Nice undercut
Fall pruning, dawn redwood edition.
It’s a new Jewish year. 5,782 years since the creation of the world, according to Maimonides. It was a Sunday.
Time and I are all out of whack. It’s hard to measure time when you have no external markers. Thanks to Lockdown 2: The Return of Jafar, my sense of time is as gooey as the filling in a toaster streusel.
Fortunately dawn redwood 2 has been keeping track. Here is what it looked like in late May.
And here it was last weekend.
The bark is fissuring like you’d see on a mature redwood. The nebari is developing a great flare. There’s a subtle S-curve filling out in the trunk that brings good character. I like this tree. All I’ve done since buying it in May is fertilize and let it grow. Now it’s time to get to work.
Like I’ve talked about before, pruning in bonsai is largely about suppressing the tree’s apical dominance, or tendency to direct its growing energy upward and outward. The topmost branches on this tree are well on their way to becoming miniature trunks. By pruning downward and inward with dramatic cuts, I force the tree to direct its energy to foliage at its current height.
I still need to learn a lot about pruning, but I’m proud of my progress. When you start learning a technique it’s all meaningless jargon you translate on the fly. Like hunting a wildcat while also consciously remembering to breathe.
Now I’m internalizing some of the “rules” and the knowledge is beginning to feel fluid. Reduce any branch junction down to two. Keep your lower branches thick. Remove (or wire back) anything pointing upward. Stick to the outline of your tree.
Still shaggy, but you can see more of the trunk and the branches have room to breathe. Call it a work in progress. I’m waiting until the leaves drop in fall to see how far I can cut back the branches. Next year I need to give more light to the right hand side to pop some foliage.
Trees grow by extending a thin membrane of live sapwood upward and outward. As the tissue advances, the cells left behind lignify and die. This is why trees have rings, and why we can study them to learn about environmental conditions hundreds of years ago. It’s all locked up in the tree.
Happy new year to you and your trees. If you fasted, I hope it was fruitful. It’s fall now. Go out and meet a cool tree.
Tree reading
Ancient trees are g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶k̶i̶l̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶s̶dying faster than they’re being replaced, critically endangering the ecosystems that depend on them, so scientists are working with fungi to accelerate the growth of a new generation of elders. [BBC]
An oak and a beech that grew up together have fused into a single chimera. How arvoreal. [Reddit]