"Vincent's forest"

I did couple of of pictures of the hornbeam forest few days ago. Colors were nice and bit unusual for me. I was in hurry since I thought it will turn brown and dry soon. But it surprised me and it created even nicer yellow tones in last days. I thought they are so nice that I moved it  to my usual photo place and took few shots. You can see the result. 
My hornbeams tend to have ugly brownish and dry leaves rather than nice autumn yellow like this one. I have about 10 hornbeams but none of them is even close to those colors. 





"Vincent's forest" in autumn colors

It was about right time for some autumn colors in my garden. Some trees seems not noticed its autumn already. But this forest started to get yellow leaves, more inside the crown and in shaded side. Picture taken on shelf instead of my traditional photo area since I was not in mood for moving this beast around this time. In my last post about this group or forest I was making repotting. As you can see trees are doing fine. Wiring in winter is possible again.







Short story of two seeds

Not far from my house there are several ash trees. They are old and tall. In summer they provide housing for many birds and shade for our neighbours. When right time comes they drop their seeds all over our gardens. One of those seed fell into spot under my bonsai bench several years ago. I keep river rocks under benches and I'm cleaning them from weeds time to time. I remember I have noticed ash seedling when it was tall enough to be weeded out. I do not exactly why but I kept it in place. Later when it was too long I pull it out and planted into one of empty pots full of older substrate under my bench. Despite tree was treated rather roughly and it was sitting in dark corner of my garden it decided it wants to live. I accepted the challenge and let it grow, I understood tree wanted to be bonsai. So one year I took piece of wire and make big band of the seedling. Then it was left to grow. Its shoots were usually longer than one meter and than cut back. You can see few cuts which did not healed yet. With amount of callus tree is able to produce it will heal over wounds in short period of time. So what you can see on pictures right now is structure tree after 4-5 years. In spring thes year tree was removed from substrate and roots edited a little bit.
When dealing with ash I was cleaning its substrate from weed one day and realized I just pulled out strange weed. When inspected closely I thought it is seedling of cornus mas. Which is possible since I have one as you maybe know from my previous posts and it is bearing fruits for few years already. I think some bird could just eat one of the fruits and use ash pot as its toilet. So seedling was planted back into pot to grow together with ash. Problem is that mistakenly pulled it out again during weeding. But it wants to live and always grows when planted back. We will see if it make it to spring next year. Then I will plant it separately and apply thick wire to make first bend of the trunk, than you will see it in its own post. 





Biggest cut after I left sacrifice branch to grow too long. It will close anyway soon. 

This is last cut from this year and shortened new leaders. 

And second seed here. Maybe future cornus mas no.3 in making. We will see. 

Malus No.2

I love flowering and fruiting bonsai. One of my bucket list trees always were miniature apple trees. For different reasons they were not part of my collection until this spring. Than two such trees find its way into my garden. They have been grown by my passed friend Vincent and when trees from his collection were looking for new home some of them came to my place. This are not those nice circumstances but such is life and I try to develop those trees further as good as I can. 

We are having apple season in our area so I took opportunity to make few shots of one of the bonsais with ripen fruits. Weather is particularly cold this october, so colors could change dramatically soon. Tree was brought to my place in simple plastic container so I gave it temporary ceramic pot. Tree surprised me with its vigorous growth and abundance of flowers. In late spring I decided to remove majority of forming fruits and kept only a few of them. Next spring I will work on basic structure, but generally I'm happy with direction of majority of branches.  





Prunus spinosa "Katharine"