Great result Peter, people are frightened of doing this kind of major work on maples, but maples are a very strong cultivar when you know how to look after them properly 🙂 keep up the good work.
here we are and those of you who have been following my youtube videos will remember this tree which i did maybe about two years ago and that was one of my early youtube videos when i took a tree that had been grown in the field and then grown in a flower pot and the roots went round and round in a circle what we call a girdling root and that youtube caused a lot of stir because i used an ax and a cleaver and all sorts of vicious looking tools to cut those girdling roots off so if we come close you can see where the roots were cut that root went round and round so that was cut there cut with a saw as well and an axe and you can see the callusing over here it’s healed so well look at the kerosene all of that that has healed and we still got to work on it some more but i do it in stages and all the thick branches in the past that we cut off you see how the callusing is taking place so we rotate the tree there was another big root which was cut from there and all those so-called ugly roots were cut so we have almost a clean slate to begin with and this tree must have been 10 or 12 feet tall the first cut was made there that’s callousing new leader was grown here it was cut there then cut there and so on and that’s where we’ve got to so in the last two years it has produced all these new branches i’m going to show you pictures of the tree when we did it for the youtube video initially and you can compare what is happening and just to show you how vigorous this tree is yes so i’m going to now use this grinding tool to get rid of some of these burrs [Music] you see how i’ve made this a bit smoother so that it’s not lumpy and not popping out and jumping out of you same with this this is going to be a lump big lump so i want to get rid of that so and in case any of you think i’m carving the tongue i’m not carving the trunk what i’m doing is i’m simply making it smooth so that when the callus takes place the whole thing will become smoother in fact i’m going to take a bit of that off as well so this should become smooth rather than jutting out in a big lump so [Applause] now talking of tools i don’t want to advertise this but this is quite a useful tool it’s a very gentle tool compared to some other tools like the route tunnel which is much more serious so it does carving in a gentle way so you can see what i’ve achieved very quickly much easier than using hand chisels and now this one this is looking ugly so let’s improve this and see what happens so you can see in less than a minute i’ve just moved this quite a bit and i can now either put the cut paste on it i think i will because just to be on the safe side i will and then i can always raise the soil there to cover this up i don’t want to be too drastic and go too mad see even some of this there are a lot of blemishes here which can be refined and let me just show you how i would do that [Laughter] again i will raise the soil up when i come to potting let me see if i can improve this a bit yeah there’s some serious issues here but it could make a nice turtle back even so let me just see what i can do so as you can see you can always improve the thing by doing this is almost like what you call a you know cosmetic surgery using these tools and although i’ve used that particular brand of tool i’m sure many of you will find other types of tools will do the job equally well so always adapt and use what is available and i’m now going to keep a close eye on developing the ramification even further so the tree is well on its way to becoming a nice specimen i can do a little bit more wiring like that which is really child’s play but the big issue is that one with the leader but i’m going to keep an eye on the back one before i cut that off if i cut it off too soon i may live to regret it so i will now just end by putting some cut paste on this tree so that i don’t risk it just hang on a minute if you can have a close look at what i’ve done so i will get my editor to show you the tree when it was started two years ago with the axe and the cleaver as i said i don’t have to put this sealant on i’m doing it just as an extra bit of precaution and the sealant is really to prevent the loss of moisture but if i make sure it is watered all the time and the bark and trunk is watered as well there will be no worries about that it’s not so much to keep all sorts of nasties out and to prevent disease getting in i just want the wood to rot over there but i also want the edges to callous so this is what the object of the exercise is but i know that the roots are so strong there is no real fear of that happening i may even leave this uncovered see rotting happens naturally already some of these old bits are rotting away very naturally so that is not an issue so what happened was that after i made this tree i just put in a pot and last year i didn’t do anything to it i just let it grow and i just put a few pieces of wire to guide the branches along so two years is not a long time to wait to get something from a bare trunk to this stage so i’m going to get body my editor to show you pictures of the first workings of this tree when we use the axe and what it is two years later and i dare say by next year in three years it will be a complete tree so although this material is very old this tree must be at least 50 years old as a maple tree but it just shows from field grown material to this finished article in the space of two years which is as of today and by three years i’ll get a complete specimen how good is that [Music] you
