Mirai Satsuki Video (Free)

SgtPilko

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I am sure lots of people caught it already, but Mirai posted a decent length stream on Satsuki design a couple of weeks back, worth a look. Centred around making established trees look less "formulaic" in design which I think is a useful theme.

 

Glaucus

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Good video, obviously. Despite Ryan's very careful artistic vision, I think the essential takeaway from this video is that one has to reduce the number of shoots. We tend to prune azaleas into our foliage pads. Azalea responds with many new buds, which all will give flowers and then all will give a multitude of new shots. If one does this type of pruning, one has to go in, probably late winter, and just remove many of them. Too much ramification can weaken the branch shelves of an azalea bonsai, leading to weak growth, shaded branches, and possibly weak branches dying.

Note, many of the azaleas we work on lack these developed branch shelves. So in that case, this point is less important. One has to balance trying to generate finer ramification for good branch shelves/foliage pads against spreading out the vigor of the tree over too many apical shoots (and their flower buds).

And reducing the number of shoots then also helps one make artistic decisions.

It is my vision however that this type of pruning is ideally done just before the tree wakes up.
 

Deep Sea Diver

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Was very disappointed. It was absolutely not the Ryan we all know and love …at all.

Some notes from today.

Agree with a proper periodic strong cut back in spring… giving the entire growing season to recover…. not in late spring… and not done the way shown.

Overall B- for general, but limited, azalea content. Said didn’t have time to tell the nuances, but could’ve, …trading off getting the tree into a ‘conifer styling’ to something the tree could recover from in the remaining growing time this year.

Overall technique D- It wasn’t after flowering pruning, it was a hard late winter early spring cut back.

..and then there very serious issues with pruning technique, especially when cutting hard back to bare wood repeatedly and finishing by hacking the apex hard…
…followed by toying with the idea of just taking the top of the apex off entirely!

Frustrating.

So F on pruning timing and summer technique… especially on apex pruning.

Likely better to have put the scissors down much earlier instead of pushing to make the tree look like a Christmas tree and impressing the crowd.

To give a bit of credit, Ryan admitted the tree had gone out of whack over the years. Getting leggy, no internal growth. (He also admitted he didn’t know beans about azaleas when introducing Randy Knight the other day) ….Yet what was done in two hours should have been done some each year in the two years past.

In fact Ryan admitted this, then proceeded to hack with abandon, instead of using the tree as an object lesson and showing folks the right way to style an azalea and that this was a three year project rather than a “marine high and tight” job. Then trying to justify this by saying it has to be done…

What I don’t get was Ryan had the tree last year to repot and didn’t at least start pushing the tree back then, thus creating some interior growth to push back to. That’s standard practice.

Bewildering. It looks like Ryan won’t be working on my big azalea in the near future.

Very regretfully written,
DSD sends
 

Deep Sea Diver

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… please substitute ‘Joe Harris’s Azalea lecture’ vs Randy Knight in my comments above.

cheers
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Berra

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Was very disappointed. It was absolutely not the Ryan we all know and love …at all.

Some notes from today.

Agree with a proper periodic strong cut back in spring… giving the entire growing season to recover…. not in late spring… and not done the way shown.

Overall B- for general, but limited, azalea content. Said didn’t have time to tell the nuances, but could’ve, …trading off getting the tree into a ‘conifer styling’ to something the tree could recover from in the remaining growing time this year.

Overall technique D- It wasn’t after flowering pruning, it was a hard late winter early spring cut back.

..and then there very serious issues with pruning technique, especially when cutting hard back to bare wood repeatedly and finishing by hacking the apex hard…
…followed by toying with the idea of just taking the top of the apex off entirely!

Frustrating.

So F on pruning timing and summer technique… especially on apex pruning.

Likely better to have put the scissors down much earlier instead of pushing to make the tree look like a Christmas tree and impressing the crowd.

To give a bit of credit, Ryan admitted the tree had gone out of whack over the years. Getting leggy, no internal growth. (He also admitted he didn’t know beans about azaleas when introducing Randy Knight the other day) ….Yet what was done in two hours should have been done some each year in the two years past.

In fact Ryan admitted this, then proceeded to hack with abandon, instead of using the tree as an object lesson and showing folks the right way to style an azalea and that this was a three year project rather than a “marine high and tight” job. Then trying to justify this by saying it has to be done…

What I don’t get was Ryan had the tree last year to repot and didn’t at least start pushing the tree back then, thus creating some interior growth to push back to. That’s standard practice.

Bewildering. It looks like Ryan won’t be working on my big azalea in the near future.

Very regretfully written,
DSD sends
So, what is the proper timing for a hard cutback? Early spring or post flowering?
 

Glaucus

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I don't think this video is that bad. I think it is better than videos by either Peter Warren or Peter Chan.
Or the other random videos of people that prune off all new growth after flowering.
He should have done it 3 weeks earlier, though.

I think it is key to establish why you are pruning a bonsai, what you want to do, and how you want the tree to respond.
Additionally, if you do high quality content, I believe you should show the progression. Just a snapshot of pruning is not really enough.
Often, you make a tree look worse because when it will grow it will eventually look better.
So a lot of these single snapshot videos end up trying to make the tree look as good as possible at the end of the video.
If you ask people for 20 dollars a month, I believe you could show this.
There was a free Japanese channel on satsuki that did exactly this for a few trees.

Since Ryan's goal was to reestablish the foliage pads and apply some wire to them to set them better in position, I think this is the type of pruning one should do.
The bare tips on the strong branches is probably the right decision to make, because by cutting back in old wood, you get new buds all over.
And this sets up the tips of the foliage pads to be a bit more denser and with shorter internodes than if you just let it grow outward and to some futame futaba type of pruning (2 shoots 2 leaves).
Cutting all tips to be bare is actually the correct technique if you want to develop more refinement on a foliage pads that is structurally finished. That is the way to get it to be really compact so no light passes through. But I believe you can't do this every year. That would be the motobadome technique.

I often see pictures of weakened satsuki. And I always wonder if people just prune off all the new growth post-flowering. Because so many videos and people say you should do this.
So I was actually happy to see Ryan not do this, despite his lack of satsuki knowledge. I suspect he might still have done this though, if this was a post-flowering video.
 

Colorado

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Was very disappointed. It was absolutely not the Ryan we all know and love …at all.

Some notes from today.

Agree with a proper periodic strong cut back in spring… giving the entire growing season to recover…. not in late spring… and not done the way shown.

Overall B- for general, but limited, azalea content. Said didn’t have time to tell the nuances, but could’ve, …trading off getting the tree into a ‘conifer styling’ to something the tree could recover from in the remaining growing time this year.

Overall technique D- It wasn’t after flowering pruning, it was a hard late winter early spring cut back.

..and then there very serious issues with pruning technique, especially when cutting hard back to bare wood repeatedly and finishing by hacking the apex hard…
…followed by toying with the idea of just taking the top of the apex off entirely!

Frustrating.

So F on pruning timing and summer technique… especially on apex pruning.

Likely better to have put the scissors down much earlier instead of pushing to make the tree look like a Christmas tree and impressing the crowd.

To give a bit of credit, Ryan admitted the tree had gone out of whack over the years. Getting leggy, no internal growth. (He also admitted he didn’t know beans about azaleas when introducing Randy Knight the other day) ….Yet what was done in two hours should have been done some each year in the two years past.

In fact Ryan admitted this, then proceeded to hack with abandon, instead of using the tree as an object lesson and showing folks the right way to style an azalea and that this was a three year project rather than a “marine high and tight” job. Then trying to justify this by saying it has to be done…

What I
Was very disappointed. It was absolutely not the Ryan we all know and love …at all.

Some notes from today.

Agree with a proper periodic strong cut back in spring… giving the entire growing season to recover…. not in late spring… and not done the way shown.

Overall B- for general, but limited, azalea content. Said didn’t have time to tell the nuances, but could’ve, …trading off getting the tree into a ‘conifer styling’ to something the tree could recover from in the remaining growing time this year.

Overall technique D- It wasn’t after flowering pruning, it was a hard late winter early spring cut back.

..and then there very serious issues with pruning technique, especially when cutting hard back to bare wood repeatedly and finishing by hacking the apex hard…
…followed by toying with the idea of just taking the top of the apex off entirely!

Frustrating.

So F on pruning timing and summer technique… especially on apex pruning.

Likely better to have put the scissors down much earlier instead of pushing to make the tree look like a Christmas tree and impressing the crowd.

To give a bit of credit, Ryan admitted the tree had gone out of whack over the years. Getting leggy, no internal growth. (He also admitted he didn’t know beans about azaleas when introducing Randy Knight the other day) ….Yet what was done in two hours should have been done some each year in the two years past.

In fact Ryan admitted this, then proceeded to hack with abandon, instead of using the tree as an object lesson and showing folks the right way to style an azalea and that this was a three year project rather than a “marine high and tight” job. Then trying to justify this by saying it has to be done…

What I don’t get was Ryan had the tree last year to repot and didn’t at least start pushing the tree back then, thus creating some interior growth to push back to. That’s standard practice.

Bewildering. It looks like Ryan won’t be working on my big azalea in the near future.

Very regretfully written,
DSD sends

Oh good grief.

Have you ever considered that perhaps Ryan knows a thing or two about bonsai, that may be different from how you personally do things?
 

Colorado

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Was very disappointed. It was absolutely not the Ryan we all know and love …at all.

Some notes from today.

Agree with a proper periodic strong cut back in spring… giving the entire growing season to recover…. not in late spring… and not done the way shown.

Overall B- for general, but limited, azalea content. Said didn’t have time to tell the nuances, but could’ve, …trading off getting the tree into a ‘conifer styling’ to something the tree could recover from in the remaining growing time this year.

Overall technique D- It wasn’t after flowering pruning, it was a hard late winter early spring cut back.

..and then there very serious issues with pruning technique, especially when cutting hard back to bare wood repeatedly and finishing by hacking the apex hard…
…followed by toying with the idea of just taking the top of the apex off entirely!

Frustrating.

So F on pruning timing and summer technique… especially on apex pruning.

Likely better to have put the scissors down much earlier instead of pushing to make the tree look like a Christmas tree and impressing the crowd.

To give a bit of credit, Ryan admitted the tree had gone out of whack over the years. Getting leggy, no internal growth. (He also admitted he didn’t know beans about azaleas when introducing Randy Knight the other day) ….Yet what was done in two hours should have been done some each year in the two years past.

In fact Ryan admitted this, then proceeded to hack with abandon, instead of using the tree as an object lesson and showing folks the right way to style an azalea and that this was a three year project rather than a “marine high and tight” job. Then trying to justify this by saying it has to be done…

What I don’t get was Ryan had the tree last year to repot and didn’t at least start pushing the tree back then, thus creating some interior growth to push back to. That’s standard practice.

Bewildering. It looks like Ryan won’t be working on my big azalea in the near future.

Very regretfully written,
DSD sends

Oh good grief.

Have you ever considered that perhaps Ryan knows a thing or two about bonsai, that may be different from how you personally do things?
 

Glaucus

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Ryan said he doesn't know azaleas very well.
 

Rivian

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Ryan said he doesn't know azaleas very well.
Could just be by his elevated standards.
Like you might say you dont know narrow petal azaleas very well, but really thats in comparison to your other satsuki knowledge, and you probably do know a lot about them.

I agree about adding in results at the end of the video, though it wouldnt work for his Q&A streams, but maybe an edit later
Timelapses would be fantastic, high value content also.
 

Deep Sea Diver

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Hmm…. Beg to differ. Knowing bonsai doesn’t give one a free ride when one doesn’t know a species at all and admits it.

I like Ryan’s work and didn’t like posting this review as I don’t like posting negative stuff…

The technique was out of bounds timing wise and on apex technique.

Ryan freely admits he doesn’t know azaleas. He demonstrated it here.

In fact, Ryan brought in Joe Harris, an azalea expert, as guest presenter on last Saturday’s pro live stream on azalea fundamentals that will be made publicly available soon.

In it Joe mentions leaving green at each cut site, even if it’s just a stub of green. Not done.

Dunno why Ryan did this, pushing the envelope, being flamboyant, craving style over technique, or lack of other trees to work on…. It’s a mystery to me. But Ryan is Ryan.

As you all know my opinion is moot, your trees your choice.

In the end everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, this is mine …and all my azaleas and I are going to stick by it.

Best
DSD sends
 

Deep Sea Diver

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So, what is the proper timing for a hard cutback? Early spring or post flowering?
A hard cut back on established azaleas in the pot is done early spring, depending on the weather, climate and equipment to protect the tree in.

There is also a less hard post flower cut back to green all around done to healthy trees to allow light in and spur interior growth. This was done last year to this tree, pictured today…. Just at the end of its bloom.

IMG_8983.jpeg

Post flower removal due soon….a week later post flowering cut backs will be done.

btw This was what the tree looked like when it was first bought.

IMG_4250.jpeg

Cheers
DSD sends
 
Last edited:

Glaucus

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Just so I understand what your criticism is better, and as I didn't see Joe Harris stream, you would have:

1) Done it 3 weeks earlier (I agree)
2) Less pruning on the apex (debatable)
3) Leaving green on every cut site (not done by Japanese either, though debatable and timing and goal related if one really should or not)

To me, if he had done this 3 weeks earlier and maybe not pruned some shoots bald, I think this would have been an excellent video.
But even with pruning the tips of some of the branches bald, he wasn't wrong and he explained his reasoning. They were all at the tips of strong branches and he predicted they would all bud back there.
He'd be right. But his reason for cutting them bald wasn't clear. It is a partial motobadome technique. It was the wrong motobadome in the sense that Ryan didn't leave the petiole. I think maybe that would be the major criticism and the point that Joe Harris would have made? Leaving the petiole gives more buds. Which is why you would be doing motobadome in the first place. It is like with pine decandling, but you take off the entire new candle completely, not leaving a stem from where it would backbud. in Both cases, you prune off the prime reeal estate area for the backbudding you hope for.

And I wouldn't be using motobadone when you are reestablishing the contours of the branch shelves. And which I wouldn't suggest and demonstrate in the only azalea bonsai video on the channel. Motobadome is an advanced technique that you should think careful about when using.
 
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