Creating a Boxwood Bonsai (Buxus) from Nursery Stock

In this upcoming video I'm going to show you how to turn a basic piece of raw material like this into a nice little shohin bonsai like this right here. This is part of a larger lecture series available on bonsaiempire.com. All right now the approach for broadleaf evergreens is going to be slightly different than that for the deciduous material. These trees obviously retain their leaves all year long hence the name broadleaf evergreen. So with these particular types of plants we're looking mainly to create a general canopy shape to the tree rather than focusing too much necessarily on the taper within the branches and creating like a padded structure. So with a plant like this we're going to go through and actually just prune back each individual branch to create whatever desired sort of silhouette that I want on the tree. Now that doesn't mean I'm going to go through and shear everything back. I actually do want to look at each individual branch cutting back to potentially a directional bud moving in a certain direction for that next shoot. Although with boxwood they are an opposite leaf pattern tree so that's a little bit tricky. But in any case I don't want to shear through it because it just gives you a very fake and contrived look. We're going to want to cut each individual shoot to give us a much more naturalistic vibe to the tree in the long run. Now before I do any cuts on the plant I do want to explain the background of it. It was a tree that was propagated by cutting. More than likely it's in the neighborhood of about three to four years old. The nursery that propagates these uses a very high nitrogen fertilizer and throws gobs and gobs of it on the plants to really blow up the size. So even though it's young it's got a lot of growth on it a lot of ramification. Now there are two ways to approaching the design of this tree. One is to treat it kind of like a show heme. We're just going to prune everything back to shape and make it look really nice. The other is of course if we want to thicken this or grow it any larger we need to leave at least one or two terminal shoots up here at the top to thicken the plant. Now for me personally I think it's going to look good sort of as is if we prune it back and turn it into essentially a little show heme tree. So that's what we're going to do in this upcoming session here. So before we start cutting the top of the tree we do need to figure out what the front is going to be and that will dictate what we end up cutting off and how we build the directionality. So to me we have two main options. We've got this side here which shows off the four main trunks that we have. We've got the big guy in the middle here one off to the right side. This one coming slightly towards the front and then one on the far left side there. We can also flip the tree completely around to the other side here in which case again you see all of the trunks. Now in my opinion the bark on this side really isn't that interesting whereas from the other side it just seems to shine a little bit more and show off a bit more. So I'm thinking we're going to probably lean towards this being the front of the tree over here. It might not look the best in the video but I think once we prune it up you'll be able to see the structure better. In person it just makes more sense I think to use this side as the front. Now with all of that in mind you'll notice here that the thickest trunk is actually this one on the far left side here. Second thickest is the one in the middle. This guy is the third thickest and then the one in the front is the thinnest. So typically we want the thickest trunk to be the tallest. So I'm not going to worry about pruning this over here quite yet. I'm going to go ahead and start pushing down the other trunks first. All right so the line of this trunk we have two options. We can grow it out and straight to the side here or we can have it come up cock back in and then back out to the side. So I think it's pretty obvious that the movement here is going to be more interesting. So I'm going to go ahead and shorten back this potential apex that we had here. We're going to turn this more into a branch than an apex. So really with boxwood we can cut anywhere along the length of the shoot as long as we have some buds to the interior. The older the tree the less likely you're going to have back buds so I wouldn't necessarily do a hard cut. But with a really young tree like this we can really cut just about anywhere here. So we'll cut this slightly long for right now. All right we'll leave this guy down here kind of as a directional branch and then some of this growth towards the rear here I'm going to go ahead and leave that slightly long as well so that it sort of continues the line to the right hand side here. Now the apex here on this shoot that's coming up we don't need it to be this tall of course so I'm going to go ahead and push this down to this bifurcation down here. We're going to go ahead and shorten this guy up a little bit here as well. So eventually that'll round out and give us I think a nice little top for our shortest trunk there. All right now the next thing we're going to do is come to the front trunk here. I'm going to go ahead and shorten that down but I want to make sure that the height of this is different than the height of the first trunk that we cut. So in my opinion we should probably make this slightly taller than this guy here. So I'm going to come up into this area bring back these shoots here and back about there and that should do it for us I think. All right next up we'll come to the second thickest trunk currently the tallest trunk but we're going to push this way down and again I want to make sure it's not the same height as this guy so we're going to make it just a little bit taller here. Start with that still a little too tall I think so let's push it back a little bit more somewhere into that neighborhood there. It feels pretty good and then the remaining branches towards the interior here I just want to sort of continue the rounded look of the canopy here. So tentatively we're going to cut these guys back into this area here. We're probably going to end up shortening some of those as we work our main apex off to the side there. All right now our main trunk here we have a couple of options we could continue the apex out to the right hand side which is currently the tallest shoot here or we can make a new line moving back towards the interior with this guy and then potentially change the planting angle of the tree. Now of course just like our smaller apex here I think having that additional movement in the trunk is going to be best so we're going to make this the actual apex here just shortening it down a little bit but making sure that it's taller than the rest of the trunks. Now everything on the opposite side over here to the left we need to shorten significantly so that the movement and your eye go in the right direction which is to the right of course. Okay let's see. Oh yeah I look pretty good. Okay all right now one thing that is obscuring the trunk line of these trees is all of this fuzz down below here or this sort of interior growth that really is unnecessary. So when you're building a clump style tree like this anything that's going back towards the interior we can automatically go ahead and remove that. So we're going to cut out some of these shoots here to open it up. We'll take out some of the really tiny guys down here and some of these guys in the center here. So that feels pretty nice to me I think. All right now another issue with this is that the trunks are still relatively close together so I'd like to go ahead and separate these out slightly. I'm going to show you a really quick trick as to how to do that. All right now of course we could throw a little bit of wire on the branches to fan some of those out but in order to separate the trunks on the tree I would much rather use a brace than put wrapped wire on there. The wrapped wire can cause a bit more damage than the bracing does and it just looks very ugly and obtrusive whereas the brace will give us really nice holding power. We can leave it on as long as we want without the worry of it biting in and it will provide a lot of holding power once we remove it as long as we let the branches or the trunks in this case set into place. So I'm just using a piece of copper wire here that I've cut to a point on both ends. I've work hardened it a little bit as well so it's not going to bend once we put it in there and we're going to force this in between the trunks to push them apart. Let me get the right size here. All right so we're going to jam one end of the wire into the interior trunk here and the other end into our furthest right hand trunk. Right because we've pushed those or cut those rather to a point at the end as we push them into the branch they'll actually sink into the branch and lock into place. We're not going to have any slippage there. So we're going to do the same thing for the far left hand side here. I'm going to push our main trunk away just slightly. That's going to give us a much broader canopy to the tree. All right and lastly here I'm going to put just a few wrapped wires on some of our secondary and primary branches here just to open the canopy up a little bit more. Now for this we're just using aluminum wire. This is a 1.5 mil which is plenty big for these small branches here. We should be able to leave this wire on for a decent amount of time. I don't think this is going to bite in that quickly necessarily particularly if we slow down a little bit with the fertilizer which at this stage of development is actually not a bad idea. We've already basically got the primary lines of the trunk set up. Most of the primary branches are where they need to be at least in terms of diameter and now we're trying to slow the growth down to produce ramification. So I don't foresee this wire biting in that quickly but we do need to keep an eye on it and remove it before it does in fact bite into the branches. All right so now that I've styled this tree up and fanned all the branches out and the trunks out it actually looks really really good from both sides. As a matter of fact this side actually may even be a better front than what we initially designed it here. So sometimes this happens when you start printing things back fanning things out it can shift completely. So the beautiful thing is that this nice front here is on the exact opposite side as the original front that we chose. So no matter what type of pot we use it could be rectangle could be oval could be round of course we can show the tree potentially from both sides which is very cool. Now in terms of pots here we've got three options to choose from. We've got a little guy here from China you know sort of a modern production pot that's actually quite nice. The color of this I think will look really nice with the color of the bark and really make it pop. We've also got a Yamafusa pot here that's significantly longer but relatively shallow so we might be able to use this and the color of this to me looks really beautiful contrasted with the white of the bark and the green foliage. We also have a little shuho pot here from Tokoname that size-wise I think would look spectacular with this but the speckles on it might make it a little bit loud relative to the bark but we'll see. We're going to pop the tree out work the roots back a little bit set it in each pot and see what works best. So this tree has a lot of really nice roots on it but we're going to work most of these out of here. So we'll start with the underside of the root ball as always work the periphery second and then pick away at the top with the chopstick. So at the moment here we are in very early spring in Tennessee so this is perfect timing to do major root work on most of your plant species. So in exposing the roots here we actually do have a really nice nabari under the surface so we're going to try to expose as much of that as we can but this is definitely an indication that we did something right in phase one in working with the nabari. Again this was a cutting initially so those roots down at the base were removed and then in favor of the ones closer to the trunk and then flared out and now we get this really nice flared nabari on the surface of the soil. All right so we've worked the roots out on the tree here and you can see we managed to knock it down to a pretty flat underside here and a very thin root ball. What we're going to do now is set it in each of the pots and test this out to see what looks the best. So here we've got our modern Chinese production pot size-wise this is fantastic usually the depth of the pot should be about the same as the diameter of the trunk just above the nabari so we're not far off here. Left to right the size is great the canopy of the tree overhangs the pot a little bit on both sides which you know gives it a nice sort of big broad feel to it I think. So let's pop it out of here and try our other two options. This is the Yamafusa pot here now this one is a little bit shallower than the last pot that we looked at but quite a bit wider side to side and front to back so there's more room for the tree to grow in here and to me the color of this pot I actually like a lot better with this box so I think it makes it pop quite a bit. So if we're thinking sort of you know future evolution of this tree getting this to fill in and ramify this is actually not a bad pot even though right now it might feel just slightly large for the tree I think in say one to three years once we do get that ramification on there it will blend nicely with the plant. All right now the last option we have here is our Shuho pot from Tokoname right which again is a good size I think for this tree but it just feels a little bit loud like it's competing with the bark on the plant and kind of detracting from it really one of the main features of this boxwood is that fissured bark and of course the flowers at the top but the fissured bark seems to compete with the speckled glaze on here so size-wise it may be good but to me it just doesn't match the tree properly. All right so for me personally I think I'm going to stick with the shallow Yamafusa pot I just like the color of this and again I think developmentally in the long run it's going to make the most sense to have it in here we'll be able to keep it in this pot.