AusBonsai

It's frosty and nasty today, blustery and wet. Six degrees outside at 3pm, and all six of them were tiny ones. Time to catch up on some posts.

Winter has hit, and everything has stopped growing except the Eucs, most of which are still going crazy! This is E. crenulata, drooping because it needs yet more water. I usually water everything when anything needs a drink, (it makes life easy) but the rest of trees don't need anything like the water that the Eucs are demanding at the moment.
This is my hairy Angophora hispida, also powering on. The leaves are usually quite large and coarse, but I hope to reduce them as Pup does, to just the tiny leaves you see at the top. Bright red new growth.
And a Euc. rubida with the light behind it, just for fun.
Enjoy.

Gavin

Winter

What's that

We have only had a few nights in single digits and usually back above 10 before 9 am

Spoke too soon. It was down to 6 deg this morning

We got up to 6 degrees yesterday!

And yet I find winter is never long enough to get everything done that you want.

Grant

It's not just winter, Grant - as you get older, time gets distinctly shorter. In all senses.

Gavin

Has winter arrived yet?
Got down to about 9 deg so far here this year and the coldest day I have seen was 17

so far the warmest i have ever experienced in sydney, Usually we get a few frosts but no where near it yet!

Ken

Tell me about it,

I have a trident that has only just started to show autumn colour

Ah well, maybe next year

Kerrin

hi Gavin, love the immature leaves of Eucalyptus rubida; have you much experience with Eucalyptus rubida?
I've been growing one for about 5 years now (from tube stock) and it still has its immature leaves - it's my mums favourite!

Waltron, you have two years more experience than I do. (How is the trunk looking so far?) They will probably keep their juvenile foliage as long as you keep pinching/pruning/attacking it. I'm beginning to wonder whether the combination of a rough old trunk with a head of juvenile foliage is going to look odd - I'll tell you what I think in twenty years or so. The colour tones on the juvenile leaves are just amazing - I might just have to put up with the incongruity. E. crenulata, E. cinerea and E. bridgeseana all have similarly beautiful leaf tones- as you can guess, I'm a bit partial to them...

Gavin

Here's how it looks this morning:
It's about 45cm high from the base of the trunk, I've let it grow to about 1.5m tall to see if it would lose it's juvenile leaves. It didn't. Like yours it is currently growing and thirsty (like always). The question about the trunk is interesting: will it develop to be rough like the base of a mature tree or smother like the rest of the tree - I guess time will tell!

Waltron wrote:Here's how it looks this morning:

Eucalyptus rubida 140627-2.JPG

That is beautiful stock you have there, very nice.

Yeah, I've only just put my boab's away, they just started yellowing the other day very slow start to winter, but when it hit, it was sudden

Thanks for the pics though Gavin, I've got the euc bug well and truely, have a few different varities that I started from tubestock when I first started bonsai, they're almost getting to a point where I can think about styling, but not quite yet. I've got a few ficifolia's that I'm hoping will turn out to be winners I really want to get one that is already on its way, one that I can start refining and admiring, as mine are all a fair few years off yet

@Waltron, thats awesome stock mate, would kill for that keep us posted on the progress

Waltron, that's a very elegant trunk, good start. I'm at a loss what to with branches and foliage on these things, it will be interesting to see what evolves. I doubt, with the size of the leaves, that they will ever be "scale model" bonsai, more a condensed version of elements of the wild tree. What that will mean, who knows? Please keep posting.

Jason, I hope you don't mind a bit of advice - don't be in a hurry to style. Think about spending a few years making a good thick interesting bendy trunk like Waltrons. When you have the core of the tree, the branches and leaves are anchored in something you want to look at. If you are trimming and pinching all the time, the trunk won't thicken much.

Gavin

GavinG wrote: Jason, I hope you don't mind a bit of advice - don't be in a hurry to style. Think about spending a few years making a good thick interesting bendy trunk like Waltrons. When you have the core of the tree, the branches and leaves are anchored in something you want to look at. If you are trimming and pinching all the time, the trunk won't thicken much.

Gavin

Thanks Gavin, the more advice you can give, the better I've barely scratched the surface, and am a soaking up all the information I can

I don't trim, but I have chopped a couple back to a new leader after they started getting a bit tall... was that ok? or should I just let them go freely?

The longer they grow in a season, the thicker they get. In the early stages, prune once a year, and only allow two or three shoots to grow - rub off the rest. More shoots = shorter, not so thick. After a few years, the trunk gets some kind of movement, so you get the idea where you want branches, so you leave just a few more. Obviously, this is for Eucs and others that bud back freely. For junis, pines and leptos that don't bud back, you need to be more tactical - let one grow long, keep a couple at its base pinched short, and then cut out the long sacrifice branch after a year, repeat the process at the next stage.

Be aware that by the time you have made two cuts to the trunk, with two resulting bends, you have pretty much defined the eventual size of the tree. If your first two cuts occur in the first 150mm of the trunk, the tree probably won't end up a metre tall - the low bends just won't be in proportion.

This of course is all just my opinion. Find out for yourself, see what works for you. And NEVER EVER prune a long stem of elm without putting half a dozen cuttings in a pot...

Best of luck,

Gavin