Forsythia Bonsai From Hedging Material
This old forsythia bonsai which you have seen countless times in full bloom this was the one which was dug up from the field it was grown as a hedging plan i have several of these you may remember that i did some other ones where i dug it up and split it with an axe i will deal with those in due course but i have another one very similar to this and i will show you how we can use these ugly stumps to make a quite interesting tree i know i have to carve a lot of this but sometimes i prefer to let them rot rot away naturally and then you’ll get a much better effect so i’m not too bothered about that because when this is in full bloom you don’t see the blemishes in the middle so just a few shots here and we’ll go inside and show you another similar project so as you can see i have a very similar one i have so many of these it’s almost unbelievable because we have a hedge of forsythia every time i trim the hedge back i say to myself do i want that you know it’s so cumbersome uh i don’t need them all so the better as bonsai for saita by the way root from cuttings ever so easily so all these shoots if you just stick in the soil they make new plants that’s how we produce our hedges just stick it in the soil and you’ll get a new plant in two or three months time so i’m just a lot of cuttings there i just stick it into our growing beds and you will get the new plant now this one is quite interesting because that stump is nice but this piece here it’s doing nothing you know it’s out on a limb uh so what will we do with that so i think it should be a separate tree so a twin trunk like that doesn’t work and there’s bits of dead there actually i’m shaking soil off at the same time i want to separate the two i don’t want to pull my back because recently i pulled my neck muscles but very often you don’t have to use a lot of force if you know what you’re doing you can get them out without using force these are like a lot of these tai chi and karate principles you just direct the force in the right position there you are i’ve separated the root and we won’t have to use much force i will also just tease away just have a look i suppose after doing this everyone will be digging out their forsythia plants because buried under the surface you’ll get some beautiful uh stumps and roots so although i started off with the x probably i won’t need the axe i just want to make sure i get sufficient root i don’t want to take too much off without getting root with it there’s a root going down there the forsythia by the way is such a common plant in western gardens but it came from western china so like most of the flowering plants in temperate countries europe and north america they all originated from china and in the 17th and 18th century a lot of these european plant hunters british belgian dutch they went to china mainly and japan and discovered all these beautiful ornamental plants camellias forsythia you name it magnolia all come from china so i’m very proud of the chinese heritage in that way although mind you i’m not really chinese oop oh there’s enough room there there’s enough root there i can grow a nice little plant there that will become a nice plant all the right taper everything so nothing ever wasted who would ever think that this would in time become a nice bonsai forsythia wood is very hard i may have to saw it use the big lopper i have this big lopper very useful lopper these things are not cheap but they do the job levers [Music] so maybe see you can straight away see the line so this in time will make a nice little bonsai with a tick tick trunk over there and what we do with this you can see originally it is buried deep in the ground so whatever is buried deep we’d want to reveal because there’s some lovely trunk there there’s such a lot of root there i’m not worried at all so bonsai is certainly unconventional horticulture you’re not producing carnations and chrysanthemums that’s a completely different ball game bonsai is so different the technology or the techniques are so different i different because it is artistic the horticultural side the propagation and the growth they’re all same as other horticulture oh god i’m not going to waste too much time i will show you after clean i’m going to remove all these roots as well just to show this thick trunk here sometimes if the root is too high we don’t need that here we are you must be wondering why i’m donned up like this it’s because i want to grind away some of the wood i told you that wisteria wood is very hard it’s almost like iron so [Music] oh so so so so there we go we haven’t decided which is going to be the front i think it’s quite nice either way see even if we turned it this way this is a very nice front here that stump is beautiful so we won’t rush to cut bits off because it’s going to produce so many shoots in the coming season that we can decide on what to keep as we see the tree develop so it’s got a long journey to go in fact i have some more stumps i’m going to uh find them and we look at all the foresight so you see how beautiful that stump is that’s absolutely beautiful we will put it in a training pot and then we will show you what it looks like okay so look at that beautiful fibrous root that there is beautiful beautiful fibrous root and that thick trunk that trunk must be at least six eight inches across the bases centipede coming out and i’m going to plant it in one of these temporary plastic training pots so i’ve teased away the soil as you can see this is still the ordinary garden mud it is just ordinary garden mud but look at the fibrous root there is there is a lot of fibrous root and with that amount of root you don’t have any fears of the tree dying it will race away so i will just put it in here this is one of these round plastic training pots by no means the final pot and then let me decide what shall i do shall i use this ordinary garden mud or i can put it in proper soil i think it will continue growing in mud a lot of people ask me what sol are you using but as you can see it wasn’t a pot and it was just growing in mud and after all plants do grow in mud so you must be wondering why do we use special bonsai compost i think we use special compost as the trees get mature you want to control the rate of growth they slow down if you use soil which drains better and the pot being small it needs to drain better and that’s the reason why i think we use better bonsai soil to get the tree performing the way you want it to so because i want to generate roots and make these trees survive better i may use some of my spent soil let me get some spent soil uh just stay there i’ll get some uh now this is just soil we’ve taken out from other old bonsai trees and as long as there are no signs of disease no signs of vine weevil or anything in it i will continue to use old soil i hate waste i absolutely hate waste so where i can and of course we recycle the soil whatever is here all compost we put in our compost heap and then we will use it again after two or three years so this is what we call sustainable practice you know that’s the inward for years and years people used to waste there’s no need for waste so let me just pop the tree up at the sort of position i wanted to grow as i said i could have used the old garden mud but i think it will perform better in this spent or old bonsai compost it’s probably a richer soil give the chance you know for this tree to grow better now we put it up on the bench and we will show you the potential of this tree and look at that trunk look at that trunk isn’t it magnificent come close and have a look at it i think when we wash it off i will jet it off and i’ll take a close picture with that so you can see the potential already it looks nice that is good yeah but i think i still prefer this side this is going to be really thick like that okay all right let me just show you if you remember i can’t recollect which episode it was when i dug out trees from the field these are some more forsythia and these were put in a flower pot and look at all the shoots that have come out from there i’m going to plant it again because i know it’s growing there’s some roots i need to get more roots so this is forsythia as well so we’re just going to put them back in flower pot look at these nice fine roots to grow them on and see already getting a nice hollow trunk so this will make a nice bonsai in future and we have several but not all of them took you remember i split the tree into several parts this is not doing too well i think this is only partly alive now let’s throw that away we don’t need that one sometimes you are successful sometimes you’re not now fortunately this big piece is successful and look at that i can make a stumpy tree there let it grow properly some of the roots are rotten but there are some roots which are alive so the fact that they produce so many new shoots we just put it in a deep flower pot for now and grow it on so these are the continuing projects we have with forsythia so whenever i dig a hedge out i take the roots and the stump and you get this beautiful effect here so there you go so here we are this is that big foresight here when i showed this to you just about a week ago it wasn’t in flower and now on the 22nd of march it is in full bloom it has been exposed to the frost throughout the winter and of course in the winter we had temperatures this year as low as -10 so it has survived well let me show you another one if you come around this one was repotted only yesterday and this was grown in a flower pot having been dug up from the ground this was one of the stumps and look at all that beautiful wood this is all natural rotting of the wood no carving with routers or chisels this is all the natural effect and i must admit it really looks nice we’ve got to refine it still none of these branches are in the right position usually with trees which are as vigorous as this i cut all the branches off and let new branches grow so the trunk is the main thing so that’s another example uh forsythia are very easy to make into bonsai i’ve got some slightly smaller ones if you come along here these are also trees that were dug up from the ground this is all natural wood if anyone wants to carve it and refine it they can do lots of carving and make it into a really cute tree so there’s a lot of scope for improving it that one again the wood has just rotted naturally and look at the beautiful driftwood on this one this is not carved by machine it is all natural so this can go in a smaller pot so this shows you what can be done with the humble forsythia i thought i’d show you one final shot today is the 30th of march and forsythia are in absolutely full bloom and it’s a glorious day it’s a bit of distraction show this beautiful maple while i’m here i’m just going to walk around and show you the other two four sizes because the blooms get better and better with time and they have a very long flowering uh season in fact i noticed that these forsythia first started showing signs of bud around the 4th of march and it’s almost a whole month is today the 30th of march and look at the blooms they’re so dense absolutely dense and this is where when they’re in full bloom you don’t notice the blemishes you know it was just cut at the top but you can’t see the chops at all when it’s in bloom like this i’m photographing in the sun so i hope it won’t spoil the picture but that’s a glorious tree and this is a picture of another tree that we dug up from the flower pot and we just put it in the pot i haven’t refined any of the branches this will come after flowering the branches will be cut off and we will proceed to refine it and make it better there were one or two others i will walk there i’ll walk slowly because it’s a lovely day and things are beginning to grow i know you enjoy these walks so why not enjoy it i’ll take you to these other two all forsythia they are also due to be improved and while i’m walking past these are the conker trees just coming into bud and these two old foresight here with the exquisite trunks and bark when i prune the branches back i’m going to get much shorter branches but i’ll keep that beautiful trunk this trunk also is a natural trunk and i can make something out of that so just these are just experiments they’re not meant to be commercial trees but we do a lot of experiments because we like trying different things so this gives this idea for more and believe you me i have more foresight here growing in the field which we dug up when we dug up a hedge we saved all the forsythia stumps so i hope you’ve learned something from these shots that we’ve taken about for scythia as bonsai so enjoy [Music] you
