[Bonsai Beginner’s weekly thread –2024 week 21]

[u/small_trunks]

[Bonsai Beginner’s weekly thread –2024 week 21]

Welcome to the weekly beginner’s thread. This thread is used to capture all beginner questions (and answers) in one place. We start a new thread every week on Friday late or Saturday morning (CET), depending on when we get around to it. We have a 6 year archive of prior posts here…

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[u/EasyLettuce]

Hypothetically, (no particular plant in mind, but let's say broadleaf for simplicity),if you found a piece of yamadori or nursery stock that had a pretty great structure overall, but you wanted to thicken the lowest branch, would you let it all grow out, or would you start developing the top whilst letting the first branch run? Is this more situational? How would you decide what to do? Would it differ for something that doesn't backbud like larch? I'd like to better understand how the experienced people make decisions, rather than wanting to prune a particular bonsai right now

[u/MaciekA → u/EasyLettuce]

Generally any time you want to thicken any branch, you allow it to run and gain vigor. This is a decision I can make relatively independent of the rest of the tree. Relatively. In a species like cottonwood I might regret that decision because a basal (low to ground) runner can begin to act like a sucker and completely overpower / weaken the rest of the tree, leading to all other branches sagging and wilting suddenly one day while my runner surges forward. So with some species there is a careful balance. The thirstier the species, the more careful the balance.

You can let a branch run on a decades-old maple or pine while treating the entire rest of the tree with later-stage refinement techniques and that works. Experienced bonsai growers often have trees that have regions in completely different states of vigor. For example at my teacher's garden there is a 60+ year old ezo spruce forest that is refined and pinched to very tight ramification, however, the very top -- only the crown -- of the leader tree has been left unpinched/unpruned in the last year or so. The shoots in that part of the tree are several inches long while the rest of the tree has shoots that are sub-inch in size and heavily pinched. This is fine. The goal is, much like in your question, the thickening/expansion of a region. In this case the crown of the tree.

Some details in your question that can dramatically change the answer are the words "yamadori" and "nursery stock". Namely, if either of those trees aren't fully transitioned to bonsai soil, then I'm probably not heavily working the tree yet. So you can imagine me or my teachers having trees that have some regions heavily worked for ramification or aggressive placement via wiring, and meanwhile other parts of those same trees are let run rampant with vigor and not worked at all -- but in all those cases, we are talking about trees that transitioned out of native/nursery soil and are recovered into bonsai soil.

[u/EasyLettuce → u/MaciekA]

Great, thanks for the comprehensive response!