Wild Cherry Raw Material

This is a wild cherry that was originally given to me 5 or 6 years ago as part of a batch of unwanted saplings.  Most of them have either died or held no promise at all.  This one I’ve kept going and persevered with, just for something that could turn out to be a bit different.

September 2015,

Originally it looked something like this, only a few years old:

2011

In March 2011, I planted it in the ground temporarily to get it to thicken up.  While brushing away the top layer of soil I discovered some strong one sided surface roots and I felt that these could influence future styling.

March 2011. Note the exposed nebari.

It had to be dug and potted when I moved house the next year but instead of putting it back into the ground, I toyed with the idea of a literati type tree.  Most of the foliage was further up the trunk and efforts to back bud had never amounted to much.  So I repotted it at a slanting angle to make the most of those gripping surface roots.

March 2012

It took a while to recover and then last year I wired it in an effort to get more movement on the pretty straight trunk.  No picture of that I’m afraid.  There was only so much I could do due to the trunk thickness and being brittle.

It is slanting more but this isn’t the best angle.  I think it needs to lean towards the viewer more but it’ll be a compromise between trunk line and root angle.  The next photo shows more movement:

For now I quite like the autumn colour and am hoping for a first flowering next winter/spring.  I’ll also repot it into a shallower ceramic pot.

 

 

Japanese Maple Autumn Change Slideshow

During the month of October I took a picture of my Japanese Maple everyday to capture the gradual change in colour up to total leaf drop.  The idea was to produce some kind of stop motion animation but looking at that gives me a headache ( a tripod would’ve been useful!).  Anyway, click below for a much shorter series of photos displaying the main changes during the month.

Fungi

I usually have some kind of fungi appearing on my lawn this time each year but I’ve never had such a variety as now.  I suppose it may be because it’s been warmer than usual for this time of year and very wet lately.  Implications for my bonsai? Increased risk of disease so I’ve been spraying an appropriate fungicide.  My field maples so far are fine but my oak seedlings have got the mildew.