Nursery plants to bonsai

[BobbyLane]

so, if you can do that with a collected tree then surely it can be done with a healthy nursery tree and from my experience yes you can and if i want to carve them up straight after i could do that too. and they dont skip a beat. why? well because most nursery trees have an abundance of fibrous roots. its the roots what power the tree and make it healthy. ive demonstrated this with hornbeams over and over, i dont even need to post an example. that would be three insults without the tree even batting an eyelid. was this tree 'pushed to its limits' erm well no because it powered on for the rest of the season!

from what ive learnt, the size of the root ball will heavily determine how hard you can push a tree, so lets not blow stuff out of context guys.
from my observations that also applies to collected material. most dont collect trees with near enough root and often trees teeter on the edge for months, i see that a lot on here.

 

[leatherback]

@leatherback i see it the world over, when folks collect they usually reduce the top with a saw and loppers then dig the tree up. whether they carve it straight after doesnt matter much, the point i was making is that is already two insults. top and bottom. its a normal collecting procedure right.

And then they leave the tree alone for 2 years.

 

[BobbyLane]

And then they leave the tree alone for 2 years.

thats a good recommendation for some species. some can be worked at the end of that season depending on how they recovered. i often see HH styling collected trees maybe a year after.

 

[leatherback]

thats a good recommendation for some species. some can be worked at the end of that season depending on how they recovered. i often see HH styling collected trees maybe a year after.

point being:

it comes down to: Learning how much one can do to a specific tree species/history/health/care.

 

[BobbyLane]

point being:

Trial and error, sure. call it whatever you want.

 

[Paradox]

agreed.

In the end, I think it comes down to: earning how much one can do to a specific tree species/history/health/care.

I take both approaches. With species I know well, I usually take more risks than with species I have not kept succesfully for multiple years.

So once you had already LEARNED something about a tree or species you felt more comfortable doing a bit more.
I agree with that and I have done the same. I don't take a tree new to me and do 3 years worth of work in one year because I would actually like to give the tree the best chance to survive if possible. Every tree is different, even trees of the same species. I try to learn that tree first, see how it responds rather than assume anything. I learn more from seeing how a tree responds to one thing at a time rather than doing many things at once.

i think after youve worked on a few nursery trees you know how far you can push a tree. thats not to say you strive to push a tree to its limits at every opportunity. you should have learnt your lessons earlier on. good to know @Paradox has had a few die on him, i beginning to think he was superman or something. lmao

Just working on trees at all, even one thing at a time will teach you something.
My point is that you dont need to push a tree to its limits to learn something.

Everyone that has done anything in bonsai has had trees die but it doesn't mean we should purposely push trees just to see what will or wont kill them.
That lesson is learned along the way regardless. I learn more from trees that live than the ones that died.

Lastly, I am not a "him"

 

[Leo in N E Illinois]

The one thing you should not do is take a slender cutting, and plunk it immediately into a bonsai pot. And then expect the trunk to thicken up. This pomegranate below had been in my care some 38 years at the time of the photograph. It was a tree that spent its entire life in as small a bonsai pot as I could keep it happy in. It started out as a simple 5 leaf cutting, maybe 1 mm in diameter (more slender than the graphite in a pencil). This little cutting spent its entire 38 years in a bonsai pot. At the time of its demise it was about 12 inches tall and at most one inch in diameter. I made EVERY bonsai mistake possible on this tree.

Now a pomegranate, given a few years in the ground, or a larger 5 or 15 gallon grow out container could easily have reached 4 to 6 inches in diameter in less than 10 years. But because I never allowed its root to run in a rich soil in a larger container, the diameter of the trunk never increased in size.

It was the tree that inspired me to finally quit thinking I could teach myself and to go take a few classes in bonsai. When the tree was 25 years old, I looked at it, marvelled that it still looked like a shrub, not a bonsai, and went and joined the Milwaukee Bonsai Society, which led to classes with Ted Matson and later Peter Tea.

The pomegranate improved significantly in its last 7 years, then I forgot to bring it in one autumn, as it was not "high on my radar", a sudden autumn freeze of +15 F proved to be too cold for the pomegranate, and I lost it.

Point is, when you put a tree in a bonsai pot (confine the roots to a small container) the rate of increase in the trunk diameter will slow to a crawl. In the case of this pomegranate, 1 inch of diameter increase per 38 years. About 0.25 inch per decade.

So straight to a bonsai pot is only good if the diameter of the trunk is where you already want it to be.

 

[gstyle]

I remember that thread you linked, did the Rhodi bud any

The Impeditum is in full flower at the moment and the Arctic Tern is just about to open its buds and flower.

The Azalea is still as you can see it in the original thread. Could be dead, not sure how to tell?

..it must be species specific, not in general.

Yes my question was more general, but I now understand that to answer it fully it should be more species specific.

You just can't be non specific and expect a specific answer to your thread.

I get it, but as a newbie I didnt realise the question I was asking needed to be more specific