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.
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| Biggest cut after I left sacrifice branch to grow too long. It will close anyway soon. |
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| This is last cut from this year and shortened new leaders. |
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| And second seed here. Maybe future cornus mas no.3 in making. We will see. |
