Evolution of this large privet bonsai !! - Greenwood Bonsai

Hello, welcome to the Greenwood Bonsai Studio here today. We're going to do a follow-up video. videos on a lot of the project trees we've We worked on it before and this is one we thought we'd show you. The channel's been going for a couple of This particular tree we worked on about a year ago. It was quite wide, quite leggy, overgrown growth and we've been trying to sort of chase it back and get a better shape There's a little pop-up on the screen Now for that video if you want to go back And we did that initial prune A little late in the year, we did it about August Time and the new growth just started to come through late in the year and then didn't really Gained a lot of traction, didn't really do much. So it's been in the greenhouse since and this spring It started to put out a lot of new growth. A little clip from the first video of how severely we trimmed this tree back. There's a little clip now showing you me doing that work Now because the privet is really good for hedging and most hedging plants you can trim The privet is no exception, it's one of the most commonly used types of privateet. The best trees for pruning hard back so No prizes for guessing what we're going to do today. Private hard back and I do mean quite hard back. We've got quite a lot of leg growth so where this branch comes out for For example, look, we've got 12-14 inches of growth. Just sporadic back shoots on it and this is all too long so Now after flowering we're going to cut it hard back We're going to fertilize it pop it in the greenhouse we've got a good I think we should be able to get a good deal of sunshine here in the UK. I'll put some food on it, put it in the greenhouse for a few weeks. Keep it well watered and hopefully we'll come back to it in a few weeks And I'll show you how it's progressing. It's a pretty drastic thing to be seen doing but it's It's not something we don't do as bonsai enthusiasts. Sometimes you have to take a step back with a tree and and address any problems so you can then move forward We're not trimming this tree today. To look better we're trimming this tree to be a better tree in a year or two for the new owner. So a few people have commented on that video so you've cut a lot back it's a I hope you didn't kill the tree. You can't really kill a private by pruning it. They're very, very good for hedging material and you can Cut them back to just a stump cut the branches back really hard And we know you can because we work on them a lot so that's why We took this kind of that's why we took this method So now it's gone overgrown again it's not as leggy as before because before we got a lot of What we have now is the The branches are tighter back in but we've got new extension growth on So the next stage which is slightly Now I have to go back and just change. These back the long length back to just reduce Two or three pairs of leaves so we're keeping some Forage on here it's sprouted there's a little stub where it didn't sprout back So we can clean up some of those up and then after this stage now The next thing will be just to start not let it grow This much and this wild again so keep it trimmed back more so we can The first thing to do is to start developing the foliage paths. If I trim off stuff that's growing Like this and here you can see too You see here this is growing too much here very strongly This can shorten back but in here there are a few little stubs where we did cut it back and it hadn't sprouted That's nothing to worry about. We can remove those. Take those back. This little growth here. Look. It's coming from over here cutting across Like that same with this section we also got down here at the back of the tree some sprouts Some suckers coming straight out of the trunk here look See this one that's growing up here. This is how vigorous it is. Look. It's actually coming from right down here so that can be There's another one there's a little cluster of them in here We can take off try and get it a little more organized So here on this back branch this is going to shorten back Just a quick prune little dead stub there just to develop These foliage paths some of this stronger growth we can Take off if it's growing sending these suckers out that we don't need Just pull these out. Can you see it's sprouted from the trunk? I need that sprout this one here I don't need and this one Take those off shorten these back and back up to this branch now just I'm just trying to get the makings of foliage paths the progression of this The tree has been really quite remarkable as I say we did it a little late In the year it started off slower because it It had just begun to leave leaves and then winter came and it didn't really I'm not sure we're gonna do much this spring. It was a cold winter and some things were a little slow. But then this this kind of started to romp away and it's really quite good So now we've revisited the tree I just finished Pruning this privet back to get the foliage pads in place Now we're gonna let this flush out again but instead of it left instead of letting it Put out this much extension growth we'll let it just put out a couple of inches of extension growth and then prune it back We should be able to get that growth and prune it by the end of this year. So we might revisit this tree again. Don't forget to go back and watch. The first video of this tree because that was quite a drastic video and when we're working with bonsai like this for many years Sometimes we do drastic work and it can look like you've kind of taken a step backwards at that point but the reason you do it is so you can Then take steps forward in the years to come so that's What we're trying to show with this particular process I hope you Enjoy the evolution of this tree please give us a subscribe and keep an Watch out for more videos coming up very soon Thank you very much.