Secret plan

Now I'm going to tell you, I have secret long term plan. I would like to think, one of my offsprings will take care about my bonsai one day, when my journey will be at the end. I hope it is still far away, but still If you have long term plan, you have to work it step by step. What's my plan then? I try to expose my kids to as much natural environment and gardens as possible. I hope they will love it and latern when they are adult, they can have some horticultural hobby. Ideally bonsai, of course. In line with my plan I took them yesterday to visit Botanical Garden in Bratislava. It was partly rainy day and we have spent there a lot of time. Thanks to weather we were almost alone there, so it was great. To my surprise my kids were most  impressed by desert pavilion. So my plan worked well, partly, we went home with few cactuses. New collection was started on kids window sill. I took few shots with my phone so you can see for yourself.

 

Tilia cordata

Malus

Prunus spinosa No.2 with couple of fruits

CARPINUS BETULUS "RUSNAK"

PICEA ABIES NO.2 in new pot

I got couple of new pots from Tomas Snovicky so I decided to use one of them for this spruce. It was repotted about week ago. Pot is bit smaller than previous one and much lighter. 

CORNUS MAS "VESNA" with ripe fruits

Despite several dozen flowers were removed in spring I sill left few to produce fruits as every season. Not enough to make huge impression though. Many flower buds are already established, so tree will be hopefully message of the Spring as always in my garden. 

Carpinus betulus "VINCENT'S FOREST" edit

I made couple of necessary edits to the group recently. In current stage of the season you see very little to nothing what was done, so pictures are just for illustration. 

I have done some edits in April as you can find in previous post here. Now I went bit further with some of them. 

Now, main goal is to clearly define crowns of two main trees of the composition. For that purpose some important branches were positioned into better positions to achieve that target in long run.

Branches in red areas were moved with guy wires into directions of the arrows. For the future two blue areas on top will have to be bigger and create larger area of negative space there. Big blue area on bottom right was established in April and must be clear for the future.  In yellow area is one branch which is bit problematic and could be removed or drastically redesigned in spring.

For those of you who are not clicking link to the previous post, here is the spring picture of the group after editing in April. 

BIRCH "THE WHITE LADY"

I wanted to write short quick post about birch recently. When looking back on blog, I found out I haven't been reporting on its progress since November. So, I write bit more about it. 

November 2016

Birch was not behaving well last year. I was loosing inner growth and only peripheral branches were surviving. I was not happy about its development. I thought I knew where is the problem. It was in the pot for way too long, not repotted. It was in its pot with not much edited root ball since being collected from wild back in 2010. Plan was to repot in March 2017, do decent root work and then see what's going to happen. 

March 2017 repotting

March 2017 repotting

roots removed

It was done, as you can see bunch of thick roots were removed. Some of the old original soil removed as well. I had feeling I went too far by doing such amount of rootwork. 

Fortunately, tree was doing good. Apart that it was target of massive aphid attack, which was managed in spring with RockEffect. I was tempted to use insecticide but I resisted. (Yeah, I used insecticides in my garden zero times. No fungicides as well...).

July 2017 before wiring

Now, about design. I was planning to do weeping birch long ago. But I did not wanted to have weeping primary and secondary branches.  I consider it unnatural. Since I believe that natural birches grow pattern is upwards with main trunk, sub trunks and primary/secondary branches. Just after that ends of new growth is in weeping pattern. Problem with this tree was, I had never enough tertiary branches to creates such design. And with natural dieback of secondary branches it was quite challenging to find enough branches to create it. Decision was made this summer to go forward with branches I have available and I will see what reaction of the tree will be. Tree was wired in two stages during last weeks. Now it will stay like this until October I guess, when all wires will go off. Im curious how much of the current branch structure will survive winter. 

Night shift

After, morning picture

With happy owner