Hawthorn: Summer Pruning [Bonsai]

Check out my recent efforts on my Hawthorn tree. It slowly takes on a new design.

I was at bonsai club this past month, and I brought this tree with me so I could spend some time sprucing it up.

Sprucing. Get it? (Spruce is a type of tree) Yes, that's another bonsai pun, which is buried under my many layers of dry humor. Sometimes they just slip out with my other euphemisms, double entendres, and clichés. To me, it's as easy as falling off a log.

At the library, we meet and sometimes make a little bit of a mess working on trees. Brush brush, snip snip, dig dig, clip clip, spray spray. Sometimes people bring in trees to show and discuss for learning purposes, or demonstrations.

Our club director always lays out these colored tablecloths to help keep the surfaces clean. It also protects the tables from dinks and scratches from our heavy pots and tools.

For photos, it's also great, because I can take a better look at the true shape of the tree with a solid backdrop.

All this tree needed was a little bit of a clean-up today. No major style changes, just simple trimming to invigorate the tree to continue to grow and open new buds.

Hawthorns are very thorny, so I make it a mission to snip off thorns first to prevent injury to myself. Next I remove over-sized leaves growing beside buds that have fully pushed out new stems with young leaves. After that, I shorten stems to no more than two new sets of young leaves. Lastly, I clip off any extra branches that are crowding a node, to prevent the wood from forming a thick whorl.

It ends up looking like this.

On this day, I also decided to apply some wiring to the tree. One of the goals in my wiring was to prevent branches from criss-crossing other branches, especially when I want to keep them both on the tree. Another goal in wiring is to guide the shape of the branch in a new direction. This can wildly alter the personality of the entire tree even with subtle changes.

From the reverse view it becomes easier to analyze the thickness of the branches compared to the trunk of the tree.

A professional bonsai exhibit was on display at an art fair I went to. They had a hawthorn on display that was listed as 12 years old, and mine is only half that age yet twice as thick as theirs. I'm guessing my tree has been given more light, root space, and fertilizer. They said they were available for consultation, and I may in fact inquire about the differences in our trees to find out why they are so different in size.

Always, it brings me great pleasure to share each of my bonsai trees with my neighbors here on the steem blockchain.

Comments, opinions, questions, and suggestions are very welcome. The more I teach in my work, the more I am also humbled to remember to be a student first, seeking always to learn more.

Knowledge is a free gift. It takes courage to risk believing in what we do not know. It takes experience in taking those risks to better discern truth.

Photos in this post are all #originalworks by @creativetruth, unless stated otherwise.

Find me on discord and chat with other tree growers, bonsai enthusiasts, and gardeners. We have quite a few accredited experts filling out our ranks, and a helpful Spanish-speaking community.