Elm 02
Chinese Elm [Ulmus parvifolia]
Broom/Savanna style

March 2, 2023

MARCH 2, 2023. Repotted this week, but nothing really changed. I did tweak the apex a little over the growing season last year, giving it a bit more height, but that’s not a significant change. Trimming roots and planting the twisted roots deeper helps, I think. 

March 15, 2022. I’m not changing anything big about this tree at all this year. I still haven’t found the pot I want for it, but it’ll be fine in this one another year. I have added some guy wires and will put a couple more on it soon. It grows so fast that small wires cut in within only a few weeks, and I want to do something to keep the pad bottoms flat. Trimming frequently also helps, of course. If I get a better photo of this one this summer I’ll add it; else the ones already here show what it looks like now. On the other hand, if the right wider shallow pot gets in my way, I’ll snatch it up and move the thing into a new home!

July 12, 2021

July 13, 2021. I’m really pleased with the progress made this year. The tree is finally taking on the appearance I was looking for. The back branch needs to develop a lot more, but even at its present size it contributes to the three-dimensional aspect of the design. And when the light hits things just the right way, I’m very happy with the flat-bottomed pads/clouds.

March 7, 2021. I’ve decided not to repot this one this year. Instead, I’m going to spend the year looking for the right pot for it and working on the top some more. Jim Baker says to use guy wires to place branches, but I’m still going to wire out the flat bases of these pads. I’ve let them extend far enough now, and I think it’s time to let them fill out and mound up a bit as individual clouds. Time will tell if that will work.

February 9, 2020. This one got its repot yesterday at the ABS Saturday workshop. I think it looks pretty good. Jack Pierce helped me do it, and we both agreed that one branch had to go. So this morning I took it off, and the tree looks better. The photo here was made after I removed the branch. I think I also have to do something about the secondary branch up at the apex. I had tried to move it so it goes in the same direction as the left-hand apex branch, but that doesn’t work. I’ve dropped a sketch (E-Sketch on the iPad) in the photos below. When I added the foliage, it just looked too pitiful. So I extended the foliage on all the pads and fluffed them up a little. That looks a whole lot better, so that’s where I’m going with it this year.  It’ll be really nice to look at some day! One note about the sketch: the big blob of green on the right is actually three separate branches, one of them in the back. I got a little carried away with the color, but I don’t think I could have distinguished them any better anyway.

February 9, 2020

January 31, 2020. Well, we didn’t have a fall. A hard freeze hit us before we even thought about color changes and all that usual fall stuff. That’s a shame. I’ve missed taking photos of a lot of the stages in the ongoing sage, and that’s another shame. I have a new pot for the tree, but I plan for it to be only a temporary pot, What I really want is a flat gray oval like the MC2 pots I’ve seen. They have a series of nice rugged ovals with color that will coordinate with the bark. With the green canopy and moss, the tree will look great in a pot like that. The tree has been cleaned and wired for repotting, the work to get new roots seems to have worked, and I’ll be sure to get a photo after the repot. EDIT. Here’s the photo, made February 9.

October 23, 2109. I have got to get a good photo before fall happens! I’ve wired and rewired several times, and it looks great. I hope the “fence” with rooting powder and lots of moist soil helped the root growth. I’m currently looking for a nice shallow pot for next spring.

March 17, 2019. I trimmed roots again and repotted it deeper in a similar soil mix. This time I just have a little organic stuff mixed in. I cut just about all the roots off I thought I could and keep it alive. This summer I think I have to just rough up some of the exposed roots, use a little magic powder, and do what amounts to a ground layer–trying to get new roots to form about halfway up the currently visible root tangle. At the upper end, I had wired the branches three weeks ago, and at that time I was sort of happy with the horizontal planes I had achieved. Today I thought it looked so bad I took it straight up the steps after I shot this photo. This is ragged and unkempt looking. I got part of the apex wired before I quit for supper. My guess is that I’ll be wiring and rewiring this puppy all summer about every two weeks! Update April 14. I waited a month! And it looked horrible, so I took it to the monthly workshop at Samford yesterday and did it again. Before and after photos below. Now I think I need to remove or reposition the highest pad, moving the apex to the pad to the right of that one as I look at it.

September 8, 2018. Wow. Has this tree done well over the summer. I’ve chopped it back some more, not drastically, but by way of refining the flat-top image. I even got the Dremel out this afternoon and worked it a little from the standpoint of refining the transitions from the larger trunk-sized branches to the new growth. On the whole that was successful on one branch. The others will require more work. I don’t think I’ll have to change the potting angle any farther next spring. It’s good like it is. And I’ve determined how I want to space about three different flat-top levels. I will definitely need a different pot, though. It just has to be in something smaller. Depending on how much of a cut I manage to the roots next spring, that new pot could be needed next year.

2018. February 21. Last month I chopped the hell out of this tree. Really. It had a few buds beginning to show green, so I thought it was now [then?] or never. I stuck some of the better looking sections I cut off in the garden growing area. Maybe some will root. Update March 6, 2018. The tree is putting out new shoots in lots of places, and I think I saw even more buds all up and down the trunks. The big surprise was seeing that clusters of barely noticeable buds at each of the cuts have actually pushed the cut paste off. I’m impressed.

It’s considerably shorter than it was. I also started cleaning the moss off the roots only to discover that many of those tangled exposed roots were dead and rotten. So I picked some of them off as well. That led me to look at “stumpy” from a new angle, so the repot will have the tree growing at a completely new angle. Yesterday I saw that the new buds that are popping out all over the stump are swelling, so the drastic chop didn’t kill the tree.

And the repot has to happen now! So it’s in my usual enriched 2:1:1 mix in the new Marjan Mirt pot I bought for it last year. Only now, that pot might turn out to be too big for the tree.

August 26, 2017

2017.August 26. It’s doing great, and the change to a flat-top design is going well. The next step will be shortening the tree some, and if it grows as well next spring as it did this spring, that should go well too. And cutting the big roots at the bottom of the tree will really help a lot. In the photo, it’s a little shaggy, but I’m letting it pretty much grow as much as it can right now.

2017. June 15. We got back from the Russian River Cruise two days ago, and I discovered this tree was showing signs of drying out too much with once-a-day watering. The day temperatures are in the low nineties. Next year I not only need to work on reducing those big roots on the bottom of the tree, I need to add a little organic stuff to the soil mix for this one. It’s not all that happy. The good news is that I moved it to a shadier spot and I’m watering it twice a day. It’s happy now.

AND—The idea of separate small domes looks terrible. I almost withdrew it from the ABS show. Multiple flat tops will work much better, and I can encourage  some new growth lower down some of the trunks to make that work even better.

2017. March 18. I’ve decided that trying to make one big continuous dome of an umbrella out of this is never going to work. I have to do something else, so I’ve decided to treat separately branch ends as separate small domes. Or maybe separate flat-tops. Either way, that should be much more interesting and ultimately more convincing.

Trunk Diameter: 2 inches. 26″ tall. 24″ Canopy. This is not a small bonsai.

2017. January. Repotted really early at the Saturday ABS workshop because the thing is already pushing new growth. It’s now in a 16″ reddish oval. Cheap pot, but it needs something big to encourage lateral root growth. Right now it’s a mess down there.

Besides, until I see that I can maintain it well, I’m not going to buy a really nice pot. I spent all my time last year trimming the canopy to make it as full as I could. I tried to get a continuous smooth coverage filling the oval shape, thinking of an umbrella. I think it looks OK in this photo, made just after the repotting.

2016. I bought this one at the April ABS Meeting. A former member, David Smith, is disbanding his collection, so he brought some trees for sale. It’s in so-so shape, but is crammed into a really small pot that is so crowded with huge roots I don’t think it will come out of the pot at all! I can’t tell exactly what the canopy should look like.

The crown is a general umbrella shape, but I guess technically this is a funky broom style. Maybe? I paid him $200.00 for the tree and thought I got a good deal. The photo was made May 11, 2016.

Photos