How to Trim Maple Bonsai
Coming into winter in the southern hemisphere, maple can be trimmed back to closer internodes. You want to have short internodes on branches and need to remove any long internodes. Great time to trim maples.
I want to take you through um some you know trimming of deciduous trees in autumn now this tree is coming up starting to come up really nice it’s starting to get ramified it’s starting to change i’m trying to change the triangular shape of this tree because i don’t like the triangular nature of this tree that it was originally so i’m trying to you know change branches to make them go upwards more deciduous like and more natural like so that’s one thing i’m planning to do but at this stage of stage you can see all the branches all around vacation so now it’s amazing yes so now it’s a matter of just building up on that ramification over time those long branches as i mentioned i want to try and grow them out to create a third kind of apex in the tree and create a much bigger broader canopy trying to eliminate that triangular look in this tree and that’s one of the most important things i’m trying to do i don’t like the triangular look of this tree but it’s slowly coming coming getting rid of that you’ll see that little left hand side trunk it’s doing really well it’s trying to create its own little area and trying to kind of create its own little tree you’ve got the main apex and then i want to create something bigger on the left hand side on your left hand side so really today is all about internodes you want to have small or very close internodes what internodes are is the distance on a branch between two buds the two next slaughter buds so you want very close interns the closer the internals means the more denser more ramification more smaller leaves so you don’t want really long internodes between each each bud all that means you’ll never get if you’ve got a long internet you’ll see between two buds and there will never be a bud that performs on that on that bare bit between the internodes if that makes sense you only get you only get buds or you only get leaves at the bud spots you don’t get leaves at the the plain bare spots if you know what i mean so really really important to know you need to get very close very close into it’s very close buds together along the branch we will increase your amplification and increase bud um increase ramification and increase or decrease the size of leaves anyway so here i am just trimming up a little bit but really that’s my other main thing i want to talk about today is how to trim this deciduous tree which is a try to maple and i’ll do some wiring as well on this tree just just in the main areas some of the main branches i purely treat this tree more like a clip of more lace unless there’s some real major flaw that i want to um that i want to improve uh for example there’s a lot of those branches on the left they’re quite um you can see they’re quite a bit to the word long and straight and uninteresting so we’ll keep going and we’ll get that done and we’ll get some movement into that branch where it goes up upwards and then comes down so that’s the plan going forward okay all right maybe something some things that i can show you now let’s have a look at this branch it’s i mean can we you can probably see that in my hand over my hand probably see that branch now you could just make out these buds there bud’s there and there’s a long break there’s buds long break there’s buds so unfortunately so there’s all these buds but there’s a very long internet from that bud to that butt so i’m going to come back to the i’ll leave a tiny little stub okay so that’s what i’m going to do so even same thing up here there’s a very big distance between that bud that button there’s a little buddy in here and the closest to the truck that comes off then i’ve got little ones like that which aren’t quite nice i’m not going to cut those off see those little ones they’re actually quite good so that’s that’s the process so i’m just going to go through anything that’s dead i’ll cut off there’s a long internet there before a small button here in this case in this example here there’s actually some nice small boats close together and there’s a long part so it goes off and you’ve got bits where like this see this bit it’s quite heavy it’s got some nice inch but there’s nothing here so ideally for the long term you need to come back come back okay so that’s the process that i go through trying to remove aroma file these branches um and it is it’s all about ramification even up the top you need to start coming back a little bit things are getting out of control and out of whack you just gotta go go through a bit by bit again this is the same issue that’s a dead bit probably come back to there you know you just go through it slightly some branches are quite long you probably got to keep the length for now and then hopefully you can get back money just come back come back sometimes you’ve got to think about where can i wire the branch okay so it’s a process of just cutting bringing it back in so it doesn’t have really long internets and that’s what they means of this so sometimes i get really big branches like this they need to go because you’ll never get yeah you’ll never get branching so i’m just going to go work my way through the whole tree cut it all back and then we’ll look at what else we can do with the with this tree but really that’s it’s a very simple process of trimming looking for the long internets and coming back to a bud that’s closer to the trunk and can grow on your next branches also go through and clean up anything that looks pretty ugly anything that needs to be removed um things like that as well but majority of the time it’s really just reducing the the length of a lot of the branches by by removing that internet so then i’ll put some wire on some of these branches just to just to get it a bit more natural looking okay we’ll be back all right everyone so i’ve um done the cleanup you can see it’s might be more refined not not many things growing out of the way i’ve also put some wire on these branches trying to do that that kind of curve probably can’t tell 100 and you see that one goes up and it comes down that’s the intention i haven’t wired these secondary ones yet just not yet a lot of these a lot of these branches will be once they’re the thickness i want i’ll be cut back and re-road um to get it into the shape so i was trying to do that loop effect so i’m trying to get them to go up and then come back it’s a little bit tricky somebody’s a bit heavy but come down and come up come down and come up yeah but at the moment that’s this is the time to do your trimming you can see the structure this is the time to do the wiring you see the structure you know go through it individually and go through it bit by bit this side i didn’t cut as much because i want to see what how how it comes that side i did probably did a bit more because of that smaller tree on the other side so you know i’m trying to build up this area to be really full over here like almost a third a third trunk so you’ve got a little trunk over there and you’ve got the three with the apex and i was hoping to try and create something an extra big big foliage mass in here trying to create the more deciduous look because these are actually going so i’m trying to change the dynamics of this tree rather than a triangular pine tree i’m trying to change it into a more deciduous looking tree it will need a lot more growth a lot more growth but it’s on the right track and i hope you guys can appreciate that but it is a slow process continually trimming um this is the time to do the work wire up as you see i don’t put too much wire on it that’s probably the other thing not too much wire just a little bit in certain areas and the rest is trying to clip and grow you know clip off trim off bits and pieces you don’t want but that’s the first one that i’ve done this first try and i just want to show you guys i’ll pretty much go through all my tridents in the same way even my japanese maples same thing same strategy you go through them you know trim back to the to the internodes and work your way um this is the time to get on with it and have a go it should be pretty easy you can get harder you can go easier you can go really trim back um but up to you guys really um but you can see what i’ve done just nicely trim back the silhouette trim back each each individual branch don’t do a hedge trimming actually go through each one and trim away at the right angle at the right point in the tree so it looks really nice it’s got a nice base nice tree hopefully fixing it up making it look more deciduous in the coming years and hopefully get it in a shop anyway guys that’s it for this tree and hope you enjoyed that video and um i’ll do some more videos on other types of treats especially what you do in autumn and winter see you guys next time thanks for watching
