Bonsai How to Look After Turtle Back “Nebari”
Turtle Back “Nebari” Field Maple – In this video I show you an acer campestri ’turtle back’ in the making and some turtle back trees that are already established.
You must be wondering what i have here for the past two weeks we’ve been digging trees up from the field using a great big bulldozer and a digger so while digging up plants i came across something very interesting staff were going to throw this on the bonfire and i just rescued it from the bonfire because they don’t know what to do with it but if you look carefully this is a veritable gold mine absolute gold mine
if i just take the weeds off and i will explain to you what we have here for someone who is not into bonsai they must be thinking this is rubbish but as you know we can make bonsai from virtually anything and this people would give their right arm for in the bonsai community there’s a term called the turtle back nebari is not quite the word for it but the turtle back is when the roots cover the surface like a mat and it is usually found with trident maples and japanese maples where they grow trees
with a turtle back i do have some trees with turtleback when i finish videoing this i will take you to that maple and show you what a true turtleback looks like but this reminds me exactly of a turtle back but before i go any further you must be wondering what species of tree this is it’s not yet into leaf so to put you out of your misery this is the english field maple or the botanical name is acer compestry and the acer compass tree or the field maple has three cornered leaves very much like the trident maple it’s green for most of the year and in the autumn it turns a beautiful golden yellow and sometimes it can turn orange
so this is the main interest of the tree and these are going to be the trunks now how come it is growing like this you must wonder and what we have here underneath this is the plastic membrane that we cover the nursery with we covered the nursery with this membrane so that weeds don’t come up and by the same token the roots don’t go through it so what happened was that i had planted a pot on top of the membrane and the roots went through the pot and then it had nowhere to go so it straggled all over the place trying to find the soil and this is what happened
and this what you find here was the tap root where i cut it off cut the root off from the pot and i took the pot and the tree probably became a bonsai and then the base of the root became like this all this growth i shouldn’t have cut this off which was growing about two or three meters tall are only two years old you may not believe it but it is exactly two years old all this growth is one year more than 1.5 meters is one year’s growth so the field maple is an extremely vigorous tree
so what i have in mind is to grow like a matted base what we call the turtle back and let small trees grow from the base so all that growth has made the route strong and made the tree strong but for the bonsai design i will follow this through i will try not to sell this because as you know whenever people see the projects that i do on our youtube videos they always ask to buy it and it’s always tempting when someone is very persuasive to sell it to them but i will definitely try not to sell this one to anybody because i want to show you the progress of this tree as it goes along
you wouldn’t think that you can make bonsai by using these great big implements like this but this is how i work and these are the results i can get as they say we work on serious trees very serious trees so i got to be careful i don’t cut so much that i end up with nothing but then i know that this variety is so vigorous that despite cutting so hard in one year i can virtually redesign this potential tree very easily so that is as far as i’ve gone and i will now bring my secateurs just keep filming you can take some detail of that the buds are so active that they are bursting almost bursting ready to come into leaf
so it won’t be long before this tree will be covered in leaves the english field maple is more vigorous than the trident maple so very nice species to work with so we’ve got it down to here and because i’m going to grow it for the next year or two i might as well get rid of this this plastic membrane look at it sitting on the plastic membrane and it just shows how effective this membrane is the roots just can’t go through the membrane it’s only where you get a puncture that the odd root will go through so this membrane has done well it’s just the odd root that has gone through
i’m now going to pot it up oh see in some places the route has gone through but by and large the roots haven’t gone through there must have been a tiny hole to begin with for it to sneak through we use this membrane a lot on the nursery to smother the weeds and if you may remember some of the earlier videos i did of root cuttings field maple is one of the species that grow very easily from root cuttings this and crab apple are very good for root cuttings i would emphasize that if this was a proper commercial nursery where they’re mass producing bonsai no one would ever waste time doing the things that i’m doing i’m doing it because i like playing around with different projects
different ideas but commercially you wouldn’t grow bonsai like this so don’t get the idea that this is how commercial bonsai are produced this would be thrown away and put in the fire like my staff were going to do it is virtually useless piece of material but i like to show to my youtube audience that there is no need to waste everything can be used so let us use what we have mind you when i started off my bonsai adventure my burnt bonsai journey it’s always been done on a shoestring so nothing was ever wasted
so i’ve come full circle i don’t need to do this for a living but because it is fun i’m doing it and the fun of bonsai really is to make your own and to find challenges that are worth pursuing so this is a real challenge not only is it physically challenging to get it out of this wretched plastic but to follow the project through
oh god so you must be wondering what we did with the things we dug up the things that we dug up with the digger were planted into flower pots or planted back in the ground to go on bigger or to have more compact root and this was just an afterthought really something that we would have thrown away i rescued it from the rubbish dump i’m nearly there for those people who say that they like watching me do all this and nothing is boring i really hope you mean it okay so that is it that’s the piece of plastic got rid of and here’s the base of the tree and the future of the tree is going to be that beautiful root base there with some little trees coming out from the side and looking at it carefully
i could even make this the tree i think that too many things there it’s a bit confusing and conflicting so i take very quick decisions i think this ought to come off i don’t think we need that i don’t think we need this and this is a bit too tall let’s get it shorter and there you go that’s going to be the tree and looking at it it’s already quite interesting look at that huh and what am i going to put it in for now i think i will put it in a tray one of these plastic trays my carrying trays just fill it with soil grow it for a year and see what happens
oh i think it’s almost made for it isn’t it except that this is too long and if it is too long let’s cut it off because that would become a root cutting and i can get several plants out of that there you are a pesto that fits in there i’ll cut a little more off to get it to fit in there there you go i’ll plant it like that and grow it on and that will become several trees i could get let me just show you again to repeat what we do when we make root cuttings
i can get a plant from that i can get plant from that all these will make plants even this one i can get several trees from that i could make a tall tree or i could make several short trees so that’s how we do our root cutting so that’s not wasted so those are our root cuttings so that is going to be the future bonsai and i will show you the progress during the year
i will plant it in the tray like that and now i found something else while i was digging in the field another english field maple now you must be wondering what the hell is this and this one you can see the flower pot is still there and the roots came through the flower pot you see how vigorous the tree is and went into the ground and of course it is so interesting what i find here so let’s see what i can get out of this thick roots are no good for anyone except for me and i will make root cuttings with that we’ll get several trees out of this
so this is what we call trees for free so tight it might even break my loppers no another root cutting and look at that powerful base you’d give your right arm for that now this is conflicting you see the way it’s grown it’s fused together with the other trunk the two trunks are fused together so what can i use as the front now this side is very interesting that part is interesting but this side this side is also interesting there may be too many chunks but i’ll let it grow for a while let’s see what happens because this may become a thick chunk so i’m not going to waste that i’ll just grow it on to see how it develops this is a bit too long these are a bit too long also don’t need those it’s so vigorously from the root there’s growing new plants and new shoots from there
oh god how many plants i can propagate from that i’ve got to be a bit careful i don’t want to waste it because there’s potentially a plant there i won’t rush it but just to show that that’s a beautiful trunk there stump or i can use it like that to make the trunk so look at that for the future of the tree so there you are nothing ever wasted so another interesting projects so i’m now going to show you that turtle back that i referred to so we’ll take you there so let me show you the turtle back i was talking about this is a maple which is just coming into leaf and look at that root see how similar it is to that field maple
i showed broad broad nebari here so that’s what we call a turtle back turtle backs take very long to grow this is one of our field grown maples that i produce from the trees that i’ve been growing for 30 years in my field and look at that base i’m trying to create the nebari there the base turtle back there that will also become turtle back this also is like good nibari look at the root system there so all these nebari’s take time to develop i only need to walk within the space of five feet and you’ll see more that’s another nice nebari there turtle back there developing another one here developing
so this how we develop all these turtle backs that’s another one in this australia look at the root base there so that’s the same principle and now they piece the resistance is this one here if you come close and have a look at this this is a twin trunk but it is a root connected you see there’s another tree growing from here but it’s from the same tree that root has gone there and it’s sprouted up into another tree so it is connected there so this is a turtle back here and then merging and then going into another tree so this is what you get from that turtle back that i showed you with the field maple
so i’m not as stupid as you think i am these turtle backs have a purpose and that one day will become a nice tree with a beautiful basil turtle back with some small trees growing on top of it so i hope you enjoyed this and i hope you can comprehend what i was trying to teach you using turtleback
Making Picea Bonsai Free Session
