In this video Corin showcases a few different cultivars of Satsuki Japanese Azalea (Rhododendron indicum) with differing leaf and flower types
Corin then walks us through the timeline of a specimen Azalea Bonsai (Rhododendron indicum ‘Korin’)
Here in nottingham our short video for you today we’re going to give you some information and details about japanese satsuki azalea botanically these are rhododendron indicum and it’s a species of azaleas that originate in japan and there are hundreds of different cultivars of satsuki azalea we’ve got some young plants in here in the studio today and that we’ve been recently working on and selling on our website and i’ve brought some examples in in flower and want to show you some of the variety of flowers and we’re also going to discuss and do some work on this larger satsuki azalea of mine i’ve had this for over 15 years so these azaleas rhododendron indicum these are young plants imported from japan they’ve been grown to get nice movement to the trunk they’re quite slender and elegant at the moment just in the early stages of bonsai cultivation and they normally flower in the uk they tend to flower about the end of may beginning of june these particular ones have been in a greenhouse so they’re flowering a little bit earlier this year and just like you get roses with different cultivar names and different flower characteristics the same was true with the satsuki azalea this particular one is a cultivar called casa no yuki and the flowers of this quite a large flowered cultivar beautiful pale pink with a deeper throat and a white edge to the flower and on these satsuki they’ll flower you’ll get a good three weeks out of them when they flower and they’re quite reliable and they’ll flower every year if well cared for so that’s casa no yuki this next one is a multi-color satsuki it isn’t uncommon with satsuki’s alias and here we’ve got a white base color with a slight pink fleck but then we’ve also on the same tree got pink flowers and this cultivar is ryoka no bizumi and you’ll see it in subtitles on your uh on your screen and then we’ve got this uh onno suki a beautiful pale pink like a powder pink very very delicate colour to the flower and then slightly darker we’ve got asahi now azumi and they have slightly different leaf characteristics as well some of the darker flowered ones have a darker leaf some have a larger or smaller leaf and this one again we’ve got some dark pink light red and some white so it’s a multi-coloured cultivar of satsuki this is a murasaki quite a popular cultivar a pale and slightly deeper colored flower quite an elegant and narrower flower with a longer petal again slightly different characteristic if we put it down here next to that first one you can see the difference in flower characteristics and also in size this next one’s unusual this is a fairly new cultivar called oreo and it’s uh for a long time with people in japan have been trying to get a sort of lemon color or yellow colored satsuki this is an example of that it’s a sort of a yellowy green petal and it’s got a different petal characteristic to the others also it sort of ruffles in and very nice compact closed-in formation and very very heavily flowering this one quite an unusual cultivar and we’re quite lucky that we’ve still got just a few of these left here on the nursery at the moment so pop that back down there so these are young trees imported from japan that we’ve been offering for sale and working on and then also i’ve got this tree here on my left and this is a imported satsuki i bought it about 15 years ago when i first got it it was in a quite a large polystyrene box and the branches were out here very very leggy growth on it so initially after about a year and a half it looked like this image now that we’re showing you you can see it hasn’t got much density the branches aren’t very well developed i’ve just put a little bit of wire on some of the branches to start shaping them this next photograph a year later it’s got a few more flowers on it and better density of foliage it’s starting to develop a little bit the following year again it’s got more flowers it’s filled out more and starting to mature then the year after that i didn’t let it flower in the uk personally for me with my azaleas i give them a year off every three years so i let them flower on the first year flower on the second year and i don’t take let them flower on the third year so as the buds are swelling coming into flower i remove all the flowers from the tree so this photograph here it was showing it with no flowers on when it had a year off the following year it put on this display it was in a new pot and it was a beautiful bright pink display really good density of flowers and this is probably at this stage it’s the best it ever looks since i owned it then the following year i gave it another year off and didn’t let it flower people think that that’s a bit of a shame because they say well i bought this tree it’s a beautiful tree it looks really nice when it flowers they want it to flower every year but by letting it not flower for a year giving it a year off this was the display it rewarded me with the following year so again from this display here if i go back to this one here the density of flour is much much greater and finally about three years ago i commissioned a pot especially for this tree this one that is in now is a handmade pot by warsaw studio ceramics and here you can see a photograph of it two years ago in full flower in this pot this tree over the last year or so has been in a greenhouse and we’ve just been letting it grow a little bit wild to get some vigor and growth into the tree and now it’s time to give it a little bit of a prune and a spring tidy up so if we have a look here the fronts towards you all this growth at the base it just sprouted out these suckers from the roots so what i’m going to do we’ll trim these off this growth here it’s quite dense the satsuki is a a basal dominant a lot of trees are apically dominant they put a lot of growth on up at the top with a satsuki the reverse is true so you get more vigor in these lower sections so it’s important to trim these lower sections back to balance the vigor of the tree this one also has got a little van shopping here there’s a little branch here that’s died off unfortunately so that needs removing so we need to remove that trim this back thin it out a little bit and if we turn it round here you see these long shoots here they need to be taken back so this time of year in the uk these are loaded with flower buds just waiting to come out in a few weeks time but this tree here is scheduled for repotting process this year so what we’re going to do you’ve got two options with satsuki in the uk you can either re-pot them in early spring or you can repot after flowering i prefer to do them after flowering if you do them in the uk in early spring you can re-pot them we can have dull wet cloudy weather and they don’t always respond very well to being done in early spring i much prefer to do the work to them just after flowering sort of beginning of june time and then i put them in a warm greenhouse and they really bounce back from that work very well and grow very strongly so this has got to be trimmed we will inevitably today as we trim it we will be cutting flower buds off it’s not an issue because it’s not going to be flowering this year anyway but that will set it up well for next year the most important thing with growing satsuki’s i found in the uk you know they’re not a difficult tree to grow but there are certain things you need to know about them firstly most satsuki imported into the uk are coming from japan and they’ll be planted into konuma so this is the bag of konuma it’s japanese soil mined in japan and it’s a very very pale sort of sulfur yellow substrate and it’s acidic azaleas are an ericaceous tree and they like a very acidic soil so this granular structure and acidity they grow very well in it and you can just use it neat out the bag you don’t need to mix it with anything else you can see here these young ones from japan are growing in pure konuma and we should be able to well these are wired in but if we just get rid of this wire and just slip one out of the pot and you see the data’s have a very fine fibrous root system and that isn’t in need of repotting that’s fine in there for another year in the canoma soil so it’s important in the uk if they’re in konuma you continue to grow them into canoe it’s important to keep them well water they use a lot of moisture a broad leaf evergreen like this even during the winter it’s transpiring through the leaves and it has a requirement for water more so than a tree that possibly goes dormant for instance like a like a like an acer like a japanese maple so you do have to keep up with the watering of these watering is important the soil is important also the feeding is quite important now our favor a granular feed there’s two main granular feeds that we use here at greenwood the first one is fosmag and this was actually specifically developed for rhododendrons it’s just a granular feed you just sprinkle a pinch or some of it on the soil surface and it lasts about four weeks and when it’s all gone you add some more it’s a chemical based feed it works very well with all bonsai but particularly good for azalea and rhododendron and the other food we often use is naruto naruko is a japanese feed semi-organic the only difference really is it would have been organic it does go a little bit moldy as it starts to break down very very good for azaleas good for getting dark green glossy color on them during the winter the satsuki in the uk this particular tree through winter just goes into a well ventilated unheated greenhouse on a mild winter and if you’re down on the south coast of the uk they’ll be out they’ll be fine outside all winter we’re in the midlands and if you’re a bit further north than us it is worth before you purchase a satsuki just trying to figure out where you’re going to keep it in winter potentially have a little greenhouse or potting shed or small polytunnel available to allow you to shelter it for the worst weather so we’re just going to clear this space down and we’ll get ready to do a little bit of work on this sat ski so this satsuki we’re going to trim off some of these pieces down here these suckers it is a tendency of subsidies to throw suckers out from the base so with a concave pruner let’s get in there and see where they’re coming from just snip those off and these smaller ones we can use a more delicate concave pruner to get in there and remove them from the base all right so another one in here like this the foliage pads of these this one’s a little bit messy when you look inside there’s some old little twigs and leaves and things in there so that just wants a bit of a tidy up this longer growth here look we can shorten it back like this to get a better shape to the foliage pad it back or if we need to we could go in with a bigger pair of scissors and we could take this back a little bit more to get more compact growth and at this time of year doing this even in the uk if we trim this back and we leave branches like this look with no leaf on it will then bud and leaf from these branches which is uncommon you can’t do it on a lot of trees but you can do it on the azaleas so i’m going to have a little bit of a tidy up and work my way around this tree the reason i’ve got this tree i’ve been into satsuki’s for about 30 years or so and we said earlier there’s about there’s hundreds of different cultivars of satsuki azalea and the reason i’m particularly drawn to this one is this one’s name is corin the same as me i’m spelled with a c and this is spelled with a k so this is what this tree its posh name is uh is rhododendron indicum coin so i always wanted to find a a good example of a coin satsuki and this is my own korean satsuki from my private bonsai collection so i’m working way through just taking back some of this longer growth in here look these long shoots can be taken aback just to get a more a better shape to these foliage plants and where this foliage is growing into this one there’s a little bit of growth we can take out between the two just to tidy that up also a little bit of growth growing down just a tidying up process ready for this coming year so i spent 10 15 minutes or so giving this a prune i’ve gone back a little bit tighter than i was going to start off trimming it so we’ve gone back into some older wood because we’ve got a bit of legginess on some of these foliage pads so now we’ve taken it back like this we’ve got a bit more definition and gap between these foliage pads and made it a little bit denser here at the top but also to lighten it up like that we’ll get more light and air into those branches and we’ll get new buds emerging we’ve cooked quite a lot off look there’s a there’s a bench and a floor full of growth that we’ve taken off this tree so we’ve probably cut i think we’ve probably put 25 about 25 percent about a quarter of this foliage off the tree so next thing with this is just tidy up this soil surface around the nabari and the surface roots of this tree and then now it’s like end of april so we’re going to probably re-pop this tree um about the end of may beginning of june so maybe another four to five weeks or so we’re gonna get this one repotted for this year and then we might we might do a video of doing that and show you how to go on i hope you found this video on satsuki azalea useful and hopefully it’s given you a few pointers if you’d like to get one of these small young satsuki to grow there’s a quantity of these available on the website at the moment and please give us a like and subscribe to our youtube channel and keep your eye out for new videos coming up over the next few weeks thank you very much
