BONSAI GOOD, JASMINE BAD

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At almost a year old, my bonsai is looking, if not wizened, at least tree-like and a welcome sight in winter. This bonsai began life in a big box store, a weeping fig in a 4 inch pot. Weeping figs are so easy to root from cuttings that the propagators of these plants evidently don’t even bother with individual cuttings, instead just sticking clumps of them together. Or maybe they’re sold in clumps to make the plants look bushier. At any rate, I divided the clump as soon as I got home and then had 4 weeping figs.
In the tropics, I’ve seen weeping figs as large as our sugar maples. In large pots indoors, I’ve seen — and once had — weeping figs 6 feet high. I planned for one of my new weeping figs to call home a rectangular pot 1 inch deep by 6 by 4 inches long and wide — for its whole life! Another of the weeping figs was destined for a round pot just a bit over 2 inches wide and deep, also for life.
To fit these small plants into even smaller pots, each got its roots and tops clipped back, the roots for a good fit into its future pot and the tops to balance root loss and to give the “tree” an attractive form. All this began last summer, and the plants spent a few weeks in light shade to recover from the butchering.
Once recovered, the plants began to grow, which is good and bad. Growth is needed to keep any plant alive but the goal was, and is, to keep the plants small and in proportion to the dimensions of their pots, all the time maintaining good form, of course. One way to keep a plant small is to periodically cut back shoots. Another way to keep a plant small is to periodically cut off its leaves. As I wrote in my book, The Pruning Book, “Timed correctly . . . leaf pruning forces a second flush of leaves that are smaller and hence better proportioned to the size of the plant.” 
I also wrote that “leaf pruning is not for every bonsai. Do not do it to evergreens . . .” Weeping fig is evergreen. Oh well, I’m going to try it anyway.
This is the bonsai last summer, after I snipped off all its leaves.
As the plants age and their trunks thicken, I’ll help them along on their way to wizened gnarliness, creating dead stubs, gouging out wood where branches are removed, and, if necessary, using temporary wires to direct branches.
Plants need to be healthy to tolerate such treatments. In a few weeks, and every late winter or spring thereafter, I’ll tip the plants out of their pots, cut back some roots, and then snuggle the roots back into the pot refreshed with new potting soil. Branches also will get pruned at least yearly for health and beauty. 
I hope these trees thrive not only for my viewing pleasure but also because I devoted a whole chapter to bonsai in The Pruning Book. (This book also covers other special pruning techniques, such as espalier and pollarding, as well as standard pruning techniques for all kinds of plants.)
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It doesn’t seem premature to state that I’ve failed again: Three jasmine plants are, once again, all leaf and no flowers. Jasmine (Jasminium polyanthum) is a plant that is easy to grow and easy to propagate; hence all the greenery and the number of plants I’ve had over the years.
The main reason to grow jasmine, though, is for the sweet perfume with which it fills the air when in bloom. At least I think it’s a sweet perfume because I can hardly remember the aroma. I got the original plant 11 years ago and remember how proud I was getting it to rebloom for the first couple of winters.
So what makes your typical tropical or subtropical winter blooming plants — Christmas cactii, poinsettias, amaryllises, and the like —  bloom when they do, or at all? A period of cool temperatures, short days (long nights, actually), or dryish conditions. Any or all of these changes for a period of time in autumn triggers flower buds for winter. 
My three jasmine plants have received the requisite treatments yet, as I stare at the plants, I see no hint of a flower. Just lanky stems grabbing at other plants or sprawling on the floor.
A friend suggested that my jasmines have grown old. They did all originate as cuttings from my original plant of 11 years ago. It’s not a good explanation but the only one left. I’m buying a new plant.
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No, I’ve decided not to buy a new jasmine plant. I’ll give my plants one more chance (as I have every year for the past 9 years). White Flower Farm nursery, which has sold jasmines for years, offers some more exacting instructions on growing the plants: “Prune as necessary to control size or to maintain shape, but stop pruning by August 1, because the plant sets flower buds in late summer. To encourage the formation of flower buds for next winter, be sure your plant experiences the cooler temperatures and shorter days of early autumn. The plant needs 4-5 weeks of nighttime temperatures between 40° and 50°F, plenty of sunlight, and the complete absence of artificial light after sundown. Bring the plant indoors before frost. Then give it cool temperatures [below 65°] and indirect [but bright] light until it blooms again in late winter.”  I will follow these instructions to the letter. Wish me luck.
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Last post I mentioned battling scale insects on house plants with sprays of horticultural oil in autumn. A reader wrote to offer another remedy: soap sprays. I’ve also used soap at various times, and it is effective, especially specially formulated “insecticidal soaps.” You do have to be a little careful because some soaps at some concentrations can damage some plants. (That’s a lot of “somes.”) The reader mentioned the especially environmentally friendly tack of saving shower water in a bucket, which, the reader wrote, results in a perfect soap concentration for insect control. Whatever works.

KEEPING MULCH SIMPLE

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Dryish and cold, but not frigid, weather: What else is there to do outdoors, gardenwise, but mulch? (Pruning is best left until after the coldest nights of winter have passed, in late February.) Arborists dumped a large pile of wood chips near my neighbor’s garden and he spread all he could in paths and among berry bushes. What’s left is for me.
 
Not that I hadn’t myself been spreading mulches all through autumn. Compost went on the vegetable beds, wood chips from my own pile (long gone) beneath my berry bushes and around trees, and horse manure mixed with wood shavings beneath the young row of dwarf apple trees.
 
Mulch is one of those things in life that you can’t have too much of — if you’re a gardener — so I forked the neighbor’s wood chips into my garden cart and hauled five loads over to my apple trees. The apples would be thankful because, as dwarf trees, they need the best possible soil conditions to keep them growing vigorously, vigorously for dwarfs, that is. Also, manure left on top of the ground in winter, especially manure left exposed to the elements, loses some its goodness as its nitrogen evaporates into thin air. Barring snow, not in the offing as of this writing, the wood chips blanket should minimize that loss.
 
One other benefit of wood chips are that they look nice. They are dark brown, similar to dirt. Unfortunately, the five cart loads was enough to cover only half of the 150 foot row of apples.
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I like to get on top of any gardening fad as it comes down the pike, although not necessarily to embrace it. One such fad concerns wood chips, not any old wood chips, but “ramial wood chips,” defined as wood chips made from wood no larger than about 3 inches in diameter.
 
Is there anything magical about ramial wood chips? These chips are surely better than the chunks of bark or wood mulch, some of it dyed red, sold in plastic bags. Ramial wood chips are cheaper, often free and, having smaller pieces, are more biologically active and better at smothering weeds and maintaining soil moisture than chunks. As compared with local, arborists’ chips that would include chips from from larger diameter wood, ramial wood chips, with their  higher proportion of bark and living tissue, would be higher in nutrients.
 
Still, no reason to snub your nose at any and all wood chips (except for those bagged chunks). When used as mulch, a dynamic interface of decomposition develops where the bottom layer of raw chips meets the top layer of decomposed material. Nutrients are concentrated as microbes gobble up the materials and carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen are breathed away as carbon dioxide and water, so the nutritional advantage of ramial wood chips over run-of-the-mill arborists’ chips is lost.
 
Some people tout ramial wood chips as promoting beneficial fungi in soils, allegedly to the liking of trees — such as apples — naturally found in forests. But when any old kind of wood chips — any organic materials, for that matter — is laid atop the ground, it is worked upon by a naturally orchestrated sequence of microorganisms, fungi included. Yes, fungi are promoted, but so are bacteria and other organisms, standing ready to gobble up the more readily accessible foodstuffs after fungi have finished with them. No need to use special kinds of woods chips for special effect.
 
So, enough about ramial wood chips! Wood chips of every stripe are available free or cheap as a waste product. They’re all beneficial. I use any and all that are offered, and that’s what went on the ground beneath my apple trees.
To quote Thoreau: “Simplify, simplify.”
 

SALAD TUNNELS & COLDFRAMES, AND INDOOR “PINE”

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Cold has yet to throw a wrench into salads fresh from the garden — even though December 16th saw a night-time low of 12°F. Yes, the lettuce would be mush if unprotected but under the sheltering clear plastic and wooden sides of my 5 foot square cold frame, the plants are barely scathed. Just a few leaves wilted at their edges. Spinach that I sowed between the lettuce plants, for harvest after the lettuce is finished is still looking spry.
Plastic tunnels supported by wire hoops are offering almost as much cold protection over 3 garden beds. Beneath them, mustard greens, endive, and arugula don’t exactly thrive, but do survive.
A few fresh greens are even surviving out in the garden without any sort of protection whatsoever. That would include some arugula that was never covered as well as kale, what’s left of it, and mâche, the most cold-hardy of all salad greens.
Once temperatures plummet or the ground is blanketed with snow, fresh salads will come from the greenhouse, which, with night temperatures never allowed to drop below 37°F., is packed with lush greenery as if it were May.
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Update: Lettuce in the cold frame is flagging after a night-time low of 8° a few days after that 12° low. Unprotected out in the garden, only mâche and kale survive.
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The holiday tree, only a half a foot tall and ornamented with 3 silver balls, is cute as a button. It’s a Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), a free gift I received a couple of weeks ago from a mail-order nursery. This tree will green up the darkest days of the year for year after year because it’s a tropical species that does well in the eternal warmth and somewhat dry air, in winter at least, of any home.
Over the years, the tree will lose its impishness and develop a straight, upright trunk off of which will grow relatively widely spaced, whorled tiers of horizontal branches, all clothed in green needles. With age, the plant becomes quite majestic. Too majestic, in fact, for any home. I have seen the spreading branches of this tree towering 40 feet or more over the tiled roofs of homes in tropical climates.
So what’s a gardener to do with such a plant, after years of nurturing it and watching it grow? One option, of course, is to bite the bullet and walk it over to the compost pile. Or it could be gifted to a friend with a higher ceiling, but that just shifts responsibility and puts off the inevitable. How about giving it to grandma for her front lawn in Florida?
A natural inclination for any real gardener in this situation would be to try to keep the plant going, not as its original self but in the form of a cutting. The rooted cutting, then, is genetically the same as the original plant, only a smaller version. Norfolk Island pine does root from cuttings especially, as with many conifers, if the cuttings are taken from young growth.
This plan has one problem: fixed plagiotropism. This botanical mouthful signifies the tendency for a horizontal shoot of certain plants to always retain its horizontal growth habit. Put more simply, if a cutting is rooted from one of Norfolk Island pine’s horizontal stems, that stem will always grow sideways to creep along a windowsill or wherever else the plant is growing. 
The solution to this problem is to take a cutting from the leading, upright stem. It the mother plant isn’t destined for composting, though, cutting out that leading stem does ruin its form. Also, because young cuttings root best, you might end up with only one cutting, perhaps two, from that short length of young, leading stem. Not much insurance for a plant that doesn’t root all that easily.
The leading, upright stem, of a plant can have the opposite inclination: fixed orthotropism, a permanent, upright growth habit. With other plants, their plagiotropism or orthotropism may be temporary.
Not so for Norfolk Island pine’s plagiotropism. I’ll figure out how to cross that plagiotropic bridge, or not, when I come to it.
(For further discussion of topophysis, which encompasses plagiotropism an orthotropism, and related topics on plant growth, see Plant Form: An Illustrated Guide to Flowering Plant Morphology by Adrian Bell and Alan Bryan.)