Specialty Gardening: Pre-bonsai, 1 by tapla

tapla wrote:
The roots are still a mess, but you can see that I really whacked them hard. I didn't leave much in the way of roots. Normally, I don't cut the top back at the same time I work on roots, but the tree had so much foliage that the remaining roots could never support it. This means that the tree would have shed weak branches that might be important to the end composition. By cutting the tree back hard, it should prevent random die-back because I selected the branches to be 'shed'. Treatment this harsh should only be undertaken on healthy trees with plenty of reserve energy.

You can see how large some of the roots I removed were.

This message was edited Jul 18, 2010 6:14 PM