TINY TREES
Background
I was admiring my bonsai and thinking what it was going to need in the coming months, so decided to share the process, the plant, its evolution, and needs with you.
My weeping fig
(Some of what follows is briefly excerpted from my book, The Pruning Book, available directly from me, signed, as well as the usual sources. My updated comments are in italics.)
Bonsai (pronounced BONE-sigh) is the growing of plants, usually woody plants, in shallow pots. The art began in China almost two thousand years ago, then was carried to Japan during the Kamakura period (1180-1333), where it was brought to a high state of perfection.
A bonsai planting portrays, in miniature, a natural theme — the rugged beauty of a gnarled pine on a windswept slope, the tranquility of a grove of larches, the joyousness of spring in the cascading branches of an old fruit tree bursting into bloom. Read more
CAT NIPPING, NOT SO GOOD
A Nonsymbiotic Relationship
Cats like houseplants, but houseplants don’t particularly like cats. Or, at least, cats don’t do houseplants any good.
Take my ponytail palm, for example. My cat is an outdoor cat, but I know if she came indoors, what a grand time she’d have jabbing her claws playfully at the ends of the ponytail palm’s wispy leaves. She’d do the same for my orchid’s flower stalk, now weighed down with a row of delicate blooms. Either plant would emerge from such play worn and frayed.
There’s not much you can do once a plant catches your cat’s fancy, except Read more
SORBUS’ WORTHY OF ATTENTION
Good for More then Youth Artillery
As children, my friends and I were well acquainted with mountain ash trees. European Mountain Ash (Sorbus aucuparia) was ubiquitous to suburban home lots in the Northeast in the 1950’s, and the trees were readily recognized by their ferny leaves and clusters of flashy berries that also served as artillery.
European mountainash
Since that time, mountain ashes have fallen out of favor — and rightly so in many cases. Like our native white birch, European Mountain Ash is native to cool, moist habitats. When planted in sun-drenched backyards where summers are hot, sometimes droughty, they fall prey to borers and other ills. Those berries aren’t actually berries, but pome fruits like apples, to which mountain ashes are closely related and with which they share many of the same ills.
No reason to ignore the whole Sorbus genus, though Read more
