A couple Japanese Beeches

japanese Beech, Uncategorized 1 Minute

I bought 3 1-gallon can J Beech (Fagus crenata) from Evergreen Gardenworks in December 2017:

I didn’t quite get around to working on them in 2018. The going-in plans were either a 3-tree composition, or a triple trunk.

One never woke up in the spring, and so I decided to wait to see what the other two would do before I tried to combine them at all. So they sat one more year in the gallon cans until I got to them in the spring of 2019.

The roots looked pretty rough after another year in those cans.

I had also lost the top half of one. Can you spot the dieback?

How about now?

Cut back to living tissue…

So what to do with a tree that has layered itself? I had to ditch the initial plan of a decent-sized mica pot and accept any real development would need to be put off for at least a year while the roots recover. I didn’t think cutting them off would be wise, so I applied a wire to girdle the bottom section. Hopefully that will stem the tide.

Then, I combined them as planned, but in a much deeper container.

And with a little luck they’ll recover…

Fast-forward another year to March 2020, and here we are.

A little wiring to spread out the branches…

And on to the repot.

Good enough. Potted low in the pot for now:

And we’re set for another year:

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Published by Brian VF

I have been studying bonsai since 1994, in an ever-increasing obsessive fashion. In our last 5 years prior to moving from Iowa to Alabama pursuing a career in the foodservice industry, my bonsai collection was limited to a few varieties that could survive brutal winters outside, or winters under dim light in the dank basement of our humble duplex...my wife puts up with a lot. Including the trailer hitch I put on our brown 1983 Chrysler New Yorker to pull a U-Haul full of trees to Nashville for a 3-month stop along the career path that led us to Alabama. 12 years later, we no longer have the New Yorker; and not a single one of those trees remain on my bench, having given the last holdout to a new club member this summer. I prefer collecting native trees and buying the classical species used in Japan, feeding organic, and reading everything I can get my hands on.

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