Rooting Whole Japanese Maple Branches

[Veebs]

After reading @Roadrunner's post in the Aeroponic Propagation of JMs thread where he shared Mark Moreland's approach to create shohin trees by rooting whole sections of trees, I decided to try my hand. I didn't have all the right pieces available so I made do with what I had and seem to have been successful. I tried it on the old apex of a Japanese Maple that I had to cut off anyways to make room for a new leader and next year, will likely try it on nicer material.

Step 1 was preparing the bottle, cutting it in half and creating the holes to let the water in the reservoir below keep the soil most. The top was inverted, filled with regular bonsai soil(Kaizen mix) and inserted into the bottom of the bottle after that had been filled with water.
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I then cut off the top of the JM, trimmed it back but still left a number of leaves.

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Then, inserted the JM section into the soil and placed the whole contraption into a clear plastic, zip-loc bag.

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The bag was sealed and left in a shady part of the garden with a check a few weeks in that showed no roots but healthy leaves. I put it back and left it there and just today, exactly two months after the start of the experiment, I noticed a root made its way all the way down to the holes over the water!

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My plan is to leave it for now and towards the end of August start to expose it progressively to more air/less humidity, before potting it up in September. @RoadManDenDron how have you handled the transition to a pot?

Next year I will probably try the approach in a propagator dome instead of the bag and also try applying rooting hormone to the stem before putting it in the soil.

No rooting hormone at the start?

 

[Veebs]

What do you think is the crux of this method? The water below that keeps the soil moist?

I wonder if you could take two shallow storage boxes, where they can kind of nest inside each other, and put water in the bottom one and then drill holes in the top one and fill it with soil and then have a whole tray of branches that you place in there. Instead of one at a time.

 

[WNC Bonsai]

Here’s a link to a more complete description by the originator of the method Mark Moreland. I gotta try it this year!

Mark Moreland Visit 03/09/24

Hello! We were very lucky to have a visit from Mark and Mingchen Moreland of UK Bonsai Association (UKBA) for a fascinating talk on propagation. When they aren’t busy organising and hosting e…

leicsbonsaiclub.wordpress.com

 

[RoadManDenDron]

What do you think is the crux of this method? The water below that keeps the soil moist?

Yes that's it, the humidity is the key, you can try the boxes, in fact from the article it looks like mark has tried boxes, the whole thing needs to sit in some kind of propagator tho

Many in the UK now keep their shohin and mame trees in bottles when they are not in show pots

@WNC Bonsai Thank you! That link is just what I was looking for!

 

[WNC Bonsai]

I found it interesting that in several of the photos in the article there were pine tree cuttings! I wonder how other conifers would work, such as Blue Atlas Cedar, which are notoriously impossible to root?

 

[pandacular]

I found it interesting that in several of the photos in the article there were pine tree cuttings! I wonder how other conifers would work, such as Blue Atlas Cedar, which are notoriously impossible to root?

My reading of the article was that pines weren’t taken as cuttings but just planted in those containers for development.

 

[WNC Bonsai]

My reading of the article was that pines weren’t taken as cuttings but just planted in those containers for development.

Ahh, missed that, too bad.

 

[Notsureaboutplantnames]

I am about to try this and I am looking for clarification on the setup.

In the link to the Mark M visit the inverted top does not sit in the water, just providing humidity, while @eplov90 has the top in the water.

I guess I will have to try them both.

 

[jeef16]

definitely going to be trying it out this year!!

 

[eplov90]

To be clear, in my example, the inverted bottle filled with soil did not have direct contact with the water, it was just above it.

 

[RoadManDenDron]

You need a little space between the top and the water or it stops drainage

You need to keep an eye as you water to keep it below the (upside down) lid

 

[Notsureaboutplantnames]

Thank you both for the responses

 

[MalsRFun in TN]

Saved a lot of bottles to try this in June on my Japanese maples and crab apples.

 

[MrBonsai19]

Thank you for sharing this !!! It looks like such a powerful propogation method !!! The question is not whether I will be trying it but how many plastic water bottles my wife will tolerate in the back yard before complaining

 

[Desert O'Piñon]

how many plastic water bottles my wife will tolerate in the back yard before complaining

If I wrote a story about my bonsai journey...
I wonder what desert species might respond favorably to this method. Bigtooth maple, maybe?

 

[19Mateo83]

I’m trying this method on a cutting of “peve minaret” bald cypress. This will be the third year I’ve tried cuttings of this cultivar. So far this method looks to be working nicely.

 

[eplov90]

This year I decided to try to achieve the same result but with an approach that doesn’t actually require any bottles.

What I did is buy two plastic, transparent boxes and drilled small holes all over the bottom of one, then took some thick tape and made an elevated band around 15 cm up from the bottom of the drilled box so when it fitting it into the untouched one, I’d have more empty space below and a seal between them.

With that done i filled various pots and a pondbaskets with substrate and then stuck in cuttings of various sizes, including a fairly large trident piece from a trunk chop. I arranged those pots in the top box sprayed it down with water and closed the top.


All the water drains below to the bottom box, keeping a very humid but not wet environment above.

This trident chunk below was put into the pond basket in the box on May 29th and you can see decent results in less than a month!




Early results seem positive but let’s see how the rest of the material in there does since I can’t see in the pots. Currently it contains AP Beni Chidori, AP Arakawa, AP Koto Hime, Trident Maple.

 

[leatherback]

I keep flipping through this thread and I really do not understand why the bottle tops are upside down in another bottle. I do not really see how this is different from a pot with open substrate in a plastic baggie, or using a propagator with a little excess water to keep humidity high.

What key element am I missing here?

 

[eplov90]

@leatherback I think the inverted bottle part is not necessary.

Ultimately I think it's very similar to most cutting methods with the addition of a sealed drip reservoir below that keeps the the soil at a great moisture level for roots to develop.

My conclusion is that the inverted bottles are a cheap, easy way to set up the above dynamic.

 

[RoadManDenDron]

What key element am I missing here?

The idea is a tight seal between the two bottles, and drainage holes in the top bottle

Meaning for water to escape the bottom bottle it goes back into the rootzone and maintains high humidity in the soil

Even after the top propagator is removed many people in the UK are now keeping not just cuttings but also their small trees in the double bottle contraption and then slip potting them for shows, before putting them straight back into the bottle contraption