ACNH Pine Bonsai Tree – Styling Literati Bonsai Pine • Bonsai Made Easy August 2021

Here we are again we’ve got this potential literary scots pine with this very beautiful trunk and it’s had some training in the past but i’m not entirely happy with it so this is the potential front there’s a bit of driftwood at the back if you can turn the tree around and show it to you this is all the dead wood at the top here and this is the live portion here and because it’s flat like that it doesn’t do anything there there isn’t sufficient interest in the trunk line so what i’m proposing to do is if i turn the tree around because that’s going to be a potential front i want to bring this portion down this way if i can stand in front of the tree so that the white background emphasize i want to bring this downwards and then see what happens rather than have it flat i’m going to bring it down so to do that i’m going to put a piece of wire or two bits of maybe four four millimeter wire and see how we get on so here we go four millimeter wires by no means the most serious size wire you can go up to about 10 millimeter if you so wish and if you use copper that’s even more serious copper is really strong but i hate using copper it’s very hard to handle and once it’s on the tree it becomes very hard after it has settled in and removing it is almost impossible because it’s a single trunk i’m just going to wrap it around the trunk and hope that that will hold it so i’m breaking that two branch principle again but because i’m going to take it so far around the trunk i think it should do the job and i’m also putting two coils of wire so here we go for this to set i think it would take at least two years to set so as we always say bonsai is for the long term it is not a quick fix and you don’t get results in a short space of time many of these trees have been growing on the nursery for 20 to 30 years and we are just harvesting it it’s like wine you can make a wine in maybe one or two years but it will not be as good as why that has matured for years and years same with bonsai can make an instant bonsai from a young plant literally in next to no time but will it be as nice as something that is really old no not in a billion years this is what people don’t realize it is what we call a mugs game who would invest all that time and wait 20 30 years for results to show in fact it’s for the next generation a lot of these trees that we’re doing are for you know our children and the children’s children difficult game isn’t it okay now this wire is probably not taking off let me go back to the four four mil wire sometimes the cost of the wire exceeds the cost of the raw material again this is what people don’t realize there are no shortcuts as we say in this game you can take shortcuts but the results are not good so when you put a double coil of wire make sure you follow the path of the existing or the first piece of wire that you put on so that it looks neat and never criss-cross never do that when you wire never crisscross the wall like that i will show you the detail when i bring the camera closer up again when i’m doing all this work on my own i have to multitask and as you’ve seen before i sometimes have to hold the camera in one hand and work with the other hand all great fun though and i’ve got to be careful not to break these little twigs and branches and while i’m wiring i’ve got to keep an eye on my dinner it’s about eight o’clock i don’t want to burn my food so i will stop in a minute otherwise i won’t have any dinner to eat that’s a tough life my goodness that length of wire is exactly the same how did i know i didn’t even measure it okay the double strand should be strong enough now to hold it in place i got to be careful i don’t break this branch after growing it for 20 or 30 years you can’t break the bronze that’s a ironical thing so remember the literati the shape is really like a chinese or oriental graphics that’s what we’re trying to make graphics okay now we’ve got wider branches one at a time [Applause] this tray has been wired before so in the course of time many of these trees go through several phases we wire it once if the results are not right we take the wire off do it again i was unwiring a tree that i had wired back in 1980 in fact it was originally styled with the famous john naca in 1976 i think it was so many of these trees have several lives don’t ask me what i’m cutting because i’m just cutting instinctively i always begin by taking the tips off to shorten the branches and to produce more ramification so that is what i’m doing first okay i will leave that for now just a little more and we should be there so i’m continuing doing my wiring so these are the pads i’ve arranged so there’s one pad there one pad at the top there’s going to be a pad there just a pad here one pad let’s carry on doing these ones these branches are really very very thin pines will look very delicate but the scots pines in particular have this very floppy blousy habit and it’s quite difficult to get decent designs out of it the japanese do not get the scots pines in japan but their red pine pines densiflora is very similar in habit to our scot spine so you will see a lot of scot uh in densify red pine trend in this style even the chinese use densiflora quite a bit and especially for the literary style i would just give you a word of caution the scot spines are quite prolific when they grow and in the summer they swell quite fast and if you’re not careful there is always a danger of allowing the wire to bite into the branch i know that i always say why marks are not always a bad thing but if you don’t want marks on these very delicate branches you will have to deal with it that means you will have to remove it at exactly the right time it’s okay if you wanted to let the wire bite and let it swell the trunk by leaving the wire embedded but if you don’t want to do that you have to remove the wire so there are special circumstances where you’ve got to just see what your objective is most of you will have realized by now that the japanese maple as a species is my favorite species but my favorite style is the literati style and the literati style is only possible with pines and junipers more pines than junipers so i’m in a bit of a quandary because maples don’t lend themselves to the literati and yet that is my favorite species so what do i do well there’s this pad i don’t know whether i need this one or not i think i don’t need that because it’s spoiling this trunk line so let’s get rid of it there you are simple so this is what we call a literati with the branch tumbling down and this one will become a gin there’s so much wire it almost looks like an electricity substation but i know that i will probably only keep it for a few months a year at most so i’ve now got this beautiful line at least i think it’s beautiful with distinct pads and we will clean up the trunk there are bits of wood that spoil the trunk line so you’re looking at the front i did this with another tree because there are bits of wood that spoil the trunk line and because it’s dead wood i can easily get rid of it so and this part will be ginned i will show you the final effect i don’t want to spend time just removing the bark that will have to be done eventually you see the bug does come off but that’s going to take a long long time i know that many of you say that whatever i do is not always boring but this i would say is very boring so now let me just take hold of the camera and show you the detail from close up so this is the view of the lit rod you see that s uh driftwood at the back that is all dead wood so that will be ginned so the main literati is tumbling down and if you come close and have a look we can always refine it because some of these pads have to lie flat like that one lies flat like that the other pad lies flat like that the back pad may be conflicting with the main line this is another pad that’s another pad so all these are different pads tumbling downwards so that is the view of the top that is the trunk in a strum pot so hopefully before this video is edited i will get that driftwood on the right hand side cleaned up and hopefully you will see the finished article and this is three sessions of wiring each session has taken about an hour so this three hours of work but there has been quite a lot of hours just spent thinking about the solution so i hope you’ve enjoyed the thought process in making this particular literary this is i would say is a classic literati shape so there are many ways of viewing it and because it’s in a round drum pot we will view it but as i did mention during the growing season when the needles start looking upwards like that the tree will have a different feel altogether so let’s take a close look see that’s the bit of wood i’ve been trying to chop off to give it a more pleasing shape from this side there’s a bit of dead wood there and the bark is really crusty and old so i hope you’ve enjoyed this exercise in creating a literary and there will be some shots after i’ve cleaned the dead wood and you will see it in a slightly better light so i hope you’ve enjoyed this commentary so far i thought i’d just show you this potato peeler this special ginning tool i find it very useful for getting the old bark off can you see how effective it is so as i said you don’t have to always buy expensive bonsai tools so this is very very useful to take bark off and as you know dead bark is harder to take off than live bark but you see how effective it is see how it’s getting down to the wood removing the bark this is all very efficient just a couple of seconds only not even a minute i’ve got so much of the bark removed just using this ordinary potato peeler i haven’t had to use a dremel or anything i will probably use a bit of dremel to refine it but the main donkey work hard work it’s just done with the potato peeler so i’m going to spend more time just working carefully and you will see the end result in another shot there you go so this is what i’ve done using the potato peeler so you see how i’ve been removing the bark from there and this bit of deadwood so i’ve got to continue doing it and i’ll show you the finished thing what i’ve done right i’ve done a bit of the bark removal and looking at the tree from the other side this wasn’t the side i was considering as the front but looking at it from this side the tree looks as nice from this side and i’ve literally only spent five minutes with the potato peeler removing the bark i’ve got to gin it with the white gin fluid i’ve got to remove a little more but you get to see the effect already all these intricate lines of this gin and what i thought was the back now proves to be a more interesting front so there you go so that is my literati looking at it from the other side and the driftwood now that i’ve cleaned it looks more interesting from this angle so things are constantly changing so this is more or less the finished view i may take a still when i’ve applied the lime sulfur but the lime sulfur takes a few days to have effect so here you are all these different pans that is one pad the second pad is there and then so on all these pads come tumbling down so there you go so this is more or less i would say 95 complete by the application of the line sulfur so as i say i hope you’ve enjoyed the thought process and the making of this very very interesting literary shape so i hope this inspires you to have a go at literati if you get young scot spines or black pines coil it with very thick wire and you can get these sort of shapes to develop so be patient and try it and you should be able to enjoy the literati style so there you go [Music] you