Winter Pruning a Ginkgo Biloba Bonsai
I show you some fascinating insight into this amazing species, sometimes referred to as a “living fossil”.
The Ginkgo is the ideal species for bonsai trees.
Then I do the last of the winter pruning on my Ginkgo Biloba group planting. Or as some call it, my bonsai forest.
This short video about the ginkgo biloba i filmed this bit of camera roll back in autumn because the ginkgo biloba is deciduous and i wanted to show it with all its beautiful leaves of course if i’d waited a few more weeks i could have got those leaves their beautiful golden yellow color that they go in autumn so that’ll be something to look forward to an autumn of this year they’re called biloba because the leaves have two lobes with a deep cleft between them and some people call them the maidenhair tree because of the shape of the leaves though i have to say i don’t think i’ve ever seen any maidens with that shape here the ginkgo species is dioecious which means there are male trees and female trees i’ve heard it said that you can distinguish a female tree from the male because apparently the female leaves are more rounded but i don’t think you can tell the difference by their leaves because on a single ginkgo tree some of the leaves are more rounded and some of them are more cleft how you can tell the difference is the male trees develop cones and produce pollen the female of the species is somewhat rarer and that’s a good thing because the female produces fruit and the ginkgo fruit smells terrible it’s very pretty though [Music] the ginkgo biloba is sometimes said to be living fossil because they found fossils from similar trees in the genus dating back to 200 million years ago i mean dinosaur times but nowadays the ginkgo is the only species in this genus in fact in this whole division of plants so as well as looking beautiful they are a very special species of tree and as bonsai they are very resilient they can take direct sun they are very hardy to the cold they’re fine in almost any type of soil and they’re very resistant to most tree infections so they really are an ideal species for [Music] bonsai and now i’m going to bring you back to the end of january 2021 when the sky is grey and the deciduous tree is a bear yeah this is a very special tree and it’s a group planting five trees the dominant one at the front they’re all a bit regularly spaced probably do a repotting in spring and put them in better positions use a different pot as well but these are very special trees i love them another thing to note about the ginkgo biloba is that when you do a chop they don’t seem too callous there’s a little bit of die back but not very much but there’s kind of no healing over so you have to chop them in a way that is just going to be like that as your future trunk so all of the tops of these trees have been cut and it’s time to just take those stubs down a bit and i don’t have to do it all in one year you can just keep doing it a little bit by little bit each year until they start looking a bit more natural but here this one i’m gonna chop it just about here this is a bit of a stub you don’t want to kill the new leader of course so that’s pretty important and there are five trees i’m gonna do five chops let’s do the biggest one now that was a big one so this concave cutter really does cut right into it if you’re going to do a flush cut you’re actually going quite a long way into the tree as well i’m going to also cut down a little bit more so we get a tiny bit more taper here and hide the rear of the wound from the front to stand up for this bit there we go moving on to this one similar we just want to make a diagonal chop at the top that is more in line with the new leader tidy up a bit and when you’re doing a trunk chop it’s always important to decide in advance where the front of the tree is because then you can use that to decide the angle and the face of the chop that you’re doing so if we look at this one from the front at the moment there’s actually not much curvature there’s not much movement to the trunk but if you look at it side on there’s quite a nice little bit of movement there on that trunk so i can decide to make [Music] this side the front or this side and if i make this side the front i get some curve there and this diagonal chops at the back end all right three done two more to go here and this one as i’m cutting i can see it’s going too low down too near to the new leader cut this one a bit higher up like this so you can actually see what i’m doing four down one to go so deciding where the front of this one is if that is the new front of this tree then that can go behind okay [Music] very good [Music] let’s just have a look at the tops here so this is the main the fattest tree let’s say the biggest tallest tree which we have at the front of the scene so it’s an interesting thing but the main leader on this tree is actually not the tallest so i’m going to chop this down a little bit just to be sure that that isn’t taller than the main leader maybe even shorter still in fact down to there about here and now this one too [Music] and same here the top bud is facing inwards towards the tree and the second to top bud is facing out which i like so that one’s coming down and finally there are two stubs here so i’m gonna they’re dead wood they were obviously cut some years ago and just left i’m just going to tidy them up now with some flush cuts don’t want to go too deep it’s another funny shoot going off the side here so tidy that up yeah that’s good it’s looking good but this one here is as tall as the main leader so we’re just going to chop that off just to above this bud that will go out that way so there it is the ginkgo biloba group planting [Music] [Music] you
