Spring has sprung (finally) in the UK and now is the time that many trees flower, so they can pollinate the next generation with enough time for seeds to develop before winter. Plant reproduction is quite a complicated multi-stage process, but for the purposes of this post it’s enough to know that pollen is the […] Read more… >
Flat leaves are found across the conifer families including Taxus, Cephalotaxus, and even in Pinus (check out Pinus krempfii) as well as many of the Araucariaceae and Podocarpaceae families. Commonly known trees with this leaf shape include all varieties of yew, swamp cypress, dawn redwood and coast redwood. Here are some examples: Conifer flat leaves […] Read more… >
I’ll be honest, I find conifer needles to be quite weird. As someone raised in the southern hemisphere, true pine trees were something we had at Christmas and that was about it (this is true because the most common Christmas tree found in Australia is Pinus radiata). But actually, needles really are just plain old […] Read more… >
Scale leaves are a curious form of conifer leaves which cover up the stem in interlocking patterns. I believe they are called ‘scale’ because they look a bit like fish scales in the way they overlap but I have not found an authoritative source which confirms this. Scale leaves appear primarily in the Cupressaceae family […] Read more… >
You may have noticed that certain conifer species’ leaves go a different colour over the winter without dying. This phenomenon is most associated with Buxus (box) and Cryptomeria japonica (Japanese cedar) which take on a range of bronze, reddy-brown colours, as shown in the examples below: Although it may look a bit alarming, these leaves […] Read more… >
I’ve been planning a post on this subject for a while because conifers have always been a bit scary to me from a bonsai point of view – they don’t seem as forgiving or obvious in terms of their growth behaviour. This was one of those subjects which ended up being a lot more interesting […] Read more… >
We recently had guest speaker Amelia Williams talk to members of Twickenham bonsai club about tropical bonsai. She has moved entirely to keeping tropicals & sub-tropicals, to the extent that her back garden is full of her ex-non-tropical bonsai trees which are now planted as a foliage bed! This post references some of Amelia’s talk, […] Read more… >
Sometimes in a bonsai context it’s said that specific branches are connected to specific roots – often in discussions about pruning and carving. For example it may be suggested that pruning a specific branch will kill an associated root, or vice versa. As I’ve learned over the last 6 months researching this site, when it […] Read more… >
Most bonsai enthusiasts will have come across the term ‘live veins’ in the context of bonsai. Live veins are areas of living bark surrounded by deadwood. They are often seen on juniper bonsai, where a section of bark twists around the tree in a dramatic contrast to the white deadwood (Sierra juniper are particularly amazing). […] Read more… >
At this time of year (December) I like to grow from seed, just to give me something green to watch. To many people the very idea of growing an actual tree from seed to the point that it can be used for bonsai seems completely ridiculous. If, like me, you’ve come to the hobby as […] Read more… >