Shohin Literati Scots Pine (Pinus Sylvestris)

Took the cutters to this pine yesterday.  Sacrifice branch at the bottom left on to help thicken the lower trunk.

Before

After

It’ll go into a ceramic pot in spring.

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.

 

 

Literati False Cypress

I posted about this tree last year when I was given it by my father.  Finally time to see what the roots were like and repot it out of this bucket into something shallower.

Before

After

A flared nebari was uncovered and I was able to remove a substantial amount of root as it was surprisingly all fine and there was no heavy roots to prune at all.  It was hosed out and filled with an improved drainage mixture and some mycorrizhae fungi that I bought at a garden centre.  I reduced quite a bit of the lower foliage as it will probably be jinned at some point.  I haven’t removed any of the upper foliage yet but will do in the next few days once I have time to have a better look and decide on future styling.  I’m excited about the future of this tree and with it’s great nebari and old flaky bark I  imagine it to hopefully produce a literati Scots Pine like image.  I’ll see how it responds before deciding on when to wire.