Epic Pine Bonsai Rock Planting
All right so in this episode of in the workshop we’re in the full swing of repotting season right now i mean just last week we were in those frigid temperatures down to about 10 degrees fahrenheit or minus 11 or 12 celsius but this week we’re already up into the 70s fahrenheit so you can see from the mass amounts of sweat on my shirt here it is actually quite hot here so perfect timing to be getting into our repotting season here and today we’re going to be repotting this ponderosa pine so this tree was originally styled by naoki mayoka who is my kohai from fujikawa kokayan in japan he came to our open house event on september 1st 2018 and styled this tree for me then so i subsequently repotted it the following spring and now it’s been basically two years since it was last repotted so i want to change this tree up and put it in a brand new container and i’m not exactly sure what kind of container we’re going to be putting it in maybe it’ll be a rock maybe it’ll be an actual ceramic container i’m not exactly sure but we’ll have to get into the root system of the tree first to really find out what’s going on down there but the styling that you see right now is actually the secondary styling of the tree by our apprentice here at asan cameron carlson so i think the tree has improved tremendously over the last two and a half years and it is definitely in need of a new container so that’s what we’re going to be jumping on in today’s episode something okay all right so when cameron did the second styling on this tree the angle was changed pretty drastically so we’re actually going to have to work the roots down here back quite a bit more significantly than other areas of the root system to get it to fit in whatever container we’re going to put it in um one two three one two three all right so i don’t know what you guys think but i think that this stone looks absolutely killer for this tree as soon as we set it up in here cameron was like it looks like it we put it back where it came from and i feel the same way so this is actually a lace rock from the new mexico arizona area and of course the tree was collected out of colorado so you know not too disparate of a location between the two anyway but in any case i think you know this looks like how you would find this tree up on one of those granite mounds out in the denver area for example i think it fits the tree absolutely perfectly another cool thing about this too is that the pocket is exactly on the right angle and the right size for the root ball so we’re not going to have to cut any of the roots off the tree the tricky part now though is to figure out exactly how to tie the tree to the stone so i’ve never been a fan of cementing wire to the stone or you know doing things to the stone that might actually ruin the stone in the long run so i want to figure out a way to actually tie it in with wire without having to do that so it’s going to be a little bit tricky but we’ll take you guys through that process here one two three all right so it looks like we’ve got a hole right here that we could attach a wire through but i’ve searched the rest of the stone i don’t see any additional holes that are naturally there so we’re gonna have to figure out a way to rig this up to get the wire to stay in place so there a lot of natural crevices in here we may be able to rig something up that will create kind of a hook around this area so that then we can tie it to it but we may actually end up having to cement some wire in here so we’ll play it by ear kind of see how it goes but next step here before i do that though i’m just going to put a whole bunch of soil in the bottom of this here we’re using aoki blend here which is basically 50 akadama 25 qdu 25 lava rock so it should be you know pretty free draining mix and this being on a rocket will evaporate relatively quickly once we water it so it doesn’t need to have you know less akadama in it i think but in any case we’re going to try that wiggle the tree in see if we can attach it without actually hooking wires to this with cement and then we’ll see how it goes all right so we opted for a little bit of an unconventional way of tying the tree into the container here and that was to take the wire out and around the bottom and then come back over the top there really wasn’t a good way to even use the natural hole that we had on the backside here the reason i say that is because when we actually go in to fill this area in with soil i don’t want to fill this entire area up to the rear here where the hole is i want to be able to see this big lip kind of hanging over so if we were to have attached a wire across here it would be sticking out above the eventual soil line which is not ideal we want to be able to hide these wires in the soil so the tree is actually really solid in here now and we only had to use two tie-in wires around the outside and we did actually put a dowel in on the other side there to provide a little bit more stability under that side of the root system but now it’s just a matter of backfilling it with more alky soil and then using some peat muck to cover this area and put some actual moss on top of it to complete the look yes [Applause] is that a good angle for it um [Music] all right so to give it a more naturalistic look we added some azaleas down here at the base now of course where this tree grows in nature you’re not going to find azaleas around these plants but in this particular setting i think it actually adds some naturalness to the effect of the planting we also put moss on the soil surface here to sort of complete the look now as you see it right now it looks a bit overly mounded so in the future we’ll be able to work this down a little bit more but for right now i wanted to have more soil rather than too little so i think that you know this tree should respond quite well to this repotting again we didn’t cut any roots on the plant and the styling that we did back in the winter months on the tree was relatively mild even though we did have to use some raffia on the tree but you know as you can tell it’s a little bit messy right now in terms of the foliage on the plant but that’s totally normal at this stage of development with ponderosa pines i’m not worried about elongated needles or curled needles all i’m worried about is getting as much back budding as possible on the tree to make it as healthy as possible once we get to a certain stage of ideal health i will then start to reduce the needle size going forward so this is one tree down and about 75 more to go for the spring season so i’m gonna head back in the workshop and get on the next plant [Music] you
