BE BOLD when Pruning Chinese Elm Bonsai (Beginners Tips)

Hiya it's Xavier and welcome to my bonsai retreat and unfortunately the cold weather has driven me inside this week. Cold weather and rain. But I've been meaning to deal with my Chinese Elm and they are actually a wonderful tree for bonsai. They're a great tree to learn on and they're so very very forgiving. So long you don't take them inside. Certainly for me. But these now have been in these pots for four maybe five years. Many of these and I've repotted a few last week. The root ball is in absolute state and not only are they root bound but I've also got to deal with the fact that a lot of the roots are rotting. So what are we going to do about that? Well if that's something that interests you keep watching. They are hardy so you can be pretty rough with them. So let's get on with it shall we. Well before we get into the main ingredients I am going to show you this one because as well as purchased Chinese Elm I've got quite a few that just managed to come into my collection and this one which has got some very very interesting roots here was actually a discarded branch that I found in my compost pile. I don't remember how it got there. I don't remember even having something that could have been composted from but what I will say is it's self-rooted and without any help from me which is probably why it did root and now we've got really really interesting Chinese Elm. Before we go any further I've got to say a big thank you to Adam of Notion Bonsai who I think last year went on a big craze of making sulfuric acid or well it wasn't sulfuric acid actually it was lime sulfur and I've got a little bottle of it here with his little label on it and he sent that to me last week so really Adam thanks very much for that. So let's skip to this first one definitely a large Chinese Elm. I've got an incredible root structure but it's very tired with lots of gangly growth and you can probably see that I did actually start trying to create layers and when I first got these the first thing I did was hack them back really hard to just really base structure and then a lot of this has just grown from there but it's been ignored so it's got a bit ropey and leggy and right now this has kept all the leaves. I will go to town and I will push it right back again so let's go and do that now shall we and when I say right back if we can see best there we can see we've got these lengths that have come right out and they've got leggy and the reason why they've done that is because they're trying to search for light. We've got a dead one in here although it's got a little bit of growth on there but there's no growth closer in and as you know we want that growth close in and there's only really one way to deal with something like that. You've actually got to look back and I do an initial cut back and I will take everything right back and sometimes I'm not even looking at buds I'll just a la Peter Chan actually where I'm just trying to get the profile roughly and then I'll look back after that and see what's got. I'm not worried about whether or not the growth I'm cutting off has got leaves look at this we've got great big lengths going up absolutely useless I don't like the upward growth. Chinese elm as you know if you look at them have got loads of bud points so we have got the opportunity where we've got here this is coming across and I actually want it to go forward so I'll actually remove that big bit there and I will continue to just cut right back anything that's going back on itself again I'll get rid of and I'm going to try and redefine a basic structure so that when we look at these we'll be able to see the basic branches coming out and then the space is where I want the new growth to come from and I want it to be a lot more tighter and compact as I say the only way you can achieve that is by cutting back very hard and you know I remember when I first did this I worried I thought oh gosh if I'm cutting all this off then it's never going to grow back and I'll go have a dead tree and you know what on two of them out of 25 that did happen but that's because the roots had problems it wasn't a tree there's loads of energy in this so I can go right to town and really take it right back I mean even if you look here there's this long length here and this actually buds all the way back here and you can see them but I actually don't want these well I do actually do want those make up your mind where we've got confusion I'll just take it off where we've got extra big thick pieces I can remove those and try and get rid of that and looking at what sort of structure I've got in here and whether I like it or not well many of you will think wow because you saw what it was before and this is how it looks now I've reduced it to a single main branch with some movement in it with a little bit of branching off the side and just a couple of bits of green this is actually longer than I wanted but this is an example of just how hard back I will go on a branch and if it helps at all that is all the material came from one branch and yes I could quite happily plant those up which is what I used to do and I wouldn't even bother putting rooting hormone normal soil and the chance are eight out of ten of them will root now one of the other issues you have with with something that's as furious with growth as the the Chinese elms or zelkovas or anything like this is that they don't care about the so-called bonsai rules and there aren't any but no you know whether we have stuff on the inside of bends whether you have stuff coming towards us but very quickly we have to try and decide where our front is on this now I've never made a decision on that and you can see that you notice there's a lot more missing by the way but originally but there is one thing that's straight away I've got branches here that are coming either side both of them are in the inside of the bend I'm less worried about that but they're also opposite each other and I don't like that which means I have to take one of them off which means I also have to decide really where the front is this way the actual main trunk direction is pulling away from the from the eye but I've also got a lot of really nice branches that I like coming back and creating what would be the back growth so if I was going to try and make this the front then I would end up removing practically everything that's there or changing the potting angle slightly but with the the way the bends have been put in this I'm a little limited by that so really my front is going to be somewhere around there which means I have to decide on a couple of branches to remove can you see which ones they are I like the branch but it's always going to be poking towards me I prefer the one behind it because of what it gives in terms of depth so really I don't think I've got a choice but it's worth noticing that part of my decision is based on it's actually quite scarred up there which isn't necessarily a bad thing but yeah you ready it's gone and yeah plant that in soil I will probably plant that in soil put that in and see what happens got so many of them though so we've got rid of that branch there but looking further up straight away something I saw was here again I'm looking for anything that's too straight and sometimes it's difficult with the Chinese elms because of how they grow but here I've actually got this little wiggly branch behind this big stump up here there's some interesting movement and stuff around and I've got to try and decide whether I reduce the height I've actually got this branch this branch and another one underneath it all coming from the same point there's one that's coming out horizontally so I can remove that straight away I'm not totally taken with this great big strong straight length there up okay because we've got this I know there are buds at the top here so all I'll do is I'll cut there seal that and next year I'll bring that down a little bit lower but hopefully what I'll get is a bud from there that will go up so I'm just going to keep on going around and at the moment again I'm just cutting based on where I think things are going to be and then I'll go back into it properly okay well I've been hacking again and I've taken off great big chunks like this and more stuff but certainly as you can see now we've done two-thirds of the levels got the single branch going out this way little branches here and here again with just minimal amounts of secondary structure because I want to regrow it all looking to the back profile wise just reduce that down to again to a few of the the main branches that I want to keep and develop and the same here on a little back one here we've got some interesting height movement so I actually removed lower branches so we'll draw the eye with all this interesting sort of twisty-wisty which you know I love saying don't you respect your twistiness and that really takes us all the way up to this apical region I've defined how far in I've come so I know this has got to come in a lot further and again I'm going to be making similar sort of decisions you look in terms of how far this is up here and I've got to bring it a long way back it's also actually coming back in on itself you may well be able to see how that actually curves and comes back in and all of them are doing that so I'm going to try and decide whether I want to keep that shape or do something about it and cut them short but often it can still look chaotic when you look at it like this so the way I deal with that to try and clear it up is I as I again I look at all the growth that I know I'm not going to need and I just cut back all the stuff upward stuff I know I'll never want so I get it out of the way and even if I don't go all the way back I just clear it up because it makes it easier so much easier to see what exactly you can do I like this branch comes along but it's absolutely dead pan straight but from here there's little branches either side I think that one might be dead so it's just about looking I mean if you look at this one it's actually two branches from the top one's coming this way one's going that way I'm actually going to remove this side one and that means that I know I'm going to want to have one on this side I'll probably remove that little one we've also got this one here that's coming all the way back and across certainly don't want the height so maybe I'll just leave it like that and that's the other thing Chinese Elm are interesting trees so let's not remove all the interests and the stuff that you want to look at and look and follow their branches all the way around so you know let's keep some of that character that's already there okay well there it is so as I say when I first get my Chinese Elms normally they're ragged overgrown and you don't know where to go or take it right back and this will be the second time that's happened with this one and I have every confidence that it'll sprout out loads of growth and in fact in I think four or five months time we'll revisit this one so this is where I sort of see the front somewhere around here now I'm going to be taking it out of the pot I'm going to remove all this moss and we're going to have a look at the roots oh who needs watering bless you and uh it should come out relatively easily and that fine web there that's actually one of the better ones that uh that definitely got repotted properly by me a few years ago so let's pull that apart let's have a look and see how it looks just get rid of all this off the top you can see actually I used quite good soil I say good soil it was certainly I'd started swapping over to the kitty litter that's for sure but I've got some roots here they're all white on the top they need cleaning and let's just have a look and see now they are a very fine root so I'm going to try and avoid ripping them and they're quite dry as well I've deliberately done that but I've also got some squirty water so once I've established the new root base and done a little bit pruning I'll definitely be keeping these damp and squirted down so let me crack on with that yeah some definitely uh it's better than I thought it was going to be right well actually I was surprised um clearly this one I had done a lot of work on the roots because if you look at it you've actually got the nice reasonable downward set of roots going all the way around there's some here that I've got to remove that are upwards here we go so I'll cut things like this but I've got a nice circle of roots going all the way around and you know that I've definitely looked at it because underneath there's that clear gap in the middle where I've removed all stuff that was in there so all I'll let you do is just a very very quick cut like that and then just pick up some little things I don't want the ones up here just get rid of some of the roots that I'm really less inclined to have this great mat is going across so we'll cut it back and things like that need to keep spraying them what we don't want is all these root ends to dry out and die so that's all uh that's all cut down nice and moist and the pot I've picked is actually um very very nice straightforward ceramic that I got from Doncaster Bonsai Extravaganza and I got two of these and they reduced from 36 down to 25 um very very simple but I like the colors and I think with the uh the greens of the Chinese elm it'll look really nice so all I've done screen wired down into the bottom for the reason why I wire the screens down and again it is about personal preference but I find when you start putting the soil in and start jiggling the tree around loads of times I've actually pushed the screen off to the left or to the right and then the soil comes out so that's one of the reasons the other reasons is I have had as certainly as you've got these longer mud pushes up sorry bugs do push up from the inside and certainly if you have spiders you'll often see the spiders camped on the inside there so you know it does come in I like to know it's secure and that's the reason why I'll secure the screen down I will secure it but I know that one wire will do I will use a little bit of air hosing just to secure it so they don't go too deep into the roots but the wire is going to go across the base there hold it nicely so that's fine I'm happy with only one securing wire you know I do find that certainly in the first two three weeks when that newly potted tree is in position that's when you're looking for those new very very fine root feeder roots to start coming out and the last thing you want is those to be broken off because of wind moves it we just own clumsiness knock it move it and it moves and shifts about also the other reason why it's definitely important in this garden is the birds love to dig around and I've seen many a tree that I haven't secured in over on its side because the worms are saying oh lovely new soil looking for looking for food and they don't care that you've just repotted a bonsai so there are lots of reasons but the main reason is you don't want the tree to move about unless you're deciding it's moving around again personal preference certainly it's not a rule that I'm pushing on people but I think it's important to say why I do secure a tree down enough of that blabber I'm going to shove some soil in it's a standard soil I'm using these days which is I've got Alex obviously and I ordered a load of soil from Europe so I've got some zeolite and some pumice so that's all mixed together nice volume nice soaking the vermiculite and the pine bark gives the element that's going to hold the moisture in okay so nicely secured in the plastic tubing is going through and underneath and again the reason why I do it with these is simply because they've got quite fibrous roots it'd be the same with azalea or anything else that's got a lot of fine feeder roots that are easily ripped through the plastic tubing just gives it a little extra width and support to spread the load of the securing but that's firmly in place also if you have a look I've got a nice circumference radial of roots that are in there as well and now I'm just going to put the soil in so say the uh the mixed size about four and a half mil which for a tree this size I think absolutely perfect and just finally work it all in what we don't want to be doing is breaking roots you can avoid it just filling in those air pockets so anyway we've seen this loads of times before what I will say I've also got the Oceania slow release root pellet feed or whatever well there it is nicely seated front's pretty well where I want it I'm probably slightly wrong all the branching's been cut back to basically the primary very early secondary structure which I want I'm now going to let this one go to town I won't prune it again until later in the year I want all the new flushes to come right out lots of strength feed the roots and as I say I will probably look at this again in late summer maybe so I'll give it a spin very very healthy and for those of you who are unsure whether your Chinese elm's healthy we've all heard about scratch tests just scratch the bark a little bit if you see green then it's fine these stay outside for me so that is how I deal with a shop purchased Chinese elm to get it back into shape to get the roots right and generally to rebuild the structure you can go hard on these I've got three or four more that I'm going to work my way through I'll show you the beginning and the final and hopefully that'll do you for Chinese elm this year and before we go to the next tree that's what came off it absolute tons and if I wanted to I could go to town cut all these down to nice little sort of six seven centimeter cuttings plant them into a big bucket and I'd get loads of cuttings from them I'd get loads of rooted cuttings from them okay well rather than slipping back and forth this is the second of those big ones again probably 15 20 pounds it's 15 pounds and this one was put in this pot definitely four years ago and this one I'm definitely going to be putting this into a nicer style pot because those roots are just fantastic again I've got a good feeling that the roots on this are fine so I'll just be clipping this right back same principle that we saw on the first one and about the only difference would be hopefully I'll find it in a much nicer pot so hey presto I think on the count of three we're going to see how these all look done and dusted three two one so there are an hour and a half later and this one I definitely had to go to town with um I didn't think there was anything I could show you about the roots but what I have shown you is I didn't go um hard on the roots I actually went hard on the structure um this is going to be a real problem tree so it's actually gone back into a pond basket because I wanted to put on loads more growth so I can make a decision about potentially what I can lose I've still got the four roots down the bottom there but uh yeah I think it looked better before when it was uh all shaggy and over the top but I might just get pads out here develop here and then obviously stuff over here so that's that one this one obviously is very very similar to the one you've just seen and uh all I've done is gone extremely hard again on the branch structure um looking at um completely redefining what the the structure is going to look like but it's gonna be a lot neater a lot cleaner yeah I'll just wait and see how it responds and again hopefully I'm going to really surprise you when you see just what sort of response it gives anyway that's the Chinese elms done I very rarely go to this extent with something like Chinese elm but you know what they're the sort of thing that you can pick up for your indoor trees normally sort of thing you're going to have in your um nurseries or the garden centers and uh just want to show you that you can go hard on them and they will reward you with some cracking growth so anyway I've hoped you've I have these Chinese elms about and if you have big like and if you think anyone else will enjoy it or you haven't yet subscribed then please I ask you please subscribe and share on other social media I don't use any other social media so I'm reliant on yourselves to do that and guess what the Google algorithm absolutely loves it when it gets shared on Facebook or shared on Twitter or is it x oh goodness knows I don't know but um that's how you can help me all that's left for me to say is I fully believe these are going to come back green and beautiful in another few months time you just have to come back and see so happy bonsai and god bless cheers