthetic Cuts.

[sorce]

I'd like to make this a part of our everyday bonsai vocabulary, the difference between an Aesthetic cut, and a Horticultural one.

Stumbled across this while pondering the following for @CrisisM0de in regards to his Amur Clump.

I hope to provoke an in depth conversation, with pictures, about how and when to make cuts.

Many of you know Smoke gave us this idea of a "safety cut". Which I love because it encompasses both patience, and learning, with material in your yard. That is an excellent path to bonsai, it is, bonsai.

The Safety cut is an example of a Horticultural cut.

An Aesthetic cut will be one which defines the silhouette of a tree. Such as these final angled cuts.

Everything has its place, but everywhere possible, I believe this is the best path to most surely creating aesthetically pleasing taper transitions. It begins with understanding the difference between these cuts.

This is applicable to a branch as well as a trunk.

Rather than "blind chopping", or chopping back to just buds, or making a perpendicular cut as we are usually instructed (which is like a safety cut with a short fuse), I believe we should make safety cuts to promote branching, which are safer to cut back to. Safer and more aesthetically pleasing.

This is the result of what I will further refer to as wrong, though everything has its place.



With a perpendicular cut to a bud, we light the short fuse to splitting (cracking rotting etc) beyond what we wish to be our final aesthetically pleasing silhouette line.

By the time cut 2, our Aesthetic Cut is made, the following illustrates why we have Reverse Taper.



With the stub left there, the healing tissue has nowhere to move inward, so it bulges outward. Certain species compartmentalize differently, this must be observed and considered.

To prevent that, this technique can be utilized.



Above we make a safety cut, a Horticultural cut. Allowing our bud to become a branch of size enough to properly heal the wound. We then make one proper Aesthetic Cut there.

For a wound to heal at all, there simply must be enough mass above to continue sap flow around the wound, not just from the front end.


Every tree will certainly react a bit different, this should be observed, on safety cuts . You will find the balance of how large a branch needs to be to successfully heal it. This can range from nothing at all, just a blind cut, to a branch near as thick as the previous segment.

Cutting a trunk back to get it in a vehicle is a Horticultural Cut.

Hedge Pruning is Horticultural.
The Winter detailing is Aesthetic.

Removing a layer is a Horticultural cut.
Removing the stub off the bottom is Aesthetic.

Important Community First note.
We all practice so vastly different, some of us may never use one or the other of these cuts, yet we are all still practicing bonsai.

Resorce.

Sorce

 

[Eckhoffw]

I'd like to make this a part of our everyday bonsai vocabulary, the difference between an Aesthetic cut, and a Horticultural one.

Stumbled across this while pondering the following for @CrisisM0de in regards to his Amur Clump.

I hope to provoke an in depth conversation, with pictures, about how and when to make cuts.

Many of you know Smoke gave us this idea of a "safety cut". Which I love because it encompasses both patience, and learning, with material in your yard. That is an excellent path to bonsai, it is, bonsai.

The Safety cut is an example of a Horticultural cut.

An Aesthetic cut will be one which defines the silhouette of a tree. Such as these final angled cuts.

Everything has its place, but everywhere possible, I believe this is the best path to most surely creating aesthetically pleasing taper transitions. It begins with understanding the difference between these cuts.

This is applicable to a branch as well as a trunk.

Rather than "blind chopping", or chopping back to just buds, or making a perpendicular cut as we are usually instructed (which is like a safety cut with a short fuse), I believe we should make safety cuts to promote branching, which are safer to cut back to. Safer and more aesthetically pleasing.

This is the result of what I will further refer to as wrong, though everything has its place.

View attachment 336164

With a perpendicular cut to a bud, we light the short fuse to splitting (cracking rotting etc) beyond what we wish to be our final aesthetically pleasing silhouette line.

By the time cut 2, our Aesthetic Cut is made, the following illustrates why we have Reverse Taper.

View attachment 336161

With the stub left there, the healing tissue has nowhere to move inward, so it bulges outward. Certain species compartmentalize differently, this must be observed and considered.

To prevent that, this technique can be utilized.

View attachment 336162

Above we make a safety cut, a Horticultural cut. Allowing our bud to become a branch of size enough to properly heal the wound. We then make one proper Aesthetic Cut there.

For a wound to heal at all, there simply must be enough mass above to continue sap flow around the wound, not just from the front end.
View attachment 336163

Every tree will certainly react a bit different, this should be observed, on safety cuts . You will find the balance of how large a branch needs to be to successfully heal it. This can range from nothing at all, just a blind cut, to a branch near as thick as the previous segment.

Cutting a trunk back to get it in a vehicle is a Horticultural Cut.

Hedge Pruning is Horticultural.
The Winter detailing is Aesthetic.

Removing a layer is a Horticultural cut.
Removing the stub off the bottom is Aesthetic.

Important Community First note.
We all practice so vastly different, some of us may never use one or the other of these cuts, yet we are all still practicing bonsai.

Resorce.

Sorce

Love this. Will be fallowing attentively.

 

[CrisisM0de]

Very informative post, thank you for sharing your knowledge! I have a tree in my parent's yard that my father has been inadvertently turning into bonsai for years, chopping it down every year as it tried to grow between their house and deck. Think it is an ash. I am curious if it would be a good example of what you are talking about here, another way to illustrate your points. However, I won't post pictures unless you are interested in seeing them, don't want to hijack your post.

I wonder if you or someone else may be interested in creating a post about growth patterns in general. Most people (or at least new people) may not have spent years staring at specific trees and understanding how they grow, or will grow. I suppose there are a lot of variables here and it would be a fairly long topic to cover, but probably valuable to many people. I, for one, have a hard time picturing what branches and trunks are likely to do over the course of time, how wounds heal, how leaders grow and change the shape, etc. I know the internet already has a million places to find this sort of information, but a one-stop post like this that breaks this done is not always easy to find.

 

[Gustavo Martins]

I think most cuts are done for an aesthetic reason but do way you do it is or should be based on horticultural best practices?

 

[sorce]

how wounds heal, how leaders grow and change the shape, etc

Post pictures!

I think it's important to post all the pertinent information. Sun, water, position, growth type, prune times, etc etc etc...at least to the best of our knowledge.

So for the pictures to be as powerful as possible, include as much information as possible.

I think most cuts are done for an aesthetic reason but do way you do it is or should be based on horticultural best practices?

Everything has a horticultural consideration, but not everything needs "aesthetic" attention to detail. Further, sometimes we are still growing what needs Aesthetic attention, so it doesn't even always exist.

Defining these 2 things as different, specifically as it relates to this art of "growing stuff out", should keep us from wasting time, but more importantly, wasting through efforts at the wrong times, which wastes development time then, exponentially.

For example.

We see many trees that are already cut down to a point where they must, regrow, reenergize, continue growing, then be determined healthy enough to be tossed into the ground in some corner. Every bit of learning opportunity is lost.
It grows too fast in the ground, and heals poorly.

On the other hand. Just using a "Safety Cut", consciously as a "Horticultural cut", to get something to fit in the yard, leaves you energy for backbudding, repotting, wound healing. Plenty of length to learn how to make the right "Aesthetic Cuts", when we know what those are.

Learn first, learn while the learning is available. @Grimmy would recommend not doing anything to a plant for a year.

This is the same thing I guess, as hollering, "don't do too much to fast".

But what is "don't do too much too fast"?

It has to "be" something more than just a statement, something has to fill that space, a purpose.

How is it better to leave more tree to begin with?
This seems hard to grasp.

"More tree grows more".

That's how we speed things up.

I'm trying to define what we are doing while waiting, because we are doing something, mostly thinking. We should be thinking about these rough "Horticultural cuts".

Sorce