London Zen Garden
In this video I show you how the Zen Garden is in our Islington Project in London.
I haven’t been to see the islington zen garden in London for about three months so this is the first visit of 2021 we have to maintain this garden so here we are looking after it and because we did a hard prune of all the trees back in the autumn they’re all looking very good and this is the zen area the deciduous trees haven’t come into leaf yet but they soon will be in leaf so we just got to do a little more pruning these plants are all an irrigation system but the irrigation has been turned off since the end of october and it’s not on yet we’ll put the irrigation on uh maybe in the first week in april and this is the giant beam and all the leaves are coming into leaf everything looking good these are my large bonsai they’re about six foot high two meter high that’s what we produce them for it’s a lovely day lovely spring day i don’t want to be in the video i think the trees and the garden are what you would like to see [Music] can’t imagine that some of these rocks were as much as four tons even these small ones are about half a ton this is a massive part this has got like a six to eight foot spread they had to be craned over all these trees look at the size of that pine this is a bouvernensis pine that we grew on the nursery since 1986 so they’re all over 40 years old we brought them as already quite big plants and they’ve been trained over all these years so these are all bonsai that we make large bonsai that we make and i’m very proud of having created them all these are homemade trees non none of them are imported trees so here i am explaining to our viewers what i’m doing here i’m pruning these large japanese garden trees which are made from bhuvanensis pine the dwarf scotch pine and the main maintenance really is to make sure that there are layers between the different pads so anything hanging down because there are such prolific trees i’m not worried about cutting too much so anything hanging down is cut away so we we leave this space between so this one is like is hanging down with that and that one back side is also hanging down so i removed that whole branch so quite a lot a lot of them removed and with twice you don’t have to just take the candles out by just pruning the ends if you come close and see all i’m doing is pruning the ends if you just prune the ends it makes them bud back so all this back budding and the density has been created for the last 30 years simply by constantly pruning the ends of the shoots and that’s how you get the density and balances no funny tricks removing canvas and the like nothing like that it’s just pouring the ends and you get the density see how dense it is so dense just the ends and these hanging ones i keep removing it looks simple and it is simple so don’t be caught up and also the other thing i’m doing with the maintenance i look for indulgence on these points a diligence is an insect pest that can suck the sap and ruin the tree so i’ll show you on this one there are few adelgids here if you bring the camera close we will show you if you talk look closely at this one you see those little white spots they are the insects which will grow and develop and they can suck the sap on those trees so that’s what we’ve got to do so again you see how the layers are created so anything that’s interfering with the layers anything going upwards or hanging down we remove so that is basically all the maintenance you need okay so just from two little branches here that pad and that pad just see the amount i’ve taken out so there’s always a lot of pruning to be done and the shapes of these trees are maintained by constantly pruning and creating the pads otherwise the shape gets lost so i’ve got lots more to do and you’re going to see a pile about 10 times that size by the time i’ve just finished with this tree just this tree i will be producing about 10 times that volume of prunings in this view i’m going to remove this much so if you look at this tree again this branch is cluttering the space so i’m going to take out a large branch off as big as that we’ll take now just to create that space so you’ve got to be bold so this is how we’re creating the space between the layers even this i’m going to have to see how i create more space over here [Applause] now over here this branch is doing nothing so i’m going to take it off that branch comes up so i’ve got this branch is cluttering the space so i’m taking that off so you can see how much has to come off to create the space this is where people get terrified about pruning but you’ve got to do it if you want to get that milwaukee type effect japanese garden tree effect [Music] okay [Music] foreign
