Hi Jason & fore.
Mountain hemlocks - beautiful trees, but lots of challenges. You know the trendency, Jason: long, bare main branches, long bare secondary branches, and long bare twiglets sticking out at sort of right angles with about 3-4 years of needles on the ends. On top of that, although they bend easily, they take forever to set, and can seem to have set, only to bend back (especially phototropically) to almost their previous position over many weeks. AND - the final straw - the wire can look fine forever, then one day you look closely at a section you didn't inspect for a couple of weeks and suddenly one section of the bark has hypertrophied amazingly, growing all over the wire, leaving hideous, unhealing, bulging scars that may take decades (I'm told) to become incorporated by the VERY slowly thickening branches. Fore, I don't know if this also applies to Western and Canadian hemlocks, but on these it is very capricious, and happens suddenly with no warning.
The coup de grace: They don't back bud. Ever, as far as I know.
I've had this tree in training for 5-6 years, and most of the work was done in the first several years. I wired and re-wired the branches to bend them back in, using the gnarliness to visually fore-shorten their appearance. The ones too hopelessly long I jinned. I wired every primary and secondary branch this way, and the first year or three I did it to ALL the little twiglets as well (except the ones I cleared out). I am STILL wiring - just guy wires at the moment, Photoshopped out in the photo
- the swooping left branches, which STILL have an enormous tendency to bend back up towards the light, but the wire is otherwise off the tree at this point.
I apply typical conifer trimming to create the foliar density: cutting each branchlet back, or at least pinching the bud, every year or two. The current fullness is due to benign neglect for the past year in this regard.
Overall, the trajectory, as you might expect, is less work over time. I've always these trees, so they are worth it, but this was one of the more straggly ones that I started with, and it taught me a lot, and is turning out to be well worth the effort.
For anyone interested in trying one of these, though, they simply will not live anywhere where the summer nights don't stay consistently at a certain degree of coolness: Pacific Northwest down just barely down to Portland seems to be the extent of their range in captivity. The rest of the country either too dry or too muggy in the summer.
