Graham Potter of demonstrates exactly how to use carving techniques and wiring to create a bonsai tree from a very poor quality large tree stump. Bonsai techniques include, power carving, bonsai wiring, preserving bonsai deadwood, creating bonsai branch structure and basic bonsai tree care.
Are Bonsai Trees Evergreen?
I guess we all make mistakes in life it’s what makes us human in a bonsai context every mate every mistake that we make is potentially another opportunity to learn something that we didn’t know before uh this is one of my mistakes don’t ask me why i bought this it was a job a lot of trees it seemed like good value at the time and this was included uh this is a prunus uh prunus sarasivera very similar to a blackthorne that’s very familiar throughout the uk the only real difference is peruna sarasa ferro grows a lot faster as red twigs and the new growth instead of green [Music] now this has been in this bucket for two or three years since it was uh collected all of this branch structure has grown from obviously a bear stump and in the first year somebody had the foresight to put some wire onto the new shoots as they emerged from the trunk and that’s been helpful because we’ve got some basic shape in the uh primary branch structure the rest of it i’ve just left it i’ve kind of been avoiding it for a couple of years it grew itself through the part and into the ground a nice crop of weeds but i think we’ve got something to go at and so today it’s time to bite the bullet and deal with my mistake so the biggest issue we’ve got with this piece of material is this massive trunk but it’s dead straight it’s got no taper and for a deciduous tree if we want to make a powerful image we need a trunk that tapers from the base up into the apex of the tree at some point somebody’s cut two huge branches off up here where it would have just gone up there’s one and then forked into two and those have been rudimentary carved and hollowed out as a result nothing has grown beneath here and so all of the branches come from maybe one third of the trunk which is still alive over the uh time centers was collected since there’s nothing that’s grown from here this bark has died back and so the first thing i need to do after we clear the weeds is take a power tool and start to strip some of this bark down find out what’s alive and what’s dead and then we can start to make some decisions as to where we’re going to go obviously we’re going to be doing a lot of carving and taking a lot of material out of this there are good surface routes around the tree so it makes a reasonable debary there’s a big root here this one appears to be certainly dead on the top of it maybe live underneath i can’t tell at this point so the first thing i really want to do is get into this and start cleaning up so we can really see what we’ve got when working with any uh deciduous tree indeed pretty much any tree that’s from collected material the first thing we want to do is ascertain what we’ve got around the soil surface to pop this in this trees and it’s relatively shallow so we know we don’t have any big massive roots are going going deep down and gonna cause us any problems later but it’s good to know what we’ve got under here wouldn’t advocate growing weeds in these pots for any particular reason other than that you may be too lazy to to get so here i’m just pulling away the weed root and we’ll progressively uncover this and then we’ll be able to see much better what we’ve got and what we’re dealing with because it’s important to ascertain which of these roots are going to be alive which are dead which we’ve got to keep which we can get rid of and that’ll give us some idea as to the uh shape of the base of this trunk now you can’t always design a tree from [Music] the angle of the best nabari it depends on where the best angle of the tree comes overall so what we’re not look we can’t just go right this is the best in the barry therefore this must be the front uh because sometimes usually you’ll find that the best nebari is not the best ultimate front for the tree but at this point what we’ve got to do is figure out exactly what we’ve got in this pond when dealing with trees like this it’s quite uh common to find roots like this there are little things that stuck up in the air if you’re not too sure whether you should keep it or get rid of it if you just clean around and see how much fine root is actually coming off that now you won’t be able to see this but at this point here this comes up and then it disappears down into the soil and this as you can see from under here there’s very little root or anything on there so we can feel confident in getting rid of that so the best thing is to just give it a a chop and then we can just pull that out of there and you can see most of that if you can see by the bark color most of that is actually dead and there’s another one just underneath it that does appear to have a lot more going on so i got rid of the weeds i’ve had a pick and a scratch around this and it’s every bit as crap as you probably thought it was uh we’ve got two options i can take it and put it in the hedge but i don’t have any gaps i’m going to have to persevere so the next thing i want to do is to figure out what parts of this tree are actually alive and what i did and maybe that will give us something to go on now you can see this area of roots had a big cut on the end here you can see there’s brown underneath here and if i put the knife under there you can see it just lifts away really easy the underlying cambium having been dead for a couple of years has started to rot and that bulk pops off really easily so we know there’s absolutely nothing there once we start to clean back we’ll get to something the the color will change at this point here so we’ll see green perhaps a slightly pink color but you can see at this point where this is all dead this just pops away really uh really easy in nice big chunks and so obviously we know there’s nothing nothing alive there at all so the best tool we’ve got for removing this bike is this little terrier runs on a small power tool perfectly adequate for this this type of work [Music] so we don’t need to get very far here you can see dead wood and if you look carefully you can just see along here the colour has changed it’s uh sort of a whitey pink color black line in between so we know that this piece is alive so this great big route while it’s dead on the top is alive underneath and there’s probably quite a bit of supporting route underneath there having been a significant route for this tree in the past so we’re just going to follow this line and see where it leads us [Music] so that was tedious but i’ve now removed everything that was dead from this the bark is really thick very typical of a young tree everything’s thick everything’s very straight and it’s just going from bad to worse so just here there’s a live vein that runs all the way up into the top and then on this side you can see just on the edge there that’s live everything on the other side of this tree that you can’t see is alive there’s no breaks in that everything’s fine all of this root here is all alive this side as i said before is dead on top uh the next thing i’m going to do is deal with this little bit of weirdness here as you can see by this color there was a little live part there it wasn’t going anywhere it wasn’t feeding anything it didn’t have any uh buds on it at all and this little piece here is alive with a couple of weird roots that are tangled in with the rest of it that’s not doing anything so the next thing i’m going to do is get rid of that now this has gone we’ve got a little better little improvement here uh something nice to build off of but i now need to turn my attention to this great hunk of wood here it’s not going to be possible to get some uh amazing taper into this tree because basically we’ve got two long straight life parts and while we can dress those up and fiddle with those a little bit we can’t move them and so what i need to do is i use uh some halloween and so on and so forth to get some tapering to the stream the first thing i need to do is get rid of some bulk of wood here and that’ll start that process [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] right four hours into this project now and as you can see the dead was coming together i got a lot of nice deep hollow in here there’s a massive pile of sawdust on the floor and now we’re going to go over something much smaller just a little wire brush and start to clean up some of this and to get rid of some of the roughness and start to blend in some of the tool marks and that’ll give us a much more natural effect when this is all finished up now that i’ve finished carving this tree i’m going to put a little preservative on here if this was fresh wood i wouldn’t bother because the sap usually prevents anything you put on it penetrating into the wood but because all this wood has been dead at least a couple of years i’m going to put a little uh diluted lime sulfur it’s just a straight line sulfur with about 20 water in it uh that’ll penetrate into the wood much deeper than a neat product and it won’t give us too much of a bright white finish i’m not looking for that bright white color on this there’s always a chance it might go bright orange you can see down here there’s lots of orange color but it’s all a part of the process so we need that sulfur in the surface of the wood to stop the fungi and the bacteria getting in that will break down the wood over a period of time that’ll preserve this wood for much longer than it would last otherwise so it’s going to be a process over a year or two to get the right and a natural looking colour on this but for now a little lime sulfur all over and then a little uh water base of dark stain on the inside will give us some really nice shadow make it pop and make it look presentable for the time being [Music] baby [Music] [Music] uh no finish the carving on this uh tree i’ve got it as far as i want to get it for now so now i’m going to turn my attention to the branch structure as i said at the beginning initially in the first year that somebody put some wire on this tree so our primary branch and it’s got some basic shape to it over the couple of years that it’s grown since that branching has really hardened up so i’m going to have to use some fairly heavy wire because in the construction of a deciduous tree it’s really only probably going to be wired twice the first one really is this initial styling where we create the branch lines and we lay everything in place it then needs to grow for two three four years once a ramification has built up in the summer we can go through and find wire and refine the shape and from that point on all we’ll be doing is uh improving the structure of the tree by regular pruning so at this point what i need to do is get rid of some of the long straight stuff and i’m also looking at getting rid of as many knuckles as i can by knuckle i mean a branch which has three twigs coming out of one point because with a deciduous tree if we have one that falls into two that creates a nice junction but if we have one that then falls into three the point at which all the branches emerge over time begins to thicken up and creates a nasty knuckle uh inside the structure of the tree so what i’m going to do now is shorten all this back and get rid of as many of those knuckles as i can and also the branches i can see are going to be superfluous to the styling this is a classic example of what we mean by knuckle here we’ve got a single line that comes through from the primary branch and at this point here you can see one two three four and the middle one five and you can see already that that point just here is beginning to thicken up so what we could do is prune some of those away to try and uh save this piece of the tree but what i would prefer to do in this case because it’s such early days is actually get rid of that all together and then you can see at that point we’ve got two nicely spaced branches they don’t come from quite the same point and what they’re going to do in the future is develop but they’re not going to create that thickening that we’ve just removed [Music] so [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Applause] [Music] [Music] i finished wiring all of this tree and as you can see there’s a lot of wire uh prunus branches are very stiff and very hard to bend so in this instance i’ve had to use heavier wire than i make perhaps with a different species like say an elm something like that with this initial styling it’s important that we wire everything we want to use everything that we’ve got here just pruning it all away and allowing it to regrow will increase the density of the tree nicely but it won’t give us a nice quality structure so at this early stage it’s important to wire everything and then use everything and to be able to place it also going forward that’s going to give us some good structure and the secret to uh being able to style a tree like this is to having wired everything make sure that the wire holds so if you bend the branch like that see it doesn’t spring back wherever i bend one of these branches it’s going to stay and that’s really important because the shapes that we fix in place at this point are going to be here for the life of this tree as bonsai so this is a very important stage in the development of any deciduous material when it comes to bending the branches on material like this it’s important because we’ve got quite a lot of straightness to get some nice and interesting twists and turns and movement in that now just pulling a branch in the general direction we want it won’t give us a real character that we’re looking for and because these branches are very stiff and the wire is uh slightly overkill the technique i like to use in bending a branch is to use uh gym pliers whenever we bend a branch we want the wire on the outside of the bend so we’re bending this way we want the wire to come over here that stops the fibers breaking and bursting outwards which obviously prevents the branch from breaking so the way i’d like to do that is to use the pliers support the coil above where you want to bend then take the wire in the pliers and bend around this finger and using the pliers to apply a gentle pressure and also with deciduous trees if you twist slightly as you bend it’s much less likely that you’ll get any breakages so if you see here we want to bring this one down so we take the wire here support it just above and a little turn and a twist and then move that along and a little more from there and as you can see that comes down really nicely really easy and we’ve got a much more interesting shape in here so we’ll take this down and then with the ends of the branches we always want those facing up because the new growth is going to come from these ends and if they face upwards they grow much more strongly and much more reliably with the thinner branches like this obviously you can just support with your fingers and gently bend along but make sure wherever you’re bending you’re getting some nice little twists and turns in that and then again the ends face upwards going forwards for the development of this obviously we’ve got these ends we’ll get more backboating we’ll get lots of little shoots popping out from all in here and we keep all the ones that grow upwards we remove everything that grows downwards and so over a period of time that gives us some nice uh branch density or sort of pad volume if you like but this just lays out the basic bones of a branch structure and because the way we’re bending using pliers it gives us a lot of control but it also uh helps us to stop any bending and breakages because we can control very closely where we’re applying pressure to a branch uh and where we place our bends whereas just using your hands alone is a little bit uh less precise another useful technique for bending very big branches like this one is the wire tourniquet while this wire along this branch is never going to be big enough to hold this really stiff material so the way we make this work is we just pull that larger wire slightly away from the branch and tuck a little copper wire in there and you can see that now holds that uh but obviously it doesn’t apply any pressure to the branch because it’s on the wire and then we just take standard little wood screw and pop that in the bark just screw that in to where the heads just above the surface of the bark that gives it a nice anchor point so now we take the two ends of the wire it’s obviously important to get this anchor point in the direction we want to move this branch which in this case is down and slightly backwards take the two ends behind the screw give it a little pull and just put a twist in there and then we can grab the end of that wire with the pliers and applying pressure with our hand just gently pull that branch in so i’m not pulling on the end of the wire at all all the movement is coming from my hand pulling up here that gives us a nice controlled bend so you can see that’s coming and as soon as that wires just tightened off you see that branch doesn’t move anywhere at all look at the main fulcrum or bending points along the branch if the bark starts to open up uh just stop let it rest and then perhaps you can come back and give it some more it’s a very powerful technique very easy to break a branch by overdoing it but just little by little and the beauty of bending with your hand is you feel because uh just how much pressure’s going on there you so i’m only pulling that with one finger so that’s no no big deal if you’re just pulling on the wire you’re quite likely to break the end of the wire and also you have no idea how much pressure you’re putting on that branch because when you bend a branch the further you bend it the greater the resistance and when the resistance reaches a certain point that’s when you get a breakage so just go little by little with that and then we could just take this end away and you can see that branch is absolutely fixed in position there right where we want it [Music] good so so here we are at the end of a four-day marathon i’ve been out here on my own in the freezing cold and uh this has been a lot of work there’s a massive pile of sawdust it’s taken a lot of wire sore fingers but i’m really really happy with the result 40 years ago a good friend of mine said that you have to use what you’ve got to get what you want and at this moment in time i had this and for sure it wasn’t very promising but i’m really pleased with the result it might not be the best tree out there but it’s a good start as always for bonsai this is not the finished article this is the start this is the beginning of the journey of this tree to becoming monsante can’t say i’m looking forward to taking the wire off in the summer but for the stage we’re at today i’m really pleased with the result and hopefully it’s giving you some inspiration to go out and perhaps look at uh less than uh spectacular material and by applying a little creativity and a little imagination you just quite never know what you’re going to get so hopefully you’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way with this tree and hopefully we’ll be able to revisit this again in the future [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] you
