European Hornbeam Bonsai Tree Layering Tricks
I show you how we make large large hornbeam bonsai, by using air layering as a method and I show you how to pot it up
i’m going to talk about hornbeam bonsai and how we produce them i brought you to this big beast because this was lifted from the ground with a digger if you remember we did a video this was lifted last year in 2020 it was in april 2020 we dug it up and we put this in this great big pot and you can see the growth all these were new branches which were grown from scratch so they’re so easy to grow and because they’re so prolific you have to keep removing these small branches you don’t want all these small branches to grow so you got to be keeping on top of it and just keep the branches that you want to grow so that you get the pads in the right place so all these small things will have to continually be chopped off and taken off and just concentrate on the main branches so the tape tapers there if you come around here you can see the big cut which was made here about 20 years ago this tree by the way is about 36 years from planting in the ground so total age is only about 40. so you can see at the back where the first cut was made then another cut was made here then another cut was made there and that’s how we build the taper up so this tree is well on its way see all these new branches springing upwards i have to cut them off i don’t want them they’re too many here so we just concentrate on making the shape and hopefully one day some person will like this big tree and hopefully buy it so this is how we make these big horn beams now the horn beams are very easy to aliase so instead of having to dig it up from the ground another easy way of making large trees is by air layering as i’ve shown you before so i’m now going to take you to our main hornbeam area where we grow them in the ground but we also earlier them so this is my main hornbeam growing area you can see them they’re all different sizes different heights and you will also notice that these trees actually shaped like bonsai so by pruning in the right place i can get them to shape like a bonsai and then i will air layer them in precisely the position that i want them to grow so look at this one look at if you look at this one come concentrate on this one you can see the nice curly shape there is there and it’ll be quite easy to explain to you how we make the bonsais by air laying so if you come close here you will see that this curly part the branches grow so easily i’m not worried at all they will grow again so the bonds i’m going to earlier will be made from here this part here so i’ll go to area here and i’ll get a nice curly bonsai same with this one with this curly trunk i can easily earlier from here to there and get a nice bottom way from there so this is how these trees are grown they’re grown specifically for air layering and nothing else and when we get to the bottom we will probably dig the trees up so let’s walk around here you can see how all these horn beams are being developed now this one i cut the top off so i’m just going to concentrate on the base and this is the new leader which is coming up and if i want to make a small bonsai from this one i can easily do that you can see just by pruning in the right place so this one will make a nice border here if i want to air layer it and then the base will become another bonsai with a big trunk if we go along here you will see more trees all different stages of growing and you can see how interesting the tongues are so they’ve all been trimmed so that they give a nice s shape now these air layerings you must be wondering what’s happening here you will see that there are quite a few air rings here many many aliens and because the horn beam is so easy to propagate from air layerings i do them throughout the year the best time to start the air layering is in april which is now april may june and if you do them correctly they will root in six weeks so if i do them in april by june i will get all the roots there these by the way were done in late autumn september maybe even early october and let’s see what has happened to them because they’re easy to root i will just look at some of them so let us go to this one for instance i can already see some roots there if you look at the tree if you look carefully you can see the roots coming out from there so this is going to be almost a perfect tree it’s not a small tree either virtually all the branches are there see i could even make more bonsai from the top should i wish but you know there’s a limit to how much you can keep cutting and waiting and making so i may not even bother to use that top there although the top there is useful as a bonsai so let me not waste too much of my time oh let’s use the saw which is here so i want to keep the bonsai here so let’s get rid of this so off with the top now these branches are too thick if i leave them you will get inverse taper so i’m going to get rid of them so sometimes it may be tempting to keep it but no you got to know what the tree will do and i know that that will cause inverse taper so i’m going to get rid of these so many thorns get tripping over it already there is inverse tape i can see already so get rid of that and hey presto we’ve got the bonsai here these i can keep as sacrificials to make a thicker base now let’s tidy this up a little bit so it’s more recognizable and i’m going to cut it over here and then i will open the bag and show you the roots so this was earlier in september and already i’ve got roots so let’s open it i’ve never opened it yet but i will show you you see i don’t tie string or anything i just tied with a piece of wire how easy is that how easy is that and let’s have a look i shouldn’t really be doing it here i should take it back to the nursery to show you but look at the roots can you see the roots there can you see the roots that should be okay to pot up and that will form a new tree so we discarded this we didn’t want that so let’s go and look at some of the other ones it’s really just to show you the principle really you got to look at all of them not all of them may have rooted now this one has roots if you come here we will look at it can you see the roots on the side here see the roots is coming in the bag so that has rooted that’s rooted i can take it off and this also has rooted can you see what a lot of roots in here look at all those roots masses of roots so this is well rooted well rooted so this is another good one this one again has rooted let me perhaps open this one it’s too much plastic see we’ve used this piece of wire which is so convenient look at the roots so this is it so that’s a nice base and this is going to be that s-shaped bonds i can cut the tree there and get a nice s-shaped tree so all these can be separated and potted up it’s a very cold windy day i’ll just show you how i’m going to get the shape from the tree so there is an s shape over there this is not going to be much use now you could if you wanted to make a straight tree going that way and using this as a taper but for those of you who are new to bonsai they don’t understand what inverse taper is you see there’s so many branches here this has become very thick so the tape was not looking very good there so this is where you’ve got to get rid of the bits too many branches because if you have too many branches you get inverse taper and it will spoil the look of the tree you’ll get a bulge in the middle of the trunk where you don’t really want it so you see where i cut i’ve got this nice s-shaped bonsai from there to there and maybe some of these i also don’t need that will also cause inverse taper these thick branches can also cause inverse taper so all we need is that s shape and i in fact should refine this even more because you see how bulgy it is there it should really appear like that so this is rooted but i will separate it later on so most of these have rooted so if we move around here you can see how i’ve been shaping the branches look at that tree i’ve cut in the right place so i get a nice s-shaped bonsai from there so these have been purposely pruned so that they produce the shape of the bonsai and just by earlier i’m going to get the bonsai in the right place this is another good example but this is a example of an airing that probably didn’t quite work you look at the this is called callusing the bag is still there the bag is still there it tried to produce roots but i think the birds took all the moss away so because the birds took the moss away the roots could not form but if i now make the airline again i’ll get a beautiful base i’ll get a bonus like that high and here you are already made bonsai just by shaping the tree and air layering same again here if you look here that may be an airing again but that didn’t succeed that would have been too big but i think the bonsai should be somewhere here so i should do a bonsai airline from this point to get that tree and do another airline from here so i’ll get about three different trees that’s also another bonsai there so there’s lots of potential bonds right here so this is how we use our horn beams for air layering and you can see that no end of material here no end of material that we can use so i hope you’ve enjoyed watching this video on air layering with our horde beams so i’m now going to show you the process right through because the transition what we can call the transition from cutting it off from the tree to putting in a pot is quite tricky now i have here this one this hornbeam was severed from the pantry in september of 2020 and i haven’t had a look at it it was put in this pot and let’s see how much root it will have made since september and there you go look at all those roots complete root ball since september 2020 to april and the tree is growing well so this is the air layering from the horn beam because it’s in the greenhouse it’s already leafing and you notice that i planted it in pure sphagnum moss all this is magnum moss i know it’s expensive but it’s worth it if you plant it in anything else it is not so successful look at all that moss see this is what is growing because the moss encourages the roots to literally go right through the root ball and fill the pot so the moss as i say may be expensive commodity but it’s worth every penny i’ve tried using planting straight in the peat of the compost but it’s not always successful i will show you an example of a failure because i like to show you the failures because sometimes you do get failures now when we put it in a pot i don’t put it in any old pot i’ve got so many plastic pots around why do you think that was planted in this deep ceramic pot because this ceramic pot is heavy it’s not likely to topple over if i were now to plant these in a plastic pot the chances are the pot may not be sturdy enough to support the tree it is possible but it may not support the tree so if i have a tall tree i usually use these heavy ceramic pots because i only need to wait three or four months and it will fill the entire pot with roots so you can see what i did i just put that root ball in there and i’m just going to fill it with moss don’t be tempted to use soil i’m not saying that soil is not successful it will work but there’s always a risk it may not work especially if you use very heavy soil but i prefer to use my well and trusted sphagnum moss trick because i know that you can see the results planted in that sphagnum moss what a lot of beautiful roots you can get so that’s what i do just putting straight moss in the pot fill it quite firmly i’m not breaking the roots because that root ball is intact so that that plastic bar okay it’s not toppling over so that’s all right now this one maybe i’ll use this deep pot because this is quite a tall tree so let’s take this out so hey presto as i said that’s all you need you see there’s quite a lot of root there and that will go in there i can even leave the plastic if i want to there’s no harm because i can always remove it at a later date but i didn’t want to break the roots okay i’ve removed it so again all i do is put moss in there so that is my substitute for compost moss is literally being used as compost and because it’s quite light and not heavy the roots will just shoot through and what do i do with this i need to water it and i also usually stand it in a tray of water now let me take you if you follow me this is where some of the other air layings are stored this is the tray where we stand our air layerings so these are juniper air layerings and they’re standing in this tray and i fill the tray with just about half inch or one inch of water and there are many air layings in here this is a arakawa air layering this was done last year and i think i severed this in september or october of last year and i know for a fact that this will have also rooted and the pot i filled with sphagnum moss let’s see the results look at the roots look at the roots on that so and the moss is still there and i’m now going to transfer this into ordinary flower pot with proper soil so i don’t need to do any more to that same thing with these junipers they’ve all rooted you can see what think thick air earrings i made of these junipers so these have all rooted as well and while i’m there if you stay here i will just go in there i’ll show you another earlier in that we separated last september and you will see it’s quite a tall tree this was oh this is for youtube video there you are another horn beam air laying that we separated and this again i don’t need to take it out it’s full of roots so there you go i don’t want to damage it in any way and maybe tied in no it’s tied in it’s tied in there you are there’s got enough root in there but it’s growing well so this air layering as well and of course the beauty of air layering is that you don’t get these heavy roots that you get when you dig grow in the ground because when you dig in the ground you have to separate those thick hard roots which doesn’t produce good nibari now let me show you some failures that we have now these failures were done as an experiment i mean i didn’t want it to fail but i did it out of sheer interest and these were two big discharges that i airlift from my front garden these ones and you can see that they’re not growing whereas there that big five meter tall maple if you remember this was an elearning cut off in september 2019 and that was five meter high to cut about ten feet off to fit the greenhouse now these two deshojos did not succeed and the reason being i will show you i used ordinary pete and bark and not sphagnum moss and because i used peat and bark these trees did not grow properly they did not send the roots same with this one you can see that i used again pete and box let me remove it what a shame because i would have had too big they showed your trees but sometimes you got to try these expand just to see what works and what doesn’t work so there you are you can see that it had root look at that root ball it had plenty root there lots of root but because i planted it in peat and bark instead of sphagnum moss it was not successful so there was a useful lesson i learned so i hope you’ve learned something and keep learning from all these videos about air layering and how we make bonsai from air layering [Music] you
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