Taxus tanuki 2

Tanuki part 2. Here you can see Mario's hands helping me with drilling procedure. Tanuki on taxus proved to be very difficult task. Extremely hard wood, even young taxus plants you cannot easily bend! And old weathered wood is even harder. It is so hard that it's difficult to hammer a nail into it!

After some thinking, we have found basic lines along young taxus trees will travel up the dead trunk.

The stump with finished drilling.

"New growth" is in place. Young trees are fastened to the old stock using nails or screws.

There is really not much to see now. These young trees will not be further worked this year. There will be no wireing or cutting extra growth. The main aim is to fatten the live veins as quickly and as much as possible. Any cutting will be unproductive. If everything goes well, first shaping is to be expected next year, together with some cleaning and working on deadwood. I will report further developement.

Taxus baccata Tanuki

What we have here is one dead Taxus. Unfortunately... it happens. But, with very interesting deadwood. It would be a shame not to use it. So I decided to make a tanuki or "phoenix graft".
First photo is a dead taxus in the pot:

I aquired a few young taxus baccata plants like this one on the photo below. They measure
2-3cm in diameter.

So, this is our task. The skeleton is here, extracted from the pot and cleaned of substrate.

The deadwood has many interesting sides.

Tomorrow I'll show the result. Phoenix graft will be born tomorrow morning.

Friends from Slovenia

Our friends from Slovenia came for a visit. Miha and Tomaz were here to see Mario, and than they came to my place. They are very nice guys and we had an interesting and friendly conversation. A few hours passed like minutes. Here is a short photo note of our Sunday together.
Thank you Tomaž and Miha.

In Marios garden. Rainy day.

Miha and Mario discussing Marios new Prunus mahaleb (wild cherry).

The guys spent some time to see my place.

My top-of-the-line last year pinuses are doing fine

My old mughos also adore this humid environment. I strongly believe that high humidity is a key for succesfull transplanting these old creatures from their natural habitat. So I am very happy when it rains a lot. Extremely free drainage helps roots in this rainy season and helps a lot the roots to cope with my agressive protocols of watering these old mountail trees for the first year after transplanting. I have installed automatic misters all over the garden, so in summer, they do the job of misting the trees few times a day regularily. That is especially important for newly transplanted conifers. For broadleaved trees is ok to mist them, but for conifers it is absolutely essential.
Because, the ability of broadleaved trees to absorb water through the leaves is less than 1%, and the ability of conifers to absorb water through the needles is 10% of needed water. That's mainly because of one small basal area on every needle that has no cutticle and has a strong absorbing capability.

Mugho Metuselah is sprouting very good.
Collection story: http://yamadoriarea.blogspot.com/2009/10/mugo-metuselah.html

and... http://yamadoriarea.blogspot.com/2009/10/metuselah-potted.html

Prometheus: http://sandevbonsai.blogspot.com/2009/09/mugo-constrictor.html

and Constrictor...they are all very healthy. They flower and sprout new shoots readily... http://sandevbonsai.blogspot.com/2009/09/mugo-constrictor.html

Spring rain

This is what I love...long and soaking spring rain. Everything is dripping wet. Plants adore this kind of environment...they grow like crazy. Everything is blooming, sprouting, greening...celebration of life.

New training pots

These are very basic training pots. They are of Chinese origin. Aesthetic is not important here. What is important is that they are basically: bonsai pots. They are very cheap and, believe it or not, they are frost resistant (tested this winter up to -15 or - 17 Celsius).
If I would tell you the price for these six or seven pots, you would know that you can buy maybe one or two good but small pots for that. And one of these is impressively big. That is impossible to find so cheap. And I am in desperate need of big pots because I have so many very big trees that will need temporary training pots in a year or two.
So, that is the reason for my happiness today.

A few examples of smaller training pots that Duda and I bought today.

More drilling for Prunus mahaleb

Remember that big Prunus mahaleb? I was never really happy with first drilling of a big stump. So I further shortened the thick trunk and made more shari. I decided that this fat trunk should be totally sharied and drilled...it must dissapear. The unwanted part is that fat and straight branch on the left in the first picture on the collection site.

Powerful nebari and huge trunk but...extremely complicated fat and straight trunks-branches.

First drilling 2009 with Walter Pall. I wasn't happy with the result. Everything was still too long, too fat...

And here it is now. That fattest branch is sharied totally.

Possible front. I will cut the plastic pot more to show the impressive nebari and I will wire the tree in the next few days.

So far so good. To me, much better than before. I think that the result will be more obvious after wireing.

MY NEW WEB PAGE!

Please, feel welcome to my new web page!

www.sandevbonsaispace.com

Regards

Sebastijan

p.s. of course, this page has nothing to do with my blogs...they stay where they are and as they are, with posts being updated as the work with bonsai developes something interesting.