Bonsai For Free now today’s video is going to be called bonsai for free i always reckon that there is no excuse for not doing bonsai many people think that bonsai has to be very expensive people may get the wrong impression because on our nursery we have some very very beautiful very old trees which are in the very very expensive class you could buy a very good car for the price of the bonsai that we have on the nursery some of them are exceedingly expensive and mind you there are some very rich people who can afford it so we cater for all sorts of customers but at the other extreme you can buy a little tree for two or three pounds and make it into bonsai or if you couldn’t afford it you can have bonsai for free when i started off in my bonsai journey back in 1967 the first 10 years i never bought a tree i never bought a bonsai i just went into the nearby woods and neighbours gardens who were very keen to encourage me in gardening so they gave me a few little shrubs and plants from their gardens to make bonsai now i’m going to show you what there is free in my own garden this is my own garden if i look around here i only need to walk a few yards and i can show you about a dozen trees that you can use for bonsai let’s come here and i will just show you what we can have now these are big maples of mine and this is a big crab apple but look here there are literally just in one spot alone these are holly trees one two three four five six seven 8 9 10 there are about 20 holly plants here and holly makes very nice bonsai so you can dig these up and you can make bonsai from them i will in fact dig them up and then there is the odd this is a little uh honeysuckle seedling and then there is another one i just spotted there’s a cotoneaster ceiling as well so and these are little suckers of the apple trees so just in this little spot alone there are so many freebies to be had but let me begin by showing you a very interesting tree that i will let grow this is a little silver birch not little and you won’t believe it it is exactly five years old it started growing but i didn’t have the heart to dig it out of the ground i just let it grow but i took the top out over here and then it started branching and look at the trunk it’s over two inches in diameter and it’s already silvering and i know the exact age because i let it grow back five years ago so let me start by showing you what this tree is going to be like you can see it’s got a spread of about two meter spread like five six feet spread and i don’t want all that and i’m just going to cut it back and this is how the bonsai journey will start if i continue to let this tree grow it will get thicker and stronger and you would get a thicker tree in a much shorter space of time so there are all sorts of shortcuts you can take and you can get very good results in a relatively short time so that is all the pruning i’ve done and now let’s get this tree dug out from the ground and we will show you where we go from there so i will now ask my uh colleague jack to do a bit of digging and we can get the tree out so that is the tree at the moment it’s about i would say 40 centimeter high and he’s going to dig round it just to show you how you should be lifting plants so we are digging a circle of about let’s say 60 centimeter all round but we will reduce it further it has never been touched never been dug out so it’s just been growing for the last five years here now he’s completed the circle and now there will be a tap root i’m sure all trees tend to have a tap root but the tackle for bonsai is not necessary because the tap root is only support the tree from falling over but if you’re growing it in a pot you don’t need the tap root see what lovely soil we have here and it’s not a frozen day now if you can lift it out this is the end of january we’re almost getting into february look at how beautifully just pull it off jack there you go there you go that look at that loot look at that great big root we don’t need that okay now if jack kindly hold the camera i will show you now what i’m going to do with it so this can be a leader this can be a leader if you wanted to make a very short tree and even this can be a leader so there are many many options but for my money let me just see what is the best possible option i think this would be a nice front over here so i will just get my loppers we don’t need these thick roots these thick roots can be sacrificed and there’s plenty root there there’s plenty root we don’t need these deep tack roots there’s enough root there i don’t think even we need that so i said i’m going to make this the leader because i don’t want the tree to be too tall so although i don’t have my saw with me i can cut it off with this so that is the new leader i know that a lot of you say that i take decisions very quickly but that comes with experience the more experience you get the quicker you will be able to decide so don’t despair you will be able to do that with practice so all i’m doing is creating a conical shape remember the conical shape is everything i don’t want very thick branches because thick branches will cause inverse taper so i get the thick branches off that’s also a thick branch there i don’t want that in fact i will plant it in a bonsai pot a temporary plastic pot so that didn’t even take five minutes so that is your tree that’s going to be the future tree i don’t think we need that for now we can keep that uh but we don’t really need that so this is the structure of the tree and we plant it in a pot and you’ve got a very respectable tree so there you go and just about three feet away this was a tree that i took took off because it was getting too big for the garden but what have we got here we’ve got a little lovely little oak tree there it’s growing very close to the existing tree so if you look closely in your garden you’ll find all sorts of little seedlings that come up in fact it’s got a tap root i’ll get jack to dig it out that stump will come out the stump is dead that was old pine tree look at it dead tree okay get try and cut the tap root off this is typical sometimes you can get a very long tap rooted let’s take it away just show you what the tap root involves this massive tap root okay look at it now that is typical of some of the trees you dig up so one long root like a parsnip what can you do but what i will do now is i’ll put it in a deep flower pot so that it encourages more side shoots to grow so all is not lost so that has got potential we take that away now i will take you to another spot where jack if you come with me there’s another beautiful little not little this is my vegetable plot where i grow my vegetables you can see some of my spinach there and here growing close together are three oak trees that the squirrels have buried in the ground so we’ll dig all of them up and we’ll see what we can get it’s a nice mild air and everything is soft the ground is soft and you notice again what i’ve done i’ve not let these trees grow tall i’ve taken the leader out so they’re all well branched you see how well branched they all are take the other one out first the other one on to the right you can probably get that out oaks are not taurus because they do have a long tap root if if there is a taproot we may need to use a lopper to lop it yeah i think you’ve got the tap root very good let’s pull it out i think it’s through the we may have to cut thing okay we can have a look you see there are tables so we’ll get that or we cut the wire so that one is out and then we they’re two more there let me show you exactly what we do with them okay you may need to use the lopper to get the tap root jack yeah okay try the little one as well try the little one so jack is going to use the lopper to cut the tap root off so again that tree is no more than five years most of these trees are this one is five the other one is probably three so it just shows if you grow it in the ground they grow quite fast now this has got massive taproot but very few side shoots but don’t despair even this will survive so i’m pretty sure this will survive so i’ll show you how i’m going to plant it okay so we got all of them out and look at this one as well look at the long tap root that this has got so all these are going to be put in deeper flower pots and uh we will then see how we get on okay the next stage will be showing you how to put these up now this one has grown through the wire netting you can see that we have wire netting to prevent the rabbits going in but this little seedling has grown through the wire netting so we got to grow i mean cut all this wire netting off to release the tree and you can see that it’s already got a lovely shape so we proceed to cut the wire netting off and then we take it in and pot it up so the trunk of that tree is at least an inch maybe more so you can see the long tap root what a long tap root the tap root is about two foot long about nearly 50 centimeter long and the tree itself is about 70 centimeter and they are all about five years five years or less so we’re going to show you how we’re going to pot these up and while we’re here we’re going to do another little project right in this little space as i showed you earlier on there are so many little treasures here so let’s see what we can get so that’s a little cotoniaster and this is a little hedging honeysuckle and they’re all seedlings so we’ll use these so that’s two little plants and these as we said are the holly trees there are so many holly trees i don’t know what to pull out holly trees everywhere we use them for making hedging as well so there you are that’s a holly tree i think these are only about i would say three years old and you must be wondering why the holly is growing here because my holly bushes are about 400 meters from where we are and i think what happens is that the birds eat the holly seeds and when they drop their droppings the droppings become the young plants so there are loads of little plants here and every one of them can be made into bonsai so we’ve got about four here and there are more so all these are what we call plants for free normally you would throw them away so already i’ve got six plants here where the other ones that i dug up ah and then i will show you just a few more so this is my great big maple tree and if you home in there you see all the holly bushes there there’s scores of them everywhere i hadn’t noticed that i had so many here as well that one’s got a very nice thick trunk that one’s got like a two inch trunk so that one has been pruning back all the time i have to dig that up because if i don’t dig it up it’ll be very hard to get up dig the roots up later on now let’s look at this area here and in this area this is a type of hedging honeysuckle and these are just wild seedlings that have been growing here and it’s really a nuisance i can’t get any of that out but i guess it’s very hard to get them out every single plant will make a bonsai that’s got some root that’s possible so all these plants here they’re all potential bonsai material all these are little plants for free and i think there are some cotoneaster as well now this is a cotoneaster seedling here and that’s just been growing and probably been going here for the last five or seven years in the summer it’s very hard to dig because it’s very dry here but of course that summer’s not a good time to dig in early spring which is about now that’s a good time to dig it oh this one’s got a long route i think this route belongs to something else the trouble with trees that grow wild sometimes very hard to get the root out completely oh okay this is all good learning experience so there you are that tree’s got a lovely bend there but it’s got very little root there and it’s got that root but very fine roots but i’ll show you how we will pot these up so that these trees won’t die there’s another interesting one there so let’s see if i can get that one out this is almost like collecting from the wild except the wildest in my garden of course the aim is to try and get as much root as you can but you know the world is never perfect so you just got to make do with the best you can achieve there you are so i got that out so that’s got more root and it’s got an interesting shape so we’ll train this as well so there you are just in the space of a few minutes i’ve got so more so much the more i look the more i find there’s another kotori cottonyaster that’s got a thick trunk as well and these are just all stray seedlings here and look at this beautiful thing this is a honeysuckle root that was growing on top of a dead silver birch stump let’s see if i can get this one out i hate waste i never like to waste anything so this is how i started my bonsai journey on my bonsai career just by doing simple things like this without great expense so there’s never an excuse for not doing it because you don’t have any money or anything there you go look at that stumpy thing here look at that that’s a beauty isn’t it there you are so we’ve got such a lot of material in just the space of a few minutes so we will go into the back greenhouse and work on these so this is the harvest we managed to get out and just say about 20 minutes of digging and look at all these beauties all for free all for free so let’s take them in sequence as we dug it out so the first one we did was this silver birch which believe it or not even i can hardly believe it is only five years old look at that almost a complete bonsai five years of growth and there’s sufficient root in there so there’s lots of root there’s a thick root there and what i would do in this case because don’t be in a rush a lot of people are in a rush to get a perfect bonsai straight away there is no rush we’ve got all the time in the world so it’s not even worth putting it in a bonsai pot if you don’t have to uh because i’ve got so many i may probably use it you can always put it in say like a training pot let’s see that might fit this quite deep that would fit i know it’s not in the right angle cutting the odd root one hurt i don’t want to cut too much root off the wood off silver birch is very soft there you are that fits snugly in there so that will go in there fill it with soil and you can see look at it very respectable it has to be on this side because there’s a big long root on that side until it develops more root i won’t shift it to the center until i get more root growing so there you are straight away i’ve got a respectable bonsai then the next ones were these great big oak trees there are so many of them look at this one now this one although there are some roots there are not enough roots but what i usually do with most of the things i dig up is i don’t leave too many branches on because if you leave too many branches it makes excessive demands on the root system and if it makes demands on the root system the tree will not get a chance to grow properly and therefore it could suffer now i’ve got a decision to make here i can grow it at this angle and make this the leader let’s see there are so many choices at least we have the choice if you don’t have the choice in that becomes more difficult more problematical but here look at it straight away it begins to look like a nice tree so we can either make the tree this high like this without going too tall let’s do that why have everything so big you know we’ve got enough big trees so i’m going to bite the bullet i’m going to choose this as the new leader there you are i made it short and there you are nice cute tree and i’m going to plant this one in a flower pot because there’s not enough roots so let me choose a pot and show you the sort of pot i will use so now however tempting it is to put in a bonsai pot it’s not ready yet there’s not sufficient roots so i can either plant it in a pot like this although that may be a bit too small maybe plant it in a thing like that and let it produce more roots and next year we will put it in a bonsai training pot now let’s see the other oaks that we dug out from that same patch there were quite a few there were three from there so now this one is like a big person up here that’s the tap root and all trees produce a tap root especially oak trees and as i said to you earlier tapped roots are produced by trees to keep the tree stable as it grows taller so as it grows taller it sends the taproot deeper so that when it is big the wind won’t blow it over but since we’re growing these in pots we don’t need a tap root there’s nothing to blow it over so there’s quite a lot of fine root there and again i’m going to put it in a flower pot i don’t want too many branches because that’s going to make excessive demands on the root system you see how fine the ramification is and this is from constantly pruning while it was growing in the ground every time i passed that tree i used to cut a bit off cut the ends off and that’s how i get the ramification so i let it grow in the ground but while it was growing i keep cutting it so that’s another subject but this one we will probably plant in a flower pot like that and hope that it will produce more roots i’ll take you through all of them now this one for some reason has got a beautiful informal upright shape from not actually doing anything to it so i don’t want it that tall and this tap root because there’s not a lot of root i’m going to keep it so that i will just plant it in a flop or deep flower pot and let it grow on so i i hope you’ll get more roots from this part rather than from lower down so i’ll find another flowerpot for that now this one is pretty straight again the root is like a parsnip so long but i’ll plant it deep so that it will produce more shoots so i’ll cut that off over there so that it won’t make excessive demands on the root system and hopefully that should go now holly trees like this although they are only like two or three years old look at it the trunk is already very respectable and what can we make out of this rather than keep it growing absolutely straight i will just put a piece of wire and give you an informal upright shape i have so much scrap wire no point using good wire so i’ve got a selection of scrap wires and i’ll just see what greater wire will help to bend this little tree let’s see by the way you know you get aluminium y in clear aluminium or anodized they’re all aluminium wire some people like the clear wire because it reminds them that the wire is there all does the same thing all very bendable this is the ideal stage to bend the tree there you are so that’s bent like so and let’s put a tiny piece of wire across to water branches cotoneaster seedlings are so easily available if you have a cotoneaster plant or your neighbor has a catonias to plant the chances of finding seedlings in the paving are very high you’ll always find it look at that i’ll just put it in a little pot that pot is probably too big but a smaller bonsai pot that would make a nice bonsai and then let’s see what we do with this this one has got a lovely bend already there but you don’t want all that height you know so i would cut it there and probably cut it there and i will probably wire the branch out that way let me do it just to show that i’m not cheating i’m just making an anchor on the main branch or the main trunk and then wiring it up to this single branch that trunk i can’t really bend so i just leave it as it is and then i will plant it in a pot at that angle and hope you get more branches going out from there so that’s the second one and then there was this very very tiny one oh there’s so many there’s a cute one here and let’s see what we can do with this one so just show there’s no excuse at all not to use whatever material you can find lying around you and this is all scrap wire when the lock down is over i will advertise it and i will probably give away some of my old scrap wire because i have too much of it and that’s what then let me just find another piece of wire i will put all these up and show you the finished product you see that one is wide like that i’m going to wire it like that and i’ll put it in a small pot and i’ll show you the end result now this one was at hedging honeysuckle just the seedling this seedling is probably only like two years old i haven’t even wired if i put it in a small pot how cute is that that would make a nice bonsai so i’m going to put this in a pot and show you what that turns out and then we come to these cotoneasters here that one is quite nice it’s got quite a lot of root there and it’s got a nice trunk line so what will i do with this so i’ll look at it from every side there’s a branch here that could be used this is dead they’re so prolific in producing branches that you needn’t worry if there are no branches on the trunk they will produce branches very very readily very quickly see i’ve got so many choices i could make this the leader as well if i didn’t want to make that the leader you know probably i will take the other option it’s pretty hard and probably cut it back to there oh the wood is pretty hard i think that is quite an old tree i think i don’t need that now and i will grow this and then we’ll develop the branches and that will be the future tree because they got so many branches i can put that in a fairly shallow pot so that is going to be the future tree and this one is again like a parsnip root so i’ll have to plant this in a deep flower pot i can leave this branch and make it a cascade tree at some future date and have a little crown there so as you can see there’s so many possibilities to this so i won’t cut too much and hopefully this will give me options for the future so these will all be planted into flower pots to make potential trees and there’s more look at it there’s so much let’s see this got quite nice roots lots of very nice routes so with this one you can either use this as the leader or you can use that one as the leader but i think i’ll choose the other side as the leader that may look more interesting these loppers are very useful very useful tool so we’re going to use this one as the leader so that’s going to be the leader like that so the tree is going to grow that way so these are all potential material very hard wood gosh so that’s going to be the potential tree and you can either keep the trunk short because the roots here keep the tree this high or can make it a toiletry so all the options are there in fact because there’s such a lot of fine root i don’t need this thick root here so you just play it by ear so there’s so many possibilities there you are so that’s another possible tree what more have i got that little cotoneaster there i don’t want to waste anything now let’s put a little piece of wire there and see what we can get out of this now let’s see after this i’m now going to go and get some small bonsai pots and i’m going to put them up and when i potted them up i will show you the end result of what we’ve done in just the space of barely 45 minutes we produce all these nice little potential trees there you are so we have now potted these little plants up we’ve got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve a dozen trees just dug up by walking at random around the nursery so the first one we showed you was at silver birch and that one’s got at least two to two and a half inch trunk diameter trunk and that is the future direction of that tree and then the oak trees that because it didn’t have a lot of root i put it in a flower pot so that is going to be quite a nice looking tree and this also i reckon is no more than five years old because i have seen the acorns growing that’s another oak tree growing in the garden on my vegetable plot some of the smaller oaks that’s a natural shape without wiring and this is another one and this is the cotoneaster that we’ve dug up so that can be a future cascading tree and these little roots they will make a nice canopy here with a very thick chunk same with this one look at that trunk it’s thicker than my thumb so they all have so much potential and of course these little holly trees that i dug up and these are probably only two-year-old seedlings so that looks very nice with a bit of wire this one only got one piece of wire so that’s looking like that and then the smallest holly which is probably just over a year old i’ve got it looking like that and then this honeysuckle honeysuckle seedling i put in a long pot because let me see if i can find a piece of rock to put with it because if i can put a piece of rock it will make it look nicer i could have put it in a smaller pot but i wanted to put a piece of rock so if i put a piece of rock there and then cover the rest with moss something no bigger than that i suppose and as we say you can let your imagination run wild and there you are in that delightful little tree all for free everything for free you didn’t have to spend any money except for the pots there you are so there’s no excuse for not doing botsai so these are bonsai for free there you go [Music] you
