(Part 1)
When you have a project of this type in front of you, where do you begin? This type of trees, or a smaller one, size doesn’t matter.
(People say nebari, lower trunk, etc.)
Cleaning up the tree helps for sure. Allows us to see better. How would you guys define where is the front? To find a front, you look at the movement of the trunk first, before the nebari. Why? Because the nebari can be corrected later. Theoretically, by grafting, for example. Yes, you can look at the nebari and see if a side is clearly better than others and start from there, sure. But before the nebari and the angle of the tree, you have to look at the movement of the trunk. That cannot be changed. And as we’re all different, this guy here might like this side better, you might like another side, doesn’t matter. But you have to build the tree using this movement. It’s not a matter of branches. You can graft branches, grow them.
(a student says that he saw more movement from another side)
Yes, but then the top is going backwards, away from us. The top can be brought back, but it’s heavy work. But before doing anything major, you have this address the soil. Today, we’re mostly discussing, we’re not working the tree heavily. The way the tree is, we’re not going to do heavy pruning or bending. But in this heavy soil, if you cut too much, the tree is going to die. Because you cannot control watering, we say the tree is drowning. If you remove half the foliage, half the roots are going to die. In a free-draining mix, there’s no problem, you withhold watering a bit, the roots that die dry up, are eaten by the live ones, but if we cannot control watering, the dead roots are going to rot, it’s going to bring in diseases. And the tree then becomes sensitive to attacks. The mycorrhizae will die too. So to prepare the tree for heavy work, you change the soil to free-draining substrate to prepare the roots to survive the work. If it’s in a free-draining mix, you can cut the trunk halfway and it’s not going to die. A black pine is basically unkillable. Just like olives. If you kill it, it’s because you cut it down to a stump with no foliage.
When the Japanese repot their black pines (thunbergii), they cut the roots even more than on maples, they cut them down to two fingers (width-wise). And they do just fine. But keep in mind these trees have years and years of training in a pot. They are used to getting worked like this. But if you work a tree from the field in this manner, you’re going to kill it. But as your trees gain years in pots, you can do heavier and heavier work on them, and they’re going to do well. My first pines are from 1988, I can now repot them in July, in August (in southern France), they don’t notice. But the first repotting, don’t screw up. This is a tree grown in a field, you could say that in some ways, it is used to being cultivated. And if you start trees with cuttings, it’s even better. From the start, the tree is used to being in a pot. You can do almost whatver you want with a tree like this, it doesn’t know anything else. Just like a wild animal versus a domesticated one.
So with a pine like this, we need to work downstairs (roots) before working upstairs. Because today’s work on the top is light, it’s ok, we can do a light branch selection. But if we wanted to straighten the trunk, we’d need to use rebar, see if the trunk moves, if it doesn’t, drill a hole in it, put a rebar in it, all things that can be done quite easily…if the tree is ready for it. But now it’s not.
You repot in the spring, change the substrate, let it recuperate, and it’s possible that in one growing season it’s vigorous enough to do heavy work. This is field-grown tree, not one from the mountains. That’s why it’s important to know the story of each individual tree, and adapt your work consequently. If you take ten pines like this, all of different origins, you’re going to get 10 different reactions to the same work. If they come from the same nursery, same year, same mother tree, then yes, they’re going to react very similarly. But it’s not always the case. What works one year doesn’t necessarily work the next year.
(So on a tree like this, can you change the apex?) Yes, after you change the substrate. But it’s a big, big operation. (Can you start with another branch to build a new apex?) Wouldn’t be simpler to change the front? Nothing is forever. Imagine over the years, you select a front where the apex doesn’t require bending. Ten years later, or let’s say eight, when the tree is well settled, on the other possible front you were considering, where there was a defect, the tree will look different. And often, in those cases, you do a minor cut, and whole tree is suddenly tilted the other way (the way you want). Suzuki says that you cannot show a tree unless all four sides have been worked as a front. It’s simple, when you think about it. It needs to look beautiful on all sides.
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Part 2)
There are way too many branches. They must usually never grow at the same level. But we can start with the idea that we will let branches we don’t want on the tree only to keep the vigor of the tree up. We can work the top without working the lower branches. Some trees presented in famous exhibitions in Japan were shown with a sacrifice branch at the top. We’d never allow this here, we would say “so ugly”, but the Japanese prioritize the health of the tree. They prefer a living tree than a beautiful but dead tree. This is what Kimura says too, “better a pine with long needles that’s alive than a dead pine with small needles”. (chatter about needle length) On a black pine like this, you can reduce needles to two centimeters, shorter than on a sylvestrus. But that’s when the tree is established. At the stage the tree is in now, the longer the needles and candles the better. The trunk is going to get bigger. Do you know that pines in a pot can get an added 50% in trunk size over the years? When people tell you that in a pot, the trunk is frozen, it’s not going to get bigger, it’s not true. One of my pines, the prize-winning double trunk pine, when Laurent Breysse saw it after I worked on it for several years, he said it was obviously bigger. In the pot it’s in, there’s much less room on the side than there used to be. You look at the pictures from the early years and you look at it now, and the difference is obvious. It’s gained, I’m sure, 5 cm (2 inches) on the side. At the level of the nebari, not on the trunk above. That’s because the trees grow, simply. If you grow it strongly, it’s going to age and get bigger, even in a pot. And keep in mind that on trees with heavy bark, the more they grow, the more they produce bark. The trunk is working, it’s moving under there.
(asked if they’re remove branches or needles at this point) Well, some clean up work has been done already. We won’t need to remove much. We’re not going to remove the needles in order to trigger backbudding. We’re not a stage when we need backbudding. This is a grown-tree, so we have plenty of small branches to grow as main branches for the future.
(On backbudding) I hope you remember one thing. The tree always buds more profusely on younger portions than on older portions. Otherwise, new buds would always emerge from the trunk. Here is an example (turning to an olive with long shoots). Imagine there are no side branches on this shoot, and that it is at the top of the tree. If you want to slow down or stop growth for this branch, what do you do? Where do you cut? At the end, at the start of the branch? No. The answer is in the middle part of the branch. If we cut the end, it’s a strong branch so it’s going to explode again with very strong growth. If you cut close to the beginning of the branch, the bud (or the 2) that’s going to pop is going to be as strong as the branch, because they’ll receive all the energy directed to this branch. Even if it’s going to take some time for the tree to push this growth. The best location for the cut is in the middle of the branch. When you are in the growing season. If you cut in the middle, the tree will want to wake up all the buds latent buds below, on a long section of the branch, and they will each get less energy. Instead of fuelling two buds at the end of the tree is one or two at the base of the branch, the tree is fueling ten of them. Ten exits for energy.
Turning back to the pine, this tree will bud much more easily on this new part of the branch than on older wood. There was a guy back in the day – the guy was an expert on plant growth, so keep that in mind – he managed to have scots pines backbud on the trunk, between the bark plates. Grown pines, not trees from the wild, but still. But this pine here, it’s a grown tree, if you work it well, it could pop buds on the trunk. It could happen. You’d need to feed is extremely heavily, let the extremities grow wild, when it’s strong, you cut a little. There’s so much energy in this trunk, it’s a pipe, it needs to come out somewhere, and it could even come out as buds on the trunk.
So now, we can make our minds on the general styling of this tree, without even having to select a front. We can select some branches already. We need to keep the lower branch here. If we start with this one, it’s easy to select the rest. We can even keep a few branches growing at the same level. This way, the tree is selecting the strongest of the bunch. This also allows us to be wrong, if we keep a lot of branches on. If we think this branch is the prettiest, but one day the tree says no and abandons it, then it doesn’t matter, as long as there is a strong branch somewhere above or below. We need to have emergency exits, in case our plans change. Always leave more branches than too few. If we remove a lot now, we’re going to considerably slow down the tree. If we do it properly and go light, in the spring the tree is going to react very well and push strong growth, and you’ll be able to cut as much as you’re going to cut today. But if you do heavy pruning now, then you’ll need to wait not until next spring for the next step, but the spring after, and we lose almost a year and a half. When we prune now, the tree keeps working, it’s preparing for next spring, they’re active all through winter. The tree will compensate for the vigor lost by the pruned branches, it’s going to grow stronger on the branches you left.
But this soil is worrying, it’s why it’s the first thing you need to do in the spring. And depending on what you find in there, you adjust how hard you go with the roots. Some people say you hose everything… well let me tell you, in some cases it takes four repots to get all the soil out. You need to do it progressively. Especially since it’s a pine. Resine-producing-species in general.
(do we need to keep feeding in the winter?) No. Well, I let the balls of fertilizer from the fall on the substrate, but it doesn’t change anything. For organic fertilizers, it needs to be 18 degrees (65 F) in the pot for them to be active. Yes, there are liquid fertilizers, but there’s no point in the winter. But what we do now is to fertilize the trees heavily, because trees are preparing for next spring right now. When they grow in the spring, they don’t feed on this year’s fertilizer, they feed on their resources from last year. This is why, as a rule, we generally don’t do structural pruning in the fall. I used to do it, but I don’t anymore.
Part 3
You look at all those branches and you head is hurting, you’re wondering why ones to remove. What you do then is you start from the top. You define the desired height of the tree, and then going down you locate the branches you remove. Even better if the low branch is obvious, between the two, the branch selection should not be difficult. This here could a nice apex, but then you need to ask yourself, between the lower branch and the apex, do you have enough material to build a tree? You’re the one to decide. The part above your apex, you progressively weaken it, and then you cut it when you repot. Because the strength of the tree is up there. Since you’re hurting the roots anyways, you might as well remove a bit of foliage at the root to balance things out. The rest of the branches, those you do not want, you can remove now. You let say four shoots run at the very top, so the tree doesn’t stop growing, you remove everything else around those apical shoots, and you let the tree grow. The front is going to come later.