If you attended the Marco Invernizzi workshop either to watch or to work then you know that the time has come to get some work done on conifers and many other trees.    I’ve been puttering around in the yard grabbing a tree here and a tree there for some work.  I have a lot of pine trees now so I have a lot of needles to pull.  I started with the younger trees which are generally smaller and require less work.  On some of them I was done in about 5 minutes, others which required wiring took me an hour or more each.

I have one pine which I bought quite a few years ago; it was in a gallon can and showed no particular promise.  I pruned it, planted it in the ground for two years (during which I should not have, but did candle cut it), dug it up, pruned it again, let it grow again for a year and then this fall decided that I would finally style it.   I removed about eighty percent of the foliage between branch selection and needle reduction but I was pleased with the result because it has two or three good fronts and a few potential planting angles.  Now I just have to remember next year what I had been planning when I styled it.  (Don’t ask me why it’s in a crescent pot, at some point I knew but now I can’t remember what I was thinking.)

This past spring I transplanted a different pine, which had been growing in a cascade pot, into a tall cylinder of plastic(part of a bag of Akadama) sitting on top of a terra cotta pot to turn it into an exposed root style.  After four or five months of growth I began slowly removing the plastic in small strips to expose more and more root.  Just this past week I exposed what had been the bottom of the rootball at the beginning of the spring.  The roots are starting to look quite interesting and I plan to encourage them with some wiring and arranging at the next transplanting.  The tree seemed to have doubled in size this year because I was taking advantage of the growth both going up and going down.

I cleaned up my little formal upright juniper at the John Boyce workshop a couple weeks ago.  I styled it initially last fall but let it just grow without pinching for the whole growing season this year.  During the cleanout I jinned the stronger tips and used the other foliage to make the new pads of foliage.  I took off bottom growing foliage and evened out the branches and the silhouette.  After I was done I realized that I had been happier about half way through when the top looked all disheveled but the bottom looked relatively clean…no matter, a few months of growth will make the top look nicely untidy again.

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