My bonsai, 7 years old

MINIATURE LANDSCAPE CARE

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[The following is excerpted from my book, The Pruning Book, available, signed, directly from me as well as from the usual sources.]

Refreshening Soil

Suppose you’ve just created a bonsai plant, or you’ve just bought one, or been gifted one: Does the plant need further pruning? Most assuredly, yes! Bonsai need regular pruning both above and below ground throughout their life. The frequency of pruning depends on just how fast the particular kind of tree or bush grows, the size of the pot, and the growing conditions.My bonsai, 7 years old

Roots eventually fill the soil in a small, bonsai pot, so root-pruning is needed to make room for fresh soil. Root-prune deciduous bonsai in early spring or late autumn, evergreen bonsai in early spring or late summer. Read more

Jumanji

JUMANGI!!!

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The “True” Jimangi

Back in 1995, Robin Williams starred in a rather bizarre movie, Jumangi. The rhinoceroses charging through the living room and the crazed, great white hunter caused more terror than did the bizarre plant that kept threatening Robin Williams. After all, rhinoceroses and great white hunters, even crazy ones, are real enough, but that plant surely had to be no more than a moviemaker’s fantasy. Well, let me tell you, that odd looking plant bore an eerily strong resemblance to a real plant.

Jumanji

Jumanji

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Kumquat

THIS CITRUS HAS IT ALL

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Botanical Mumbo Jumbo, but it’s Still a Kumquat

Cold and snowy winters agree with me just fine. Still, as a gardener, my mouth waters and my hands itch to be able to pluck ripe citrus from a home-grown tree in winter. It can be done, as attested to by all the potted calamondin orange trees now basking in sunny windows.

As pretty as calamondin trees are, their fruit is barely edible, if that. What I want is a citrus plant that also bears edible fruit. Oranges and grapefruits are possibilities, but let’s admit it: a four-foot high citrus tree festooned with a few large, colorful fruits thoroughly lacks grace. Lemon and lime fruits are better proportioned to an indoor plant, and have the advantage that a single fruit of either goes far in the kitchen.Lime tree in pot

The citrus that offers the most mileage as a potted plant is kumquat. Read more

Bonsai at 12 years old

TINY TREES

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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

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

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A Nonsymbiotic Relationship

Cats like houseplants, but houseplants don’t particularly like cats. Or, at least, cats don’t do houseplants any good.

Cat at window

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

Banana plant in summer

YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS (title of 100-yr-old song)

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I Receive a Giant Teardrop

Since I don’t live in the tropics, I bring a bit of it into my house. Hence, the banana tree that, years ago, tropicalized my living room for a number of winters. The plant made a nice houseplant for awhile, its large leaves jutting into the air like velvety, soft, green wings. Pests never bothered it. It even signaled to me when it was thirsty by drooping its leaf blades down along its midribs.

Banana plant in summer

Banana plant in summer

But mind you, I was not growing this plant only for show. I also wanted to harvest bananas. In the warm tropics, bananas fruit when they are only ten to fifteen months old; in a warm greenhouse, plants fruit in two or three years; in my sixty to seventy degree, sometimes colder, house . . . well, fruit was a goal, but I was in no particular hurry. Read more

Weeping fig bonsai

A SEMINAL NON-EVENT IN THIS YEAR’S GARDEN

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No Drama

A seminal moment in the gardening year turned out to be thankfully anticlimactic. That moment was the arrival, on the morning of November 2nd, of the first fall frost. It turned out to be more than just a frost; it was a freeze, with temperature plummeting to a very chilly 22.7°F at 7:33 that morning. (I didn’t have to keep running outdoors to check my thermometer, but am able to monitor past temperatures recorded on my iPhone throughout days and nights with my handy Sensorpush.)Frosty morning

The cold weather had taken its time in arriving. Weather stations around the country have compiled the “average date for the first killing frost” for sites throughout the country. (Also the “average date for the last killing frost” for spring.) Where I farmden, that first frost date is October 22. That is an average; the chance of frost arriving sometime before early November is 80%, and the chance of that frost arriving by mid-October is 20%. Last week’s freeze was late.

Years ago, as a novice gardener, I planned my gardening around these published dates. I considered these averages fixed in stone. With global warming, those dates were officially amended. Messed me up for awhile until I realized that the complexity of the natural world makes it appear capricious. Read more

Hardy cyclamen in pot

FINDING MY ROOTS

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Elbow Room and Food

What’s happening in the soil beneath your potted plants? Over time, roots fill up the pot so there’s little more room left for them to grow. And nutrients get sucked out of the soil or washed out by water.

I keep my potted plants hale and hardy with periodic repotting. This also gives me a look at the roots, which I always find interesting. (It was one area of my research when I worked for Cornell University.) If I see roots are pressed around the outside of the rootball, especially if traveling around and around it, they’re telling me they want out. A plant might also indicate its roots need more elbow room by looking like it’s ready to topple over. More subtle signs are potting soil that dries out very quickly, a plant hardly growing, or roots attempting escape out a pot’s drainage holes.

Rapidly growing plants need repotting yearly, especially when they are young; older plants and slow growers can get by with being repotting every two or three years. Some plants hardly ever need repotting, such as — looking around my collection — my amaryllis (Hippeastrum), bay laurel, hardy cyclamen, jade plant, aloe, and cactus.

Amaryllis and my dog

Amaryllis & Sammy

I wait to repot my ponytail palm until its bulbous base breaks open the pot it’s growing in; this happens about every 15 years. Same goes for my clivia.
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NEW PLANTS, UP IN THE AIR

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Asexual Propagation

One of my great enjoyments in gardening is propagating plants. So many ways to do it! You can take stem cuttings or root cuttings, or you can serpentine layer, tip layer, or stool layer. And then there’s grafting, of which, as with layering and cuttage, many, many variations exist. Whole books have been written on plant propagation, even solely on grafting. My favorites for these two topics are Hartmann and Kester’s Plant Propagation: Principles and Practices and R. J. Garner’s Grafter’s Handbook.

The above mentioned methods of propagation are asexual. New plants are made from mother tissue of an existing plant. As such, all the new plants are clones of the mother plant. Not always, though.

Grapefruit chimera

Grapefruit chimera

A plant chimera, analogous to the lion-goat-dragon of mythology, is a plant made up of two genetically different cells, a plant mosaic. Depending on what part of the plant you take for propagation, you end up with a clone of one or the other cell type, or, perhaps, both (the chimera). A plant usually broadcasts that it’s a chimera with splotches or lines of color different from the surrounding color of the leaves, flowers, or fruits. (Splotches or lines of color can also be caused by viruses.)

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MY FIG GROWS OLD, AND LOOKS IT

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Weeping Fig, Growth in Check

My little fig tree put on a lot of new growth this year. Let me qualify this statement. By “fig,” in this case, I mean my weeping fig (Ficus benjamina). It’s a relative of edible fig, also edible (but rarely eaten), and a common houseplant, valued for its relaxed appearance, its small, glossy green leaves, and its tolerance for indoor environments. By “a lot of new growth,” I mean a half an inch or so.Bonsai fig

Despite that meager growth, the plant has grown too large. Nothing like it would have grown outdoors in open ground in the tropics, where this trees’ branches quickly soar skyward and sideways to the size of our sugar maples. From those branches drip aerial roots which anchor themselves in the ground, the ones nearest the trunk eventually merging together to become part of a fattening trunk.Weeping fig in Puerto Rico

My little fig, you probably guessed by now, is a bonsai. The tree, if I may call a four-inch-high plant a “tree,” began life here as one of a clump of what evidently were rooted cuttings in a small, plastic pot I purchased on impulse from a big box store. 

Back here at the farmden, I got to work on it, first teasing the plants apart from each other, selecting one as keeper. The road to bonsai-dom began as I trimmed back the roots to be able to fit the plant into its new home, a 3 by 4-1/2 inch shallow pot about an inch deep. There was little to prune aboveground, but I made any cuts necessary, with the future in mind.

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