Protecting Bonsai Trees In Winter • Bonsai Made Easy August 2021

These are our large specimen trees it’s a multi-trunk 5-tree clump style and this one is about 1.2 meter tall this is the famous black pine that i’ve had since 1974. you can see it in all my books in fact i will show you the picture from my first book this is another large tree so i just thought i’d show you this is page 149 of my first book bonsai the art of growing and keeping miniature trees this photograph was taken in 1980 which means that this picture was taken 1980 that’s 42 years ago that picture was taken and this is the same tree 42 years later so you can see how it has changed the low branches those three lower branches have died i’ve ginned them and i’ve made it into a bigger tree so this tree is now twice as tall after 42 years so that’s a long long time so i thought you’d like to see this it’s a bright clear day and it’s the 7th of april and you think that it was warm and sunny but it’s not if you can look at that roof there you can see that there’s frost on the roof and this morning we had hard frost the temperature went down to minus five degrees centigrade so it’s been a cold cold day so you must be wondering what we do on a cold day like this to protect bonsai trees, well it’s not often that we have to cover our large trees to give them protection but i will just show you what is happening here steve don’t remove that please leave it on so here we are these are covered with fleece and this is how we protect our trees in these very cold nights so this is a freak cold snap we’re having when we’ve had cold arctic winds and this should be enough to protect it this tried maple my colleagues have just removed the fleece but really they should have the fleece on throughout this coal spell so that’s another great big piece of fleece and that is covering one of that very big maple if you remember that was the twin trunk maple which we call the chicken plucker tree if i can just show you it this is it that chicken plucker tree so this is how they’re protected he’s just removed the fleece from some of the other maples but although we cover it here in the wesley gardens where i have a display of 36 very large bonsai those trees are never covered and they seem to be all right so it’s just a precautionary measure this is where you’ve got to know your trees and then of course you would ask me why don’t i cover my evergreens well these evergreens i know are very hardy so i don’t bother to cover them and it’s quite uh late in the year now late meaning that’s well into spring if it was november or december these junipers would be covered or put under shelter because if i don’t cover it they get what is called the frost blush and the frost turns the green foliage yellow or brown so if you don’t want the evergreens to turn yellow or brown so you do put them under cover and by cover i mean that shade tunnel there you see that green shade netting that is enough to give them a lot of protection so let’s walk here so you see that with that shade netting these maples here are quite happy and this is the equivalent of putting it under fleece fleece is a very thin material very light woven material so these maples here are being protected under this netting so i thought i’d show you how these maples fare and as i said it’s the 7th of april and here in southern england the leaves of these maples are all virtually in full flow full leaf look at these shoots about 30 centimeters long these new shoots all in the space of the last three weeks they’re literally growing by the minute you could say that and one more area where we have another shade tunnel and this shade tunnel uh i’ll just show you this beautiful maple look at that look at the foliage on this i think this is called hagaromo it’s got these claw like leaves and they’ve got ordinary leaves as well so on the same tree you get this different type of foliage such a beautiful tree such a beautiful tree look at that so different types of leaves all on the same tree this is a very old pair of trees those two trees are identical i would like to sell it as a pair because they go well as a pair and these are all the shojos benichidoris all being protected under the shade now this maple although it’s been out here hasn’t come out into leaf at all so all these maples behave differently so although they’re in the same place different maples like human beings do behave slightly differently and one more area where i will show you are major major maples i must make a parade of these specimen maples because maples as you know are my favorite species of tree and we have some beautiful maples i don’t like to crew about them but i know i can grow maples well look at that that’s it it was a five trunk tree but that’s not four trunk this is another beautiful tree and this is the one that has that beautiful turtle back of a root more trees this is sagan which is a very unusual rare maple doesn’t tend to grow strong in the uk they get caught by the frost and the cold winds and that’s another beautiful root connected maple i’ve shown this in another video you will see it’s almost a turtle back but it’s connected by the same root to form another tree pretty i’m not able to stand far back enough because these trees are so massive they’re all like four feet four foot six high they’re all my exhibition trees and for exhibition trees i like them large so there you go so this is where we shared our maples under this shade netting which we find is quite enough to protect them from the cold frost i can use the greenhouse and this plastic polytunnel as you can quite clearly see there two major specimens here this great big red deshojo maple and this very famous maple group this is our pride and joy growing ever so beautifully and of course we have the pleasure of the greenhouse now this benicio dory is going outside i haven’t protected it at all i’ve done that just as an experiment we are always doing experiments now here we come into our main greenhouse and here of course the temperature is always like three degrees maybe sometimes five degrees centigrade warmer than the outside so this is where all our maples grow i could take hours just walking you through this area to show you all the different maples that we have so i hope that gives you some ideas to how we protect our maples from the hard frost so on that note i will end this [Music] you