How to Create a Bald Cypress Whip Styling Bonsai
Jerome turns a bald cypress whip into a cascade literati-style bonsai. Enjoy the process!
I thought it was a great idea to take a boring ball cypress whip and turn it into hopefully something really cool and interesting so this ball cypress whip is about three years old there’s not much going on right now it’s it’s a little thicker at the bottom and then it gets very thin towards the top and there’s really nothing more to this tree at the moment um it’s skinny it’s boring it looks kind of like a car antenna so there’s not that much to it right now so i know or i think that if we apply some wire some thicker wire and we remove about this section of branches in here and just keep this exposed and put some crazy movement into the trunk that we could hopefully make this tree look a lot more interesting and hopefully create a really special treat all right so the very first thing that we’re going to do here is actually take some scissors and just remove all of these lower branches now these lower branches won’t be incorporated into the new design there’s really nothing that we can do with these branches so we’re just going to take them off so this ball cypress whip is about four feet tall it’s quite tall actually now the good thing about these ball cypress whips is that they are very flexible so if i stand it up like this and i take my my hands and i carefully massage the trunk and you see how much i can bend this tree so that’s pretty impressive so if i keep massaging this tree and then apply wire then i can hopefully bend this tree this tree trunk into something very cool unique and special so now when you massage this you want to really listen to it and you kind of can you can kind of feel it with your hands as you apply the pressure but you can kind of hear the cambium um it starts to crackle a little bit like you can hear that little cracking sound when you hear that cracking sound just back off and then come back and apply more pressure and use your whole palm of your hand to bend this and then you will see that this actually bends quite easily all right so we’re going to take it out of the pot now remove some of the top layer here of fertilizer so that we can actually bend this bottom section as well all right i think we’re ready to apply the wiring so i’m going to use a um quite a thick wire so this is about a three or three and a half wire millimeter aluminum wire and i’m gonna double it up maybe even triple it up and so when i bend something like this like a heavy trunk instead of using one thick wire like a five or a six i prefer to use like a three and just double or triple it up because as the wires are laying next to each other and you have like two or three of them and you start to do the bending and that way your trunk won’t crack as easy if you only have one wire your your trunk will crack much easier than if you have three you have much more support right you have overlaying wires like this all the way you can do much better bends um so what we’re going to do here is take this first wire and just slide it right next to the base into the soil so we’ll jam it down as deep as we can and this is kind of our our anchoring plus something all right so this is our anchoring and then we should start the wireless trick like you would anything else [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so next up before we go ahead and start to bend the trunk um i wanted to choose the part for it first and set it up as well so i chose this part four which is a european handmade pot and it has a really cool shape the front is a little lower and the back is a little more raised so i think if we plant the tree here at an angle and have it kind of cascading down on the side i think that would look really cool so therefore we have to set up the um pot first so that we can then um bend the trunk and part it at the same time this process goes kind of hand in hand so i put the screen at the bottom perfect there you go so this is what the tree this is what the pot looks like and now we’re going to use two wires which we’re going to use as the anchoring wires to to tie the tree into the pot and to prevent it from toppling over we need two wires for that alright so i have my tie-down wires here and i’m gonna need one more wire okay perfect and you’re gonna see why i use three wires on a tree like this in just a moment so this next wire also goes through the bottom here and we’re going to use this wire here to give the tree more movement when we tie it down all right here we are so wire number three all right so next i put my little part on top of a cascading part that’s upside down just to gain more height because we are going to go a cascading so what we’re going to do here now is we’re going to reduce the root ball slightly to make it fit into the pot and at the same time we’re also going to bend the tree the tree trunk carefully to put it into position so this is kind of like a simultaneous thing where you do it at the same time [Music] so now see before i tie it down i just place the tree into the pot so that i can see if i like the angle before i go ahead and tie the string down so therefore i just set it in here and then start to bend and i always keep one hand on top so that i don’t mess up the root ball too much all right so as you can see this tree is quite flexible so it has that nice kind of movement out and then it goes down and so this is why i have this third wire in here which is this one so that i can tie the trunk closer to the pot and make it a little more believable so now i can go ahead and tie this tree down into position all right all right so i’m going to put a little soil now to position the tree to really prop it up into position and then i’m going to go ahead and tie this tree down and continue to bend and and tie it down at the same time so let’s see how that goes [Music] [Music] [Music] so definitely mission is accomplished with this piece right here we took a boring old uh ball cypress whip and we turned it into something a little more interesting with more character now i took this wire here this one right here which is the third wire that i installed and that was just to bring the trunk closer to the pot so that we can create that more dramatic uh trunk line now i’m going to actually water this tree and then i’m going to put it right back out into full sun but i’m going to put the pot about halfway into a dish of water just throughout the summer time and that’s for a number of reasons ball cypress is like a lot of water but also i created this composition here at the uh not most ideal or best ideal time of the year since the tree was already leaved out however i didn’t do a severe root parting i just raked out and reduced the outer layer of the root ball which mostly had dirt in it anyways and then i didn’t really defoliate it either at this point i gave it this movement and i potted it and i’m not going to do this every single time so don’t worry this tree is not going to die just because i i did it at the wrong time of the year i just do this once to the street this tree will never get repotted at the not ideal time ever again moving forward so this tree will perfectly be fine so i’m going to go ahead and water this tree profusely now every single day and then the wires i’m going to have to keep a close eye on them because as the tree now starts to push now that it’s in better soil and now that i gave it some trunk movement it’s going to butt out everywhere and so therefore i have to keep a very close eye on the trunk line but this overall design i would call this a cascading literati style so i hope that you guys enjoyed this video today please let me know in the comments below what you think of my new boss cypress design and please subscribe to our youtube channel and i will catch you guys next time all right
