If it's a big carving job, all you need to protect are the edges - the exposed cambium.
Thanks that's good to know, I'd figured the softwood was the least important but was being more liberal in applying the glue/paste to the edges(cambium, which I suspect has already mostly-healed and isn't transpiring much at 3 days) and the heartwood, which still looked quite 'moist' relatively speaking of course.
Covering this stops bark tissue forming and slowing the growth of callus tissue. But only if you really want to.
Whoa, I'd thought it was to prevent moisture loss *while* waiting for callousing to be sufficient, not preventing it! Why would I want to prevent it? Ideally I'd have thick bark in these spots (this was a large yamadori, cut-back / trunk-chopped significantly, so after couple season's growth I carved the trunk to flow-into the new primary branches I'd grown, I hated having to get rid of good, old bark but that taper is necessary! I'd figure I'd want it to callous, and then form bark, as quickly as possible though, no? My thought was that this was an interim period, where I cut what's necessary from the trunk (this was a 1' wide trunk!) to make it conform to the new primaries, and
now I wouldn't be doing any further trunk stylings, just letting it grow-in to conform to what I'd carved.
You don't need to seal wood on bougainvillea as far as I know, even though it's a soft wood. You will need to preserve it eventually though. As for timing, 3 days is no big deal. After 3 weeks you might have to re-open the wound before you seal if you want continued callus production.
Hope this helps..
Never heard that re bougies, just that they're slow to heal...they seem to take any amount of abuse, I've done some pretty insane experiments with them and the ones I reallly didn't think would work still did! I've gotten most of the wounds sealed at this point, will be done tomorrow- I've gotta say I'm wayy confused by the last part of your quote there, you say that, at a future point, I may want to open it to seal for continued callous production- firstly, wouldn't the stuff on there now be the seal? It seems counterproductive to remove it, thus opening-up the wounds, just to put a different dressing on (you say 'seal', I'm presuming wood-hardener? Have heard mixed things about that on bougies, but whether I used that or not I thought I'd be waiting til the callouses healed and am surprised to hear a way of doing that would be to open it up at 3wks, if anything wouldn't it be shrewder to simply apply another layer of the sealant I'm using now (a diluted wood-glue product, it worked well on one of the only other times I used a protective layer, I was taking a 1' log of bougainvillea trunk (no shoots, no roots, just a 1' section of trunk from a mature specimen, I put ~4" under perlite with 8" exposed, put the diluted wood-glue on the top, and it made it!! Has 2 nodes now, each with 3 shoots at around 7"+, am hoping this isn't the type of specimen that's just not *nearly* stabilized enough to handle fall/winter :/