Hi every body,
two of my Bonsai friends on the IBC forum are responsible for the next virtual! Kev Bailey posted this beautiful picture of a evening sky with a “Z” from Zorro in it and Ed van der Reek virtually planted my “Z” next to it!
Cheers,
Hans van Meer.
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Hi Everybody,
In early 2002 I had the honour to be invited by Mark Noelanders to give a 3 hour evening demonstration in March that same year at his Bonsai club in Belgium (B.A.B Belgium Bonsai association). Although I was really excited at the prospect to give a demonstration at this club that already had seen most off the big names demonstrate, it also put me under a lot of pressure! How and were could I find material good enough to work on and that would entertain this knowledgeable crowd? I spend many day’s visiting all my regular material addresses here in Holland, but could not find anything remotely interesting or good enough! So in a last desperate attempt to find something, I drove with my wife An trough Belgium to try our luck at the Bonsai dealers we knew there! At the end of a long day driving, with out finding anything suitable and affordable, we had become pretty desperate! We had only one more Bonsai centre to visit and had not much hope to find something there. But we did! In the back of the garden, hidden away from sight, we found some really weird and impossible shaped Pine yamadori! And that was just what I was looking for, ugly and affordable! J
One off them immediately jumped out to me, a Mugo that looked like the mark of Zorro! It was basically a long and thin Z shaped tree full of mistakes and with only some long branches in it’s top. The base and the first 10 cm/2,5 inch upwards the trunk were really thin and then suddenly changed into a big lump that was created over many years with old deadwood and thick live vain running over it! From there the trunk becomes thinner again and stays the same thickness until the first sharp bent to the left. The next section of the trunk is slightly curved and goes abrupt to the left and back downwards. Some time long ago this section of the trunk was split right trough the middle by mother nature, leaving a long opening that looked very strange! And again this section also had no taper what so ever! At the end of that section there was a other abrupt change of direction to the right side from witch one thick branch and a few thinner ones grew upwards. Out off these branches I had to create the whole future Bonsai! A big risk to try in a 3 hour demo, but this is what I like to do, trying to create a Bonsai out of challenging material! Because when it all falls together and it works it can become really special and unique! I always had, and still have, that motivation to work with impossible and unlikely material! At first because there simply just wasn’t any good material to be found here in Holland, but latter I discovered that I really like that challenge to find something interesting or even beautiful in these ugly duckling trees! So this Mugo, that we instantly named Z, was just right to show what my interest in Bonsai are.
Below: The first pictures of “Z” in my garden. This is the planed front side of the tree.
Below: Left side view. notice that in the whole of the trunk there is almost no movement to the back or the frond. So I had to create some sort of dept with the foliage!
Below: Backside of the tree.
Below: Right side view.
Below: Close up of the section were all the branches grew from. Only the thick branch will be used to create the whole top section!
Below: This is the design that I made as a reverence for the demo.
Below: Before the demonstration started.
Below: Just one the right side of my top hand finger is were I sawed out a wedge, separating the branch from the deadwood section on the right. Allowing (I hoped) the branch to bend easier and further to the left side! The branch will be protected from breaking and ripping with layers in water socked raffia, tape and thick copper wire.
Below: This is probably the first demo tree that could receive Belgium radio! 
Below: The audience were allowed to get real close to see what was going on. Just the way I like it!
Below: The most difficult part of this demo, bringing down that thick branch, has worked out just fine. With out any splitting or cracking! But to make it in time I had help wiring the last branches from one of the friendly members of the club.
Below: At home I had made a construction that tilted the the tree and pot in to the desired angle and hold it in place during work!
Below: Bonsai is hard work!
Below: The finished result of 3 hours hard work. Before I started I had explained to the audience that I would not try to make a compact tree. Most of the foliage was simply to far away from the base of the trunk and I don’t like to twist and curl long branches just for the look of it. So I just created the desired outline of the long branches. And in the coming years I will use the proper technique to force the tree to back bud so that over time I could shorten those long branches to the desired length!
Last week, almost 10 years after it’s first styling, I restyled “Z” once again. Below: 3 major branches were removed during this restyling.
Below: Close up, as seen from the right side, of the strange but beautiful deadwood section on the lower part of the trunk.
Below: Close up of the split trunk.
Below: Close up of the thick branch that, with the help of a cut out wedge, was controlled ripped away from the deadwood. The green arrow shows the point up to were the branch was attached to the deadwood (yellow arrow).
Below: Close up of the finished top section. Most needles are just 1,5 centimeter/ half a inch long!
Below: The finished result in a pot by Brian Allbright.
I am pretty pleased with the new image of “Z”! I like how he changed from a unwanted tree into a impressive Bonsai!
I hope you enjoyed this story?!
Cheers,
Hans van Meer.
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Comment/question by Jack Sales.
Very interesting read. Thank you for posting. I was wondering if i could ask you a really quick question? I have a mugo pine from a nursery with a lot of top growth and a small amount of weaker growth further down. When would be the right time to prune the top branches away to allow the lower branches to develop?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65635415@N02/6097606096/
Hi jack,
sorry for the late reply, but I simply forgot to answer you! I had a look at your picture and I saw a typical nursery Mugo with long thick branches with mostly only growth at the end! To get foliage to grow closer to the trunk on Mugo’s like this will take a long time but it can be don and it is a good practice to understand the growing habits of this species! I dont know were you live but this late in the season you can only cut back the to long branches up to were a smaller branch grows from it. But dont cut that thick branch to close to that smaller branch! Make sure to leave some room for the old branch to die/dry back! A stump of about 1 cm/0.4 inch will be more than enough to protect that small branch from harm! Seal the woods with cut paste. Later next season you can remove that dried up stump with no problem! Now would there still have been older needles along those long branches, they stay on there for 2 or even 3 seasons, than you could have cut back any branch right back into that old growth! This can be don from early in the growing season to mid Summer! The tree will than react with loads of new buds all along your branches growing from the base of those older needles! That would have saved you a lot of time! With your Mugo it will be a case off lots of feeding and removing candles to promote back budding lower on those branches. If it helps you can find these techniques in a article that I wrote about two needle pine care on my website! This article will explain most of these techniques in words and pictures! Hope that helps you some, if not you can always ask me for more advise, even if I sometimes forget to answer!
Good luck with your Mugo!
Cheers,
Hans van Meer.
Link to the article on my website: http://www.karamotto.org/?page=40
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Hi everybody,
I would like to show you some pictures that were made a couple
of days ago during the restyling of my old yew! This yew is very special to me,
because it is the first yamadori that I ever collected. And this is how I was
able to do so. During the first Ginkgo Awards in ’97 I met Tony Tickle and the
gang for the first time. And let just say that it clicked from the start and
leave it at that! 
We had so
much fun! So much that we all together made the Japanese guest of honor faint
during the prize presentation after the gala diner! True story this! Any way,
during that same weekend Tony had invited me to come and stay at his place for a
weekend of fun and Yamadori trips! I gave it some serious thought for 0,009 off
a second and than sad in a high pitched voice YES!!!! So in early 1998, I drove
all the way to the North of England. And the Yew in this story was the very
first tree that I collected on the first day! And you can see on the picture
below that I was pretty happy and excited! Collecting this tree changed my
future in Bonsai, because it was the one that got me hooked on this way of doing
Bonsai. So this tree hold a lot of warm memories in it! Not in the last place
all the fun that I had with mad man Tony!
Below:At the end of that same year, the upper part of the tree sadly died. Of
the few branches that survived on the lower part of the tree, only two strong
young branches were usable in my design! So I would try to shape this future
Bonsai out of only two branches! And the part that died will also be incorporate
into the future design! It is after all a sign of this tree’s past! But my first
care was to get the poor Yew back to health!
Below: And by 2003 it looked like this. The picture is not that good, but it is
the best that I have from that time. The tree has recovered well from it’s
ordeal! The higher off the two remaining branches has grown into trunk from
witch new branches has grown. The second lower left branch is styled as a
cascading branch to fill that empty space. This hanging branch pushes the whole
tree upwards, making it more balanced!
Some 2 years later the tree started to lose it health and became very weak. It
took me up to now to get it back in to it’s usual form! But it had sadly lost
most of the important left hanging branch. Only the back part of that branch had
survived those bad years!
So today I am really pleased that this special
tree is still with me and that after it had these few rough years it is healthy
enough again for me to restyle it!
Below: The tree before styling. The live
part of left bottom branch is wrapped with a layer in water soaked raffia. Than
two lengths of 2.5mm aluminium wire were applied lengthwise on the outside of
the future new curves. I need to bend this now backward growing branch as much
to the frond as possible. These two lengthwise placed wires will prevent the
branch from breaking on the greatest stress point, the outside of the new
curves/bends that I will bring in to the branch! That was followed by a other
layer of tightly applied raffia. And than finally two normal layers of 3,5mm
aluminium wire were brought one! This should be enough to protect the branch
from breaking, hopefully! 
The long jin
you see in the front of that branch will be used as a anchor point for the
guide wires that I will need to hold that heavily bend branch in to it’s new
place.
Below: side view, red arrow shows the remains of the part of that branch that
use to grow towards the frond. The yellow arrow shows the branch that now needs
to get as close as possible to the former place of that important missing
branch!
Below: Well it worked even better than expected! From were the branch is now it
is possible to give that branch enough weight to balance the design. So I was
really happy with that result!
Below: Basic outline is there. I like the bottom left branch, but the branch
above it is overpowering it. It is to long and most of the smaller branches at
its tip are long and weak with not much change for future new buds. So why wait
for something that probable will never come?! So the branch was cut back drastic
to change it appearance but also to redirect more energy in to the strong
zones!
Below: Here the branch is cut back to a intersection with a smaller side branch
(yellow arrow). This branch will replace the cut off branch as the new
leader.
Below: Branch more or less in place and I am glad with the resuld of cutting
that thick branch off!
Below: Look at the difference open spaces and more separations in the foliage
makes!
Below: And after a lot more work! This is the finished result for now! I had
plenty more pictures, but I had to stop some were and it is getting very late
over here!
I am glad that I was able to bring back some of the trees
original image back in to this new design!
In the future when new buds have appear higher on the newly formed branches they
can be shortened just that little bid more to make the tree look just that
little bit more compact! And the Jin that now holds the wires for the bottom
branch in place will be shortened and restyled as soon as those wires can be
removed! But for now I am glad that my old friend is back with his new haircut!
I hope you enjoyed this little story!
Cheers,
Hans van
Meer.
PS: That little fern that you can see growing in that last picture, on the right
side of the trunk, has landed there by pure change! I find them all over my
garden and in many Bonsai pots as well! Normally I remove them and make them in
to accent plants, but this one…well it looks all right for now. And they play
chess and poker together..so I really did not have the heart to separate them! 
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September 6th, 2011 at 6:07 pm e
Beautiful tree!
It might be a off-topic, but what was the cause of the die-off problems and how did you solve that?
Thanks
Hi Lacike,
I think that it was a combination of two things that weakened
this tree. First : underfeeding and second: standing in soaked ground for to long! Last season
I started to feed most of my trees weekly with a liquid Fertilizer and several times
during the growing season I sprayed the foliage of my yews with fish emulsion.
That worked wonders on the weaker trees! I discovered the soaked ground problem
two years ago. I had repotted two trees, a fat trunk Acer buergerianum and a
Acer palmatum twin trunk in a shallow pot, because the water did not run out of
the pots like it was supposed to do. I shortened the well established flat roots by
more than half and planted them back in there original pots. With, like always,
a bottom layer with large grain sized akadama, kiryu and bims. Than a thick
layer with smaller grain size in which the bonsai is planted. And than a thin
layer of smaller grain size to to fill the pot up. Now you would normally expect
that the water would run right trough using a loose and open ground mixture like
this. Well it didn’t! At least, not all off it! After repotting I watered both
trees and I placed them in a sheltered spot. Next day I tilted the pots and
placed a piece of wood under need them. After just a few seconds water started to
run out the drainage and wire holes on the lower part of the pot. Now I could
imagine that this would happened with a wide and shallow pot, but not with a
regular pot with 3 large draining holes in them! So I started to test this on
all my bonsai, who all have more or less the same open soil mixture. And more
than half had the same problem! There was more water left in those pot than I
could ever believe. And one of the Bonsai that suffered from this drainage
problem was the yew in this story. So now every time after watering or when it
rains, I will put a small wooden block under one side of all the trees that
retain to much water! Tilted in this way much less water will stay behind on the
bottom of the pot and the water that stays behind only fills the corner of the pot
and not the whole pot! It is wise to check the drainage of your bonsai/pot every
now and then. Roots grow and fill out the pot, so things change all the time! I
know that those small blocks under need my problem trees/pots make sure that
they don’t drawn any more and to prevent root rot!
Hoop that this answers your question?!
Cheers,
Hans van Meer.
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