Reductions and refinements

About making more with less.

The calamansi was putting out so many flowers that they were becoming a nuisance. I need the citrus tree to focus on vegetative growth right now: new leaves and branches. Flowers and fruit divert energy away from that. Still, I had to chuckle. Just a few months ago, I was carefully styling my calamansi to look way more abundant in flowers than it actually was. (Sorry.) Now I had more flowers than I knew what to do with, and only one usable arm; I couldn’t even lift my DSLR to take a proper picture.

This is how it is with flowering trees. You need to balance bonsai needs against other aesthetic interests. There’s never a good time for flowers; you can always use more vegetative growth to thicken branches and develop the tree’s profile. But if you follow that logic to its conclusion, what’s the point of keeping a flowering tree if you literally never leave time to smell the flowers?

So I waited, and sniffed, and eventually reached a point of sufficient inflorescence. Then I chopped the tree to bits.

The base of the tree splits into three co-dominant trunks all from the same node. One of those trunks had to go, otherwise they’d form a bulge that would grow unsightly over time. (Had I use of both arms, I would have cut that third trunk closer to the base. Soon!) I pruned extraneous branches from every junction to no more than two offshoots, then pruned back every branch to a pair of leaves.

I could have gone even further, but I wanted the insurance of extra growth. Citrus tend to have long distances between nodes on a branch, so they’re not popular species for bonsai. As a result there isn’t much documentation about how they perform under bonsai conditions, at least that I’ve seen online. (I need to read more books.) I wasn’t sure how well the tree would respond to pruning this severe. The extra leaves, I figured, could help with recovery.

Days went by and the tree hadn’t shriveled up and croaked. The single fruit I allowed to grow fully ripened. I picked it, then realized I should have taken a photo first, then tried to put the fruit back for a staged photo, then dropped it on the floor. Then I washed it very well and cut it in half and squeezed all of three drops of exceptionally tart juice on my tongue. I shimmied from the shock.

Oh, and the tree bounced back like a champ.

Waxy green shoots popped out everywhere, even down by the stump of the trunk I chopped. Once the baby branches turned a little rigid, I decided to prune back again. New leaves appeared on bare lengths of branches. I cut them back further, as close to the base of the tree as possible while leaving a pair of leaves to keep the branch alive.

Every inch I can reduce in its height brings the calamansi closer to the proportions we’re used to seeing in a mature tree. I think I’m finally getting somewhere. Since this photo was taken, the tree has begun to push new buds. I plan to continue this cycle through the summer, leaving a month in the middle for wild growth so the tree can recover some vigor.

I’ve written before about bonsai as an art of reduction: growing something six feet tall to chop it back to six inches. This citrus is the first time I’ve really understood what that means. For months it’s been a bushy monster, crowding my indoor tropical table with its top-heavy crown. I needed all that growth, then I needed it to disappear, to expose the skeleton of the tree beneath its foliage. Of the branches remaining in the photo above, only half to a third will make it to the tree’s eventual design.

I can’t decide if the reduction process is excessively wasteful or severely ascetic. I think it may be both. It reminds me of how it feels to wrap up an article I’ve been working on for a while. All the tabs I close whose contents didn’t make it into the finished piece. All the transcripts I save and move over to a storage drive, with gigabytes of audio, kept largely for fact-checking purposes, never to be listened to.

Refinement is an ugly thing. You leave so many branches behind.

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Tree reading

Today, April 22nd, is Earth Day. It’s okay, I forgot too. But this weekend is a perfect time to plant a tree! [Canopy Project]

Very cool: An Appalachian trading post for Kentucky seed swappers. [The Goldenrod]

An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Earth Day was April 21st. Fire Escape Bonsai regrets the error.