Core exercises

All bonsai begin with a good trunk.

It’s too hot to work on trees. All I can do is keep them watered and check on their trunks.

In bonsai, a tree’s trunk matters more than anything else. The trunk is the visual anchor. It determines a bonsai’s height and frame, as well as its personality. The ficus religiosa pictured above isn’t much of a bonsai—it’s a trunk in training. Fig trees are known for their wide buttressed root flares, and I want this one to develop a big, beefy trunk. Here’s how it looked a year ago.

And here is this week.

In another year or two, the tree may be fat enough to chop. The surface roots need more time to rise from the soil and slope upwards into the trunk. Their horizontal growth will make the tree feel sturdy and powerful.

I transferred my tea plant to bonsai soil back in March, which required removing lots of coiled roots. The tree gave me the silent treatment until earlier this month, when it showed signs of life with new growth. It’s hard to see in these photos, but the plant is starting to get veiny lines up and down the trunk.

As they become more pronounced, these veins lend tree trunks a robust, muscular appearance, as if the tree were a clenched bicep in a tight muscle tee. I’ve seen tea trees three times my size with beautiful striations that are spotted with lichen and moss. They feel strong and lean to the touch, like you can register the distinct muscle groups under the skin. A different feeling from the weighty, primeval stature of a banyan fig tree.

This week I decided that I want these trunk veins to be an important feature of the tea plant’s eventual design. The fastest way to get them is to let the tree grow free. By the time the tree is ready to chop, I’ll probably lose everything above the two low branches pictured here.

That’s the thing about growing trunks. Nothing else matters until you have a good one. If you try to multitask and work on branches or leaf size, you’ll just slow down progress on the most critical aspect of a bonsai’s design.

I love the sloping stance of this dawn redwood, and I’m happy to see the beginnings of an elegantly tapered root flare. Unlike the squat ficus at the top of this post, I want this tree to evoke a gothic cathedral sensibility—for your eyes to race up the tall, graceful trunk right to the sky. I don’t expect to use many of the branches on this trunk for now, but I need them to fuel evenly tapered growth up and down the tree. As branches grow thicker, they pull more water and nutrients from the trunk. To support the greater resource demand, the trunk section responsible for feeding those branches grows thicker in turn. I’ll use these branches as sculptural tools to selectively thicken the trunk in key places that suit the design. Once they’ve served their purpose, I’ll remove them.

Japanese maple photos courtesy of my talented photographer sibling. Hire her!

With his Japanese maple, all I can do is watch it grow. I planted it in my dad’s backyard to speed up the trunk thickening process. It has a long way to go.

As the tree reaches toward the light, it’s developed a gentle lean that I’m hoping will manifest in the lower few inches of the trunk. I’m not sure what else I want to do with this tree yet, what personality I want it to have. I’m waiting for the tree to tell me what it thinks. In the meantime, the trunk will thicken. Answers will reveal themselves.

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Tree reading

A case of avian anarchism: urban birds are making nests out of anti-pigeon spikes. [Naturalis]

Using CRISPR gene editing to make woodier, more resilient trees. [Phys.org]