Search

Big Bends a Japanese Black Pine Changes

Paul Kellum
Jan 5, 2017
2 min read

I purchased this Japanese Black Pine a few years ago and this picture shows its condition at the time. It was in rock solid soil and hardly had any feeder roots. It had been improperly decandled for years leaving the tree long and leggy. It also had no interior buds to cut back to so the only option was to graft it. The tree was weak so grafting would have to wait until it was vigorous enough to take grafts.

The next picture shows the tree regaining vigor after being half bare rooted and going into a inorganic soil mix. The half bare rooting technique developed by my teacher allows the tree to safely be switched into good soil with limiting the shock to the root system.

To Allow the tree to become as healthy as possible I did not decandle the tree and allowed it to grow and become very strong.

Here is a close up of the soil mix we use. Commonly referred to by Boon's Mix. It is 1/3 Akadama, 1/3 Pumice, and 1/3 Lava all sifted to remove any dust. This soil mix will produce the healthiest root system possible.

These pictures show the mechanics of bending such a large trunk. Its a lot to do with correct angles in leveraged based bending. The bending happens over a few days so the tree is not over stressed. With bending 5"+ thick wood we try to create smooth bends like in nature as the snow slowly falls weighing down heavy branches and bending them. These bends will be held for 2 years before the wire and rebar is removed.

The Bags you see in the pictures are grafts and the blue tape acts as block from direct sunlight. These grafts where done to grow new branches to replace the ones that have become to thick and leggy, When JBP is correctly cut back and decandled you can maintain interior buds and branches so that in most cases cut back doesn't require grafting and if it does if will only be a few. In this case this tree will be grafted a few times to get all the necessary buds.

This picture shows the trunk angles before and after the bend you can see how big the changes is and the development of the tree in such a short time of getting only half the roots in good soil.