Now they're camp friends
Reuniting with trees after a month apart—my how they've grown!
Now that my larger trees have a boarding school arrangement, it’s time for them to come home from camp.
Camp in this case is the sunny backyard of my buddy Nissan’s house in Queens. When my trees were evicted from their fire escape home, Nissan came to my rescue and offered to hold onto the large ones I couldn’t keep anywhere else.
All-day sun—and Nissan’s experienced hands—did the trees good. My clethra started summer as a chopped stump. See the two lighter colored shoots popping from the left-hand trunk? They shot out like Xenomorph chestbursters, growing four to five feet in a month.
Unfortunately, none of this growth will work in the design. The dominant branch is pointing in the wrong direction to advance the tree’s canopy. Same for the little weakling vine. So I’ve chopped the trunks back further, this time to a base with zero foliage at all. The clethra will recuperate through fall and winter and, Sigourney Weaver willing, shoot out new buds in better locations in the spring.
My zombie juniper has enough growth that I can start styling. My Japanese maple got, uh, totally leaf fried in the heat, but before then it thickened considerably, which is all it needs to do at this stage. Nissan even found an anti-fungal remedy for the dawn redwood that was inexplicably losing all its leaves.
Here’s what the other redwood looked like before summer camp:
And today:
My next task is to give this vigorous bush a good trim. I need to decide which branches I want to include in the design and remove all the others. Then the branches I keep will get trimmed back to a couple nodes, setting the stage for branch ramification. If a branch splits into three or more branches in one place, that junction will eventually swell out of proportion from the rest of the tree’s taper, so any “crotch branches” have to go. Yup, that’s the term!
Also, no, this tree isn’t on my fire escape. It’s on the window ledge abutting the fire escape. A ledge that is part of my home that I dutifully pay taxes on, and the coop board and fire department are just going to have to deal, because this tree needs daily watering and brings me great satisfaction and I want it close.
Fall garden chores make you reflective. This we know. Over the next few weeks I’ll be preparing my trees both for the immediate future of winter and the long-haul future of their health and design. Naturally it has me thinking about my own. Where will I be in my life when this redwood reaches the next stage of its design? How are we supposed to get there?
I’m coming up on a year since my first sparks of interest in bonsai, and it’s hitting me—am I really doing this? Am I making medium-term life plans with my trees in mind? Am I peeking at listings in my neighborhood for homes with outdoor space?
Apparently the answer is yes, which at this point feels less like a choice and more like an inexorable consequence of my actions. I’m glad, because at this point it’s also hard to plan for much of anything, which leaves you lots of time to wonder if there will even be a future to plan for.
A plan, though, says things about your view of reality. I’m preparing my trees for winter because I believe there will be one, and a new growing season on the other side. It feels good to commit.
Tree reading
At the intersection of trees and teas you’ll find Anna Ye’s virtual discussion series called Beyond the Cup. She puts together panels of growers, buyers, and other smart tea people to improve our cultural and agricultural understanding of the tea world. I learned a lot from last year’s talks and this year’s programming is already promising. [Anna Ye]
Get to know the Great Banyan in the Kolkata Botanical Garden, a 250-year-old four-acre grove comprised of a single ficus expanding outward through its aerial roots. [The Tribune]