SU2, I am happy the photo encouraged you!
Me too ;D Thanks again, it's always such a cool phenomena to me when someone like
@DirkvanDreven makes a thread like this, then you reply in it with your pic, and then I'm unable to stop myself from going-forth with my own!!
Like all of my older bonsai, this one survived decades of my ignorance. The tree started out in the early 90s as a monstrously overgrown house plant. It was 6' tall and in a ~5 gallon pot. When it went outside for the summer, it would shoot up another 2', and I would chop it back to 6' or 7' to get it back in the house. It took a scaffold of stakes and ties to keep it more or less vertical.
Gotta love it
Out of curiosity, how long have you been practicing seriously? Do you happen to have a website or albums publicly available?
Then somewhere I saw a photo of a beautiful dwarf schefflera bonsai (remember this was before internet images, and almost before any internet at all) and that became my goal.
It's amazing how much the web changed things like this!!
But I really had no idea how to go about it. It took me 20 years to accomplish what I could now do in 5. I was always afraid to cut it back enough--you've already gotten over that! The entire tree was trained by clip-and-grow, which should really be called grow-and-clip because the growth must happen first. I tried to listen to the tree and let that guide me, but this can be frustrating since trees speak so slowly.
ROFL yeah I could probably do in 4mo now what'd take 1yr when I started it's nuts how quick a learning-curve bonsai/horticulture really is, once that quick&easy hump (heh) has been surmounted & the horticulture is 2nd-nature, it becomes all about the artistry & a million times more satisfying/rewarding!!
(love the comment re Grow-&-Clip, am going to do my best to start phrasing it that way!! I'd initially shunned that approach, thinking *everything* I did would simply be long grow-outs followed by hard-prunes, however with how ramified bougainvilleas - my prime species - are by nature, I've found that a grow-&-cut approach used **
alongside** my regular approach(es) is by far the best!!)
The first big growth of aerial roots happened by accident during an unusually wet spring and summer in hwich our usually hot and dry weather was more like your warm and humid climate. By that time you could research such things on the internet, and I learned about drinking straws and little tubes made of aluminum foil and filled with sphagnum.
Another great example of forums/the netz being so invaluable, hell I'd heard of the straw trick and was planning to utilize it once I had a reason to (aerials are more of a nuisance than a goal in my climate!) but WOW the manipulability of foil, its inherent light-blocking properties, and then stuffing it with soft-but-draining, acidic & hormone-boosting sphagnum?! That would let me grow whatever aerials I wanted, damn thank you so much I'd never heard that one in fact I'm going outside RIGHT NOW to setup my first schefflera aerial (for whatever reason, my scheff's haven't spurted their own aerials like my ficus b's & m's do)
This species never really develops thick trunks, even the ones growing at my sister's house on the Atlantic coast of Florida. In composition, the aerial roots take the place of the visual mass of a thick trunk. This is why mine needs more aerial roots to balance the big canopy.
I guess 'thick' is all relative though, I mean I'm definitely in the category of "needs thick trunks" lol but so long as I'm confident-enough that I'll be able to develop a canopy that's "the right size" / fits the trunk, I'm happy!
Am very uncertain what you mean about aerials & trunking though, I've always seen them as very distinct and am unsure if you mean that you're going to be letting the aerials press-against the trunking as to make the trunk thicker, or that the mere presence of thick aerials will help? If the latter, I can't help but fear it'd have
the opposite effect, IE if you've got aerials all over they could make the trunk seem smaller by-comparison, I can see it being possible to have them in just such a way that their tangles + the trunk create the appearance of a thicker base but fear it'd just end up looking like a thinner trunk
relative-to the aerials (if they're not being pressed-against the trunking), I guess if they were kept thin & plentiful(numerous) they could create a good juxtaposition with the trunk to make it appear larger/thicker than it is but expect that'll be one hell of an artistic challenge for you!!
The canopy needs work too. Next spring, I plan to cut back some of the larger trunks on the edges a lot. The canopy needs differentiation into distinct masses of foliage instead of one blob. This will be a challenge because the leaves are big and these things don't ramify much. You don't often see scheffleras with multiple foliage pads. But I think with the right cuts I can get one major pad of foliage, and one (maybe two) smaller ones.
Yeah this thinking is why I immediately thought "group-planting" lol!! Well that plus none of my stock was quality on its own (nothing large, and large is almost requisite for me to consider something quality..) so I immediately thought "this is the IDEAL specie for planting in my custom-carved scoria/lava-rock containers/slabs", not only will the contrasting colors make one helluva visual-impact but it's actually a pretty "appropriate" use of materials (ie scoria from volcanoes used on a species from hawaii!), I'll readily&confidently admit that I've got little care/concern for such things, I know that "purists" would poo-poo that but I don't really care as I'm trying to design specimen that **I** love, not trying to sell them to mass audiences lol ;D
As far as horticulture goes, mine have always been virtually bullet-proof. I don't know why yours are slow to grow--perhaps because they are a variegated cultivar?
AAAAAAand shit, there it is
Yup that's a great bet, am betting you're right there, didn't cross my mind because the variegated cultivar is the most-plentiful one around my parts (almost forget it's "the special/unnatural version"..), at any rate if its growth-rate-hindrance from being variegated is anything like bougainvilleas' reduced rate on the variegated cultivars then I'm in trouble here lol, I've got some variegated bougies that are over a year old and hardly show any growth (and they're in way oversized containers, hyper-fertilized most of the time, and the variegated one just sits there growing at like 5% the rate of all my other bougies.....gah I hope it's not as-severe a hindrance on schefflera's!!
Thanks again for the inspirational pic of what a great bonsai a scheffy can become, and for the thorough reply it was very helpful
(can't get the theme of internet-knowledge outta my head now....just 15-20yrs ago, if you wanted to learn bonsai you really had no good options besides finding someone to hold your hand personally, usually by going to apprentice in japan, now I see that type of thing as ineffective IE I expect someone would learn more in that time-period by simply being strict with a self-taught education, it's not just bonsai either I mean I learned tree/rope climbing this year and got quite skilled if I do say so myself and it was entirely from youtube & forums as an adjunct to my own practice in my large Live Oak in my yard ;D Thank the gods for the interwebz ;-D )