Bonsai is an unusual Japanese art of growing miniature trees that exactly replicate their fellow giants that grow in the wild. The most beautiful is spruce bonsai. However, this species requires more attention and patience.
Features of art
Bonsai has many directions, styles. They all have similar general rules regarding crown formation.
- A coniferous tree should have branches with lush and small needles.
- Trees must have a cone-shaped crown or it is divided into tiers.
Bonsai-spruce is most often grown from the Canadian variety, blue and ordinary. Dealing with this is not as easy as it seems at first glance, and not every beginner manages to create a beautiful mini-tree, especially if you grow a plant from sowing seeds.
Sowing seeds
To make a bonsai spruce, you need to soak the seeds for a day in a solution of potassium permanganate, and then place them in water for another 24 hours. Sowing is done in a container with sand. seedssown with a depth of 1-2 cm. Then the container with the crops is placed in a cold place for two months. Sowing can be put on the balcony or left in the garage.
With the onset of spring, the container is transferred to the house and placed in a bright place, watered. Three weeks later, small Christmas trees appear. As soon as they reach 10 cm, they begin to form a bonsai tree.
For three years, the Christmas tree has been watered once a week. Fertilizers are applied in the spring and only after three years the tree is transplanted into a bonsai tree. Be sure to carry out the formation of bonsai spruce, pinching the top of her head, cutting it.
Bonsai sizes
Bonsai sizes vary. The smallest species barely reach ten centimeters, and if the trees are of impressive size, then you can count on beautiful compositions of about one and a half meters. Moreover, small and large species can be of different ages: small ones grow for more than one year, and large ones can grow in just a couple of years.
The size of the bonsai is determined at the very beginning of the formation of the tree. Most often, skeletal branches, their rudiments, are already on the plant and determine in what style the bonsai will be performed.
Usually the size of a bonsai is determined by the size of the leaves. From trees with small leaves, mini-compositions of any size are formed. Bonsai with long needles should have such a proportion that the finished tree looks harmonious. For example, some types of conifers grow up to a meter or more. Spruce is usually used to form bonsai up to 30 cm high.
Shaping the trunk
How to grow a bonsai spruce, what foris this necessary? Wire is used to form the trunk and branches. It allows you to change the direction of growth, their shape. To make, as in the photo of a bonsai spruce, apply tension and wire overlay.
The overlay method is considered the most time-consuming bonsai technique, especially when forming conifers. Here it is necessary to fix each branch, without exception - to the very top of the shoot. With deciduous species, it is easier, since the formation occurs with the help of pruning branches, and the wire is used extremely rarely.
The wire is applied in spring or winter, during this period the trees are pruned. With the onset of sap flow, young branches quickly become thick, so the wire is applied weakly. During the growth of the tree, its tension is regularly checked, preventing it from growing into the bark. As a rule, after three months, the desired shape is maintained and the wire is removed. It is carefully bitten off with wire cutters without unwinding, as this can lead to breaking off branches.
Fixing the branches requires some skill, as branches often break during this process. To prevent this from happening, you should practice on other trees, branches, for example, in the garden.
Select wire
For the manufacture of bonsai, use copper-plated aluminum wire, with a thickness of 0.7 to 7 mm. To determine the desired thickness, use the formula: the wire should be 1/3 of the thickness of the fixed branch. Thus, with a branch thickness of one centimeter, it is necessary to use a wire with a thickness of 3mm.
The material used in floristry is not suitable for forming bonsai, as it does not have the necessary flexibility, it rusts.
When the bonsai is first formed, the wire is applied to the entire plant, giving it the desired shape. In this case, it is necessary to ensure that the branches do not cross with each other. During the formation of the trunk, the entire tree is wrapped with wire up to its very top, including thick and thin parts.
Change in growth direction
In bonsai, leading to several trunks, with the help of brackets, you can correct and adjust the direction of growth, the shape of individual trunks. To perform this work, it is necessary to make a lot of efforts, regularly check whether the wire has grown into the bark, rearrange the staples in a timely manner.
In order not to damage the bark with staples, pieces of skin are placed under them. Changing the direction of growth with staples is appropriate in places where wire cannot be applied.
Growing down
Sometimes, according to the idea of the author, the bonsai should direct the branches down. To realize this, a wire pull is made. This is not a laborious process like wire laying, but it has its drawbacks. This method allows you to change the direction of growth of branches in only one direction.
The pull method is mainly used where it is necessary to direct the twigs down.
To learn how to form bonsai using wire, certain skills are needed. For the exercise, it is recommended to lay wire on trees more often, giving themdifferent shape. Regular training will improve your skills and form the most unusual types of bonsai.
Wood aging
When grown from white spruce bonsai, or from another type of coniferous tree, you can carry out the procedure of artificial aging. This is done by various methods, among which the simplest and most popular is the removal of the bark from the trunk and twigs with a sharp knife. Such work is complex and requires special skill. To realize this, you need to train, have practical experience.
When artificially aging a tree, you cannot completely remove the entire bark from those branches that are planned to be left alive. They should have a strip running from the bottom to the very top of the head. Nutrients will flow through the bark to the entire branch.
Those parts that need to be killed are completely stripped of the bark. Bare wood is treated with a knife designed for woodcarving. Removing the bark from the trunk and branches is not difficult.
When shaping from Canadian spruce bonsai or from another type of tree, you can apply a variety of techniques. For example, there is a sabamiki technique that involves splitting the trunk. Outwardly, the miniature looks like a tree, which was struck by lightning and split the trunk into two parts. For splitting, wire cutters and wedges are used. This kind of technique allows the bonsai to become more powerful and strong.
Growing needles
Bonsai technique involves maintaining a certain size of needles in conifers. For this it is necessary to breaktips of young shoots. The firs are allowed to grow a little, and then shortened by half or two-thirds. Such manipulation awakens new buds, which turn into twigs next year. From the end of September, old, three-year-old needles are removed. If this is not done, they will become long and ruin the look of the bonsai.
