I’ve been working on pine trees more and more in the last few years and after four years of care I finally have one tree that I have shown and now will be setting aside for a year for the sake of improving the tree further. Once a tree becomes refined enough to have a full canopy refinement doesn’t stop. But if the canopy is allowed to remain full with no light penetrating to the interior and lower buds then the refinement will not progress but rather regress. Thus, when a tree will be shown and when a tree will be maintained for future show the treatment is different.

For a show, be it a pine, juniper or whatever species, you want a full canopy of foliage with many leaves and layers of foliage showing branching somewhat but also having a full silhouette. In the case of pine trees, when showing them in the winter or spring it is often advisable to leave some of the year-old needles on the tree so that the pads look full and thick. Long needles from buds that were too weak to candle cut can be trimmed to the same length as the other needles the day of the show so that the tips do not look brown. The underside of branches should be cleaned up, remove all needles that hang down below the line of the pad and use wire to even out the level of the tips within each pad. Branch tips should radiate from the branch outward in an arc and be evenly spaced.
In contrast to show prep, maintenance of pines involves thinning out buds, removal of all the old needles, wiring and bending and possibly grafting in places where branches are too long or poorly placed. Removal of the old needles is pretty straight forward, pull them out, removing the sheath as well. In areas that are particularly strong you can remove some of the new needles as well to balance out the strength. For buds that were not candle cut in the summer and which have much longer needles equalizing the strength requires that the longer needles be cut to the same length as the shorter needles on the tree. Note that cutting all the needles on a tree is not necessary and since the cut ends brown it will make the tree look messy, not tidy.

Thinning goes beyond removal of the old needles; remove all but two of the whorl of buds that resulted from candle cutting: these can be either a weak bud pointing upward and a stronger one pointing down, or two equal buds on the sides of the branch depending on the position of the branch. Remove weak buds that form in clusters; these tiny buds may take years to become usable branches and take energy away from the nearby larger buds. If the tiny buds are in a location where a branch is needed you can leave them, but if they are in the middle of a pad of foliage you should remove them so that the stronger branch tips are even and there is good spacing between
the remaining small branches. The result of the thinning, needle pulling and wiring should make the branches look tidy with an even amount of foliage throughout, albeit thin.

In the case of my small pine I have added a couple grafts to the top right branch because it is slightly too long and will never bud back far enough to correct the problem. The grafts will eventually form a branch and the existing one will then be cut off.

Although you can treat your trees the same way all the time, they will look their best if you examine the techniques that you are using and think about how they should or should not be applied. When show time rolls around your tree should look as good as possible, even if that means not applying some of the maintenance techniques that you have used to get the tree refined.

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