Restyling A Japanese White Beech Bonsai • Bonsai Made Easy August 2021

Good morning i’m cory tomlinson here at greenwood bonsai studio in nottingham hope you’ve been enjoying our videos on our youtube channel today i’m going to do a demonstration and do some work on this japanese white beach it’s a tree that’s recently coming to us from a private collection and it’s a little bit down on its log and it needs a little bit of restoration before we put it out on the bench for sale so it’s vegas quinata white beach imported from japan originally been in private ownership for a number of years quite a wide base and good surface routes but it has suffered a bit in recent years it apparently had an over-enthusiastic cat climb up through it and it’s resorted in a few branches being snapped the previous owner has ginned a few of these as a feature this one up here if you look closely it’s got some wound sealant on it but the branch itself has gone it’s just cracked very very badly and it’s just dried up and died off also this section here that used to form part of the top of the tree that’s been reduced over the years so now it’s just a stub with this little bit coming off it and that’s not doing much either so the process of working on this tree you know it could it’s got the potential to be a better tree than it currently is and one of my jobs here is to is to work on trees like this you know prior uh prior to sale it’s not necessarily a short process but what i’m going to do is show you the first stage of this process it might take uh it might take two or three years to get this tree back to where we want it to be but we’ll just if we don’t start now we’re never going to get to the final result so we’ve been evaluating the tree briefly firstly these gins that are on it i’m not really a fan of these on a deciduous tree like this so one aim is to try and cut these a bit more flush put some wound sealant on them to encourage them to heal over in future obviously we’ve got to cut this dead branch here off this top isn’t very good here and the original front of this tree was straight in there towards you so we’ve got quite a few back branches to give us some depth this one’s a little bit upright see if we might be able to pull this down a little bit and this is a front isn’t is not no longer ideal one of the issues is that at this point here it’s quite narrow on the trunk this point here looks better if we come around here towards you as a front so what i’m potentially going to try and do is to bring the front round here to the right to lower this to take that top section off and then we’re going to do a full wiring on it now this time of year this tree’s only just coming to us just a few days ago it’s just starting to leaf out ideally it would have been nice to do this work three weeks ago but at this this time with this tree just coming in i just i can’t turn back time so we’re going to work on it today but we need to be careful we don’t knock these leaves when i wire it so first things first if i mark the i think we’re going to try and have the front a little bit more round here where if i mark it with these two bits of wire so we’re going to we’re going to aim for a front more in there towards you so these stubs that are on it these gins here we can take these off so that will flusher with a little mini chainsaw [Music] we’ll tidy those up a little bit more this section here this branch already said that uh that has snapped off we can probably do that with a let’s do that with a concave pruner so around here with a large concave pruner in here remove that branch and neaten that cut up against the trunk another one here and here we’ll put some cut paste on these shortly this top section here look all it’s got on is this in fact this looks like it’s sort of dying back that’s dead and brittle up yeah so this top’s actually died off down to here so again we can remove that you can see the dead in the core that look so that’s uh it’s given up on that so let’s tidy that up again with a concave pruner a good clean cut that we can seal and then we can get it to heal over i say this is the first stage of working on this tree so what we need to do now we need to try and re-evaluate the tree and try and make this area the new apex there’s another there’s another stub in there that once we’re moving at the back of the tree snip that off and then we’ve got another section here and then another gin here if we can get in at the back remove that [Applause] another one here on this branch here on this one another stub here little one in here another one here and then i’ll take these two back as well and then that’s most of those stubs tied it up on the tree so we’re going to have a front here let’s see if i can bring this branch i might try and bring this down a little bit this one here there’s quite a fine branch under here i’m going to try and bring this down forward into this section to fill in we’re going to try and bring this top section up and this one down and this one down and forward it’s quite a lot of wiring to do on this the next stage taking them stubs back i’ll neaten those up a little bit more let’s take these old leaves off that hanging onto the tree tied up some more of these little stubs and then my next procedure with this tree is i’m going to get all the branches wired on it for you and position them and then we’re going to finally look at possibly getting it into a into a better more suitable bomb side part [Music] makes everything all right [Music] as you can see i’ve just done some carving to neaten up some of these cuts we’ll use some cup based on these just apply it out the tub wet your fingers down otherwise it will rather stick to your fingers and stick to the tree and just we’ll use that to cover these cuts that will promote good healing and callous on these cuts on the tree so this will do it better for in future to get rid of those stubs that in themselves unsightly at least now we can move on and start to get bark and callus forming over these what were these old stubs and dead bits of tree which we don’t really [Music] need [Music] [Applause] so [Music] what’s right i can tell if there’s opis jokes we stumble i know we believe this won’t be a breeze it don’t make sense to me that we never open up our minds we only open up our eyes reflect what’s wrong what’s this what’s mine if here is your answer you’ll never know the finished wire in this tree it took about 50 minutes we’ve done it in a time lapse for you to wire all these branches once they’re wired i’ve started to shape them there was a couple of branches in at this point which on close inspection were actually dead they’ve not got any life on them so i have no option but to take those out as well so try the best once these are out to fill in with the branches that we’ve now got we’ve put a guy wire on this lowest branch to pull it down and to bring it rearward a little bit the front’s marked in here towards you the next thing with this tree really is to get it into another pot we’re a little bit tight on the time frame of doing it it’s just coming into leaf i’m going to put it into a slightly larger pot this one’s too small for it anyway and i’ve got a pot that i think will suit it a little bit better so we’re just going to get cleaned down and set up with a potting table and then i’ll show you the repotting procedure okay so we’re all set up to do a repot on this tree this pot that this beach is in is a little bit too small and also i feel the trees raised up in it a little bit too much i found this part which is just a little bit longer it’s a nicer design i think it will suit the tree a little bit more so before we can get into that i’ve already put some wire and mesh into that pot got it prepared for this tree but the next thing you need to do is to try and get this tree out to this pot so again i’m not quite sure how long it’s been in here for there’s a wire on this side let’s cut these otherwise underneath we’ll see if we can take it out might be a bit of a nuisance might have been in there for a while and it is an in curved pot and if there’s ever a pot that’s going to be a nuisance it’s an in curved pot like this so what we’ll do is we’ll take those markers out we’ll use a little bonsai sickle around the edge of the pot which is just going to slice through any roots that are growing under this lip just here and it should allow us to remove the tree a little bit easier okay so we’ve loosened around the edge of the root ball particularly this root and this one i think there’s a heavy root going down under this lip so we’ve cooked through those with a little saw so now it should just pop out there we go nice and cleanly lift it out the pot so move this pot out the way we don’t need that now next thing it doesn’t look like it’s been in there for too long probably um a year or two but it does want something a little bit larger so we’ll just comb away the edge of this root wall i’m not going to do too much i’ll just sort of tickle it around the edge so that we can get into this new pot get rid of this stuff that we’ve cut through here knock these corners off a little bit we’re going into an oval this looks like it’s in a mixture of grit and acadama maybe a little bit of uh kid armor or pumice we’re going to put it back into a neat packadama mixture which is what i tend to favor for all my deciduous trees here in the uk obviously you know we’ve had a lot of people asking us about compost mixes but i tend not to recommend too many different ones because depending on where you are in the world what trees you’ve got what budget you’ve got and availability of products makes a huge amount of difference but i’ll always tell you what i’m using but obviously you can tailor that towards your own environment and watering regime so once we’ve got it to this sort of stage we could probably just have a little bit of a sniff on these corners to get rid of some of the long roots they’re not taking too much off a little bit here a little bit on this corner i’ll have a little comb out on the underside just to loosen that up as well again just a little there’s a little piece of wire there look from before let’s pull that out with a pair of front sight pliers let’s just trim a little bit of these off just to neaten up tied it up on this on the side and then let’s see what it looks like in this new this new pot so i think this pot will suit a bit better in shape it’s a little bit larger the tree is going to be around here towards me [Music] we’re wanting to try and have a front in there towards me so we’re going to have to reduce a little bit more of this front corner to allow us to rotate it in the pot so something up there and correspondingly on this back corner here and then we can use a good stiff brush to neaten up that transition between the soil and the roots like so in the tree a little bit of a little bit of tightening up as we go along not too much and then we’ll take our tree again and with those sections taken off that’s more comfortable in there now to try and get it positioned into the new pot i’ve brought the front round here a little bit to the right from what it was before so that we’re not looking at this thin section so much and then i bought this branch across to hide it as well so now we know that fits in we need to add a bit of uh compost so as i mentioned i’ll just use a good quality grade packet armor for this tree put the layer of that in the bottom of the pot [Music] followed by our tree and we’re going to put that in like this and settle it down onto that armor and make sure we get the angle of the tree present correct the front towards me here get it right on the bottom of this part let’s get it a little bit deeper than it was before once we get it to this sort of position where we want it to be then we can fill in with academia again i always leave the the wires and do that at the at the end once we’ve got this in to get the academia in first here’s a potting stick just to work your way around the edge of the root ball just guiding the academic down around the edge of the roots to the edge of the pot so we don’t get any air pockets we work it in around the roots of the tree so that it’s got fresh academia right at the edge of the root ball to allow it to grow strongly and healthy into that new compost the soil and then a bit of a tidy up again a little bit too much i could armor here bring that round here and then these wires just to secure the tree in this one’s going to come across here this one here is just going to come across like this and then to this one just pull on twist them together like that and trim off any excess push that down into the soil do the same around here just to keep it secure in the pot push that down and then a little bit of tidying up around the edge just to neaten that up and then move some tools out of the way [Music] so as i said to you when i started this this tree had been through uh into the walls a little bit if it had several branches snapped off by a cat it has also had um a few branches have died off on it so we’ve got no option but to remove those and work with what we’ve got left so we took off the bits we didn’t need and the dead bits what we’ve got left we’ve wired positioned we’ve opened the front of the tree we’ve positioned the branches so it’s got a nicer habit and structure than it had earlier and we’ve took it out that small pot something a little bit larger and nicer part nicer design suits the the formality of the informality of this tree we’re now going to lift it outside give it a water we’ll shelter it for the next few days we’ve got a chance of frost here in the uk for the next few nights so we’ll just put it somewhere when get too much frost and we’ll just look after it and grow it on for this season we’ll feed it every month with naruko fertilizer hopefully get some good growth on it get some vigor back into the tree and i’ll say this is the first stage of potentially a two or three year process to get the tree back to what it was before but it’s quite a large stage to do this and it’s it’s brought it on a lot from what it started with just uh in real time about an hour and a half ago by all means please subscribe to our channel check out our other videos we’ve got quite a few of them on there now trying to do new species and we’ve got some more lined up that we’re going to do and i hope you enjoy them and thank you very much [Music] you