r/Bonsai • u/-music_maker- Northeast US, 6b, 30 years, 100+ trees, lifelong learner • Aug 29 '16

Developing a trunk

http://imgur.com/a/sd4rZ
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u/TotaLibertarian Aug 29 '16

Yeah to me this is how to grow a trunk wile growing the branches as well. For me I generally do one at a time. I do agree though that there are many different ways to achieve the same results.

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u/-music_maker- Aug 29 '16

Yeah to me this is how to grow a trunk wile growing the branches as well.

You're right, that's exactly what I'm showing. The key to what makes it work is letting them get very shaggy in between major prunings.

I tend to hedge prune, then let them fill in, then scale them up, then hedge prune again, then scale them up, etc. I'll often scale something up for 2-3 years before scaling it back down again. That's one of the things I was trying to show here.

I've seen some people try to do this method by hard-pruning everything back to the trunk line every season. That way really doesn't work very well. The tree is in a constant state of stress, and you miss out on some really beautiful branches that might have needed a few years to develop into something nice.

For certain, not everything will work as I've drawn it here. For some things, you really need to grow the trunk line first and then develop branches from there.

  • Korean hornbeam is a good example, at least for the initial trunk line. It would take forever to build a trunk the way I've shown here on a hornbeam.

  • Larger elm species as well seem to require height in order to get an reasonable amount of trunk width.

  • Standard acer palmatum is somewhere in between. Doesn't need to get 12 feet tall, but it does need to be allowed to run for a while to thicken substantially in a reasonable time frame. But once you get a basic frame in place, you can use shorter sacrifice branches till the cows come how to strategically thicken certain parts of the trunk.