AusBonsai

Hello

Does anyone have any advice for this JBP bonsai my son bought? Can we trunk chop
It and get it to shoot lower? For some reason the grower wired branches up!


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gin_boon wrote: ↑October 18th, 2024, 1:15 pm Hello

Does anyone have any advice for this JBP bonsai my son bought? Can we trunk chop
It and get it to shoot lower? For some reason the grower wired branches up!

In short, you can't trunk chop a pine. If you chop the trunk back to a stump (with no green below) you will essentially kill a pine in almost 100% of cases.
What you can do is bend it as pines are very flexible and very forgiving if you are respectful of their foliage (ie: don't, break/destroy needles or crush them with wire) and capable of dramatic movement if you apply a twist as you bend. This tree doesn't look too thick for getting some decent movement into it, and once you get bends into the lower trunk, the direction the branching is in now will obviously change, so you can look to wire that out to best spread the foliage mass to your liking (regardless of how it has been previously wired). For best results try and have the needles at the tips of each branch facing upwards, or at least horizontal though. Pines are highly phototropic and will look to grow up and towards the sun, so this gives them a head start.
There is a lot of bare length on some of those branches between the trunk and the first pairs of needles. Laying out the branches with wire can help to induce budding in those bare areas if you are lucky, but you also might look to use these as sacrifice branches and concentrate your efforts building the branching that has foliage/buds closer in... I know you didn't ask for styling advice but just sayin' in case.

Great info from our resident pine wizard. You should scroll through some of Riceman's posts on pines for inspiration and great info on the early stages of pine development.

You can chop but only if you leave at least 1 healthy shoot with healthy needles. You could cut this one down to the 2nd or 3rd branch (it's a bit hard to see which of those lower branches look healthy)
Cutting pines hard often causes new buds to emerge on 2-3 year old bare wood, especially at old nodes.

The question we should really be asking is what are your aspirations and plans for the tree to find out whether chopping at this stage will help or hinder achieving those aims.
Chopping reduces the amount of foliage which, in turn, reduces trunk development and thickening. Sometimes it's good to allow one or more shoots to grow long and strong to help thicken the tree - then, eventually, chop that sacrifice branch off leaving a shorter but thicker trunk. Need to temper that grow and chop plan with the fact that pines don't reliably bud on bare wood so it's imperative to maintain some healthy shoots to chop back to. It may be that a chop now will be the way to get those lower shoots stronger for a future grow and chop cycle which can thicken the trunk.

No one has said it so I will.
This tree is no good. You can throw it now (out or plant it in the garden) or you can spend a decade on it trying to get weak back buds to pop out and then throw it out.
You should look for material which has been pruned early and is nice and compact right from the start, and this is what will stimulate your imagination and keep you interested. There is nothing to work with here.
Another thing you can do is practice grafting on it. You may be able to rescue it that way.

Thank you everyone for your useful feedback. We will attempt to bend it and see what happens.


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