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?