Boxwood 04
Kingsville Dwarf Boxwood [Buxus microphylla var. compacta]
Two-trunk? Informal upright? Who knows.

FEBRUARY 23, 2024. The recovery I hope for last year didn’t happen. The tree just soldiered on but never hit a good growth run, so I decided another repot was best. when I took it out of the pot, I realized what the rouble was. Some of it, at least. The mis I  used was way too coarse, and the edges of the soil had eroded away from the circle of trimmed roots. So this time I used a more appropriate mix of akadama and pumice, and I put some moss from the Cook Hill pecan trees to hold things in place. The screen I pot over the moss to hold it in place doesn’t look great, but that’s OK with me for now.

March 2, 2023

MARCH 2, 2023. I’m a little worried about this tree. It did great all last year, and still looked good in the fall, when I put it under the bench for the winter. I don’t know if it didn’t get enough water, if something attacked it, or if something else happened, but it came out from winter storage looking like a refugee from a tree war zone. There were a lot of circling roots in good shape, so I don’t think water was the issue. Maybe it got sunburned? Insects? I don’t know.

Anyway, I took it our of the pot, trimmed the roots, put if back in the same pot, and I’ll give it extra attention through the spring. Poor baby. Looking at the photo, I see that I turned the pot around. Not the best side. And the angle of the tree is turned a little, but not enough, and the tilt isn’t quite what I hoped for.

Next time …

March 15, 2022

August 5, 2022. Surprise! I put this one in the ABS show in May, and the tree got a blue ribbon! In truth it was the only tree in its category (broadleaf evergreen,  advanced level), but it still shocked me. What a hoot! Anyway, my next step is to get the side branch to drop down lower and maybe tilt the whole thing a little over just to be sure it still looks like a live oak in downtown Mobile.

March 9, 2022. Well, the little tree survived the slip-potting. At least, it’s still alive today, showing a little winter wear, but overall OK. Somehow I think I’ve let the thing get a little low and wide looking. I’ll ask for suggestions once I can get to a Saturday workshop. Meanwhile, I’ll have to finally get some photos in the new pot! I won’t change anything this year, of course, but next repot I’ll improve the angle and depth. There’s a chance it will really end up looking great.

AND — about the new pot. I learned last year that past ABS presidents receive a pot from the club as thanks for their efforts. That was a really nice surprise, and I actually got to select the pot. I had thought about getting a custom-made one from MC2 for the Savannah Elm, but that didn’t work out. I ended up getting a nice Erin pot from John Walker.

July 13, 2021

July 14, 2021. Well, I’m not going to tie that secondary trunk down after all. But I am going to buy a new pot for it. It’s looking good, but the tangle of little roots is getting worse, and drying out is also getting worse. Let’s hear it for careful slip-potting! New photos below. And I still don’t know which front I prefer. In this photo I’ve kept the original front, but I’ve also rotated the pot a little bit. And I might go further and snip off another pad. Why not?

March 25, 2021. I haven’t repotted this yet, but I hope to do that before too long. I was surprised to hear Doug say at the bonsai meeting Monday night that the club has given past presidents a gift in the past. I’m to pick out a pot I like for them to give me. I’m excited! Meanwhile I’ve been working on the tree a bit. I’ve removed one large pad sticking out of the side of the secondary trunk. Now I’m beginning to wonder if I can’t tie the side branch down a little, just far enough that it actually touches the soil. If I tilt it enough, and actually tie the branch to the bottom of the pot, I think I can do that without disturbing the angle of the main trunk too much. Maybe. I’ll try it and see.

October 29, 2020

October 30, 2020 And some more. This is another tree that has done well this year. the pads are much thicker, and the overall shape is filling out nicely. I really like the direction I’ve decided on, even if I haven’t gotten a good photo of it that way. I’ll have to work on it this week. I do like it better with the horizontal shoot running to the right, rather than to the left. I’ll have to trim some more to expose trunk and branches, of course, but the overall appearance is a little better that way. If I get some good growth sort of in the lower center of the tree, I might change my mind, but for now that’s what I’m thinking.

April 1, 2020. The COVID-19 isolation has thrown a monkey wrench into my plans for this poor thing. After Rodney’s workshop was canceled, I took a couple of photos and constructed an email to make up a sort of virtual workshop. I sent the email to all the ABS members and to Rodney. I got only a couple of replies from club members, but Rodney sent a few suggestions. The main one was to use the original front but tilt it to the left about 10 degrees. That would make the strange long branch look more a part of a whole. I tried it; he’s right. He also said I need to keep it in the grow pot another year. That’s easy. I’m going to change the soil mix anyway. That’s just needed for perk up the growth some more.

October 23, 2019. Wow! This tree has done well this year. The stress seems to have been overcome with its time in the big pot. It’s healthy and growing well. I think the next step is to decide whether or not to keep it this size or to cut each main branch back and make it a much smaller tree. I’m not sure what I want to do. Yet. I’ll figure it out in due time. UPDATE January 31. I’m playing with ideas of changing the potting angle. I really don’t know what I want to do.

March 30, 2019. I took this one to the club workshop with Rodney today. It looks like I dug it a year too early, and possibly did a little too much pruning after I dug it up and put it in this pot. Now it looks stressed, and I don’t want it to get worse. So I’ll treat it with kindness, feed it well, protect it from drying out, and hope for the best. At Rodney’s suggestion I looked at the Virginia Tech info about Boxwood Blight. I don’t think that’s the problem.

March 13, 2019. I dug this one out of the garden and potted it up about a month ago, and so far it’s doing well. Now that I see it in the photograph, I’m not happy with the silhouette. I thought it looked OK at first, and then I tweaked the secondary trunk and one of the main branches. I’m going to have to think some more. The two halves of this one will definitely go to Rodney’s workshop in a couple of weeks.

October 20, 2018. This photo isn’t great, but it’s about the best I could do squatting down in the garden with my phone. I had to shoot it from the side, so I rotated the photo a little bit. This shows the angle I think I want it to have in the pot; it might mot be the angle it’s growing in now. The unaltered photo is below, in the Photos section, This will end up being a twin trunk/mother-daughter kind of live oak design, I think. I’ll have to get help with that.

October 15, 2018. Three weeks ago I separated the top portion because I could see roots through the plastic wrap. YAY! I put it in the ground in at the far end of the second level of the garden, and it’s growing well. Including making new growth left and right. I wanted it to have time to adjust to the separation before winter sets in, and it looks like I made the right decision. I guess the bottom part will become a new boxwood number in this set of pages.

September 8, 2018. Oh, boy, did I change my mind over the summer. I took this one to the June ABS meeting so that John Walker could use this as fodder for a program about taking cuttings. And I had already started to doubt the whole idea of a raft that I had started working toward earlier. So I bit the bullet, and when we got back from the Yellowstone trip I started an air layer of the biggest part of the tree. I think I did the right thing, but only time will tell. In the first place, my track record with air layers isn’t all that great. And in the second place, I should have started this much earlier in the summer. I’m encouraged, though, because the tree is doing well now, a full month after I girdled the bark. I just hope it hasn’t bridged the gap under all that mess of moss and perlite under the aluminum foil.

April 4, 2918: After

April 4, 2018. Well, I took it to Rodney’s workshop on Saturday, and I’m not sure that I went far enough with what I did, now that I have it at home and have looked at it some more. Rodney talked to me a little, then left me to remove growth; except for one more time looking at the tree with me, that was it. You can look at the “Before” photo at the bottom of the page and see that it hadn’t changed a lot in the month it had been in the box. the long trunk had maybe fallen down a little, but that’s about it. Rodney talked about making this into a raft, but I wasn’t very taken with the idea at the time. But now I think that’s what I want to do!

April 4, 2018. Detail

I got started today. I can’t pull it all the way down yet, but I’ll have to change the angle between the trunk and the big roots on that side of the base. Otherwise this won’t work. I tied the root ball to the bottom of the box with wrapped wire, then added a similar wrapped wire along the trunk. I tightened things as much as I thought I could at one whack. I’ll have to slowly tighten it more over the summer.

When I repot it next spring, I’ll move the trunk farther back in the box and pull the trunk down into the soil at the foliage end. There’s a perfectly shaped branch in place to form the point where the tree leaned over and was stopped from going all the way by a strong limb. It will look something like this highly “shopped” image, and I think it could be really nice eventually. But not right away.

February 25, 2018.  I dug this one up at Leo Wagner’s in Tuscaloosa last weekend. It had been growing in the ground more than 20 years, planted on landscape fabric. The roots were practically all radial and flat along the ground. Amazing. I did have to remove one downward growing root, but it wasn’t all that large.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with this so far as styling is concerned. I’m going to take this to Rodney’s workshop March 31 and see what happens. I just really like the slanted trunk, the smaller growth below the “football helmet,” and the roots — which are now covered up in the box I planted it in.

Photos