With the return of the cooler nights and shorter days, Summer in the UK has come to a close and I thought I would review the season by publishing a selection of images from my bonsai Summer

July 2010: My favourite image from the Summer. Crataegus monogyna/Common Hawthorn bonsai pictured with my 10 month old daughter Alice.

Height 30"/77cm with a 3" trunk diameter
Tree collected 2001
Pot by Erin Pottery

June 2010: An ugly S-shaped Ficus microcarpa/Fig bonsai with the smaller leaves of another ficus variety grafted to the trunk, belonging to a student. The tree had a multitude of faults including some nasty scars and inverse taper, so I decided that we should airlayer the top half of the tree to make a new bonsai and shorten the trunk of the lower half to take advantage of an interesting trunkbase.

August 2010: After the airlayer had rooted, the upper trunk was removed from the tree and the trunk chopped back to a lower branch to create the bonsai pictured above. The bonsai was then bare-rooted and potted into a new mica training pot. The tree will now have a new branch structure developed over the forthcoming year(s)

June 2010:This was an interesting bonsai I worked on with a student; an Acer palmatum (variety unknown) bought in 1974. Since then it has never been bare-rooted and has only been lightly root-pruned 4 times, the last time being over 5 years ago!
Apparently it has barely grown in the past 30+years (unsurprisingly given that it has probably been rootbound nearly all of its life) and very rarely puts out a new shoot/extension growth as a result, rather it simply opens a 2 new leaves per bud each year that remain inert until falling in Autumn.

The owner contacted me because he had been worrying about the health of the tree for a few years now and this year the leaves were very few and far between and very small. Taking the tree out of its pot, it was immediately obvious why, the lack of rootpruning meant that there was literally no space for new roots to grow into and a large portion of the small (15cm dia) pot consisted of groundsoil........from 1974!

To re-invigorate the Acer I simply removed as much ground-soil as I could without disturbing the roots and then planted the tree in a slightly larger pot with a mixture of catlitter/high fired clay and sphagnum. This should encourage plenty of new root growth during the remainder of the year allowing me to carry out a thorough repotting (including bare-rooting) next March, at that point the tree can go back into its original pot.

June 2010: In my own garden I worked on this Hawthorn bonsai, carving a large shari to create taper in the trunk where previously there had been inverse taper

The newly carved Hawthorn/Crataegus monogyna bonsai, collected in 2006 by me and my son Jake.
Height 18"/44cm, trunk base 4"/10cm in diameter. Planted in a handmade pot by Erin Bonsai.

July 2010: European Larch/Larix decidua over the course of 2010

Top Left: As purchased in March from Birmingham Botanical Bonsai Boot Sale having been dug from the ground where it had been field grown just hours before..
Top Right: A couple of days later after potting up and rough pruning the tree
Bottom Left: Two months later in May
Bottom Right: 5 months later in late July after styling.

Height 20"/49cm, trunk base diameter 5"/12.5cm

And a second field-grown Larch, again purchased in March and developed over the growing season of 2010. Height 31", trunk diameter 3"

The top jin of the Larch bonsai seen from different angles

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