Bonsaify | Basics of Bonsai: Trimming and Wiring a Ficus Tree

Hey, what's up everyone? Today I'm going to do a little basics lesson on what to do with a ficus that maybe you received as a gift from a friend or family member. We're going to go through a little bit of basic trimming and then we're going to use some wire to reshape the tree. If you're new to bonsai it can be intimidating to get a plant as a gift and then not really know what to do with it. So this video is really intended for people who haven't been doing bonsai and it's really sort of going to be some basic explanations of some of the techniques that you can use to improve your bonsai or change the look of your bonsai or just maintain your bonsai. The first technique I want to talk about is pruning and this is a Golden Gate ficus. It is commonly available in retailers like home centers. You can also buy it online and so they're they're often given as gifts to people who are interested in bonsai. Now I've had this and have been growing it for about six months now and the tree has sent out since I received it extensions, branch extensions here as well as up at the top and all over and a lot of those branch extensions have five six seven eight leaves on them. So in maintaining the same size and shape for the tree what we can do is just cut back the long shoots to a couple of leaves. What that does essentially is stop the growth and force the tree to make smaller side branches on those branches that you've cut back. So the basic pruning is to take a long shoot and cut off anywhere from half to three quarters of it and that will for the short term contain the size of your tree when it is happy and growing. Now I'm not going to prune all of the branches because I want to do something else with them today and that is wiring and you can see I've used a bright silver wire on one branch here as an example and the type of wire that I'm using is non-anodized aluminum. So bonsai wire comes aluminum bonsai wire comes in different sizes so this is a one and a half millimeter and then I have a two and a half millimeter three millimeter and these are all bright non-anodized aluminum. This is an anodized aluminum wire so it's colored to look more attractive with the bark or with the leaves and this is also a three millimeter wire. The different sizes the purpose of the different sizes are is to basically use on different size branches so the larger the branch or the harder the branch to bend the larger the size wire that you would use. If you try to use too large of a wire on a very small branch it becomes difficult to apply the wire and if you use too small of a wire on a larger branch the wire once you apply it won't actually bend the branch or maintain the bend that you put in the branch once you've applied it. In order for the wire to be effective it has to be applied properly. This wire has been one end of it has been stuck into the soil on this side of the trunk and then it's been wrapped around the trunk and out this branch at about a 45 degree spiral. Now that I have this main branch wired I can apply a second wire to this to control these two smaller branches. I'm going to do that by taking this wire and holding it at the junction of the two branches with my finger and my thumb and then I'm going to go clockwise out one side a couple of turns and counterclockwise out the other branch. The purpose of this is to make sure that the wire doesn't move relative to the branch after it's been applied. We want the wire to be applied evenly. We want a nice even spiral along the branch and we want it to be just loose enough that it's not damaging the bark but we don't want large gaps between the wire and the branch itself. You should also go between the leaves when you're wiring rather than smashing the leaves down against the branch. Once the wire is applied we can use the wire to create movement and position the branching. So again the purpose of applying the wire is to change the shape of the branch. You apply the wire first by making a spiral and then you use the wire to make the shape that you want to create. In the first example I had already wired the primary branch and I wired two sub branches but in the next example what I'd like to do is actually wire two primary branches. So the primary branch is a branch that comes directly off the trunk. This is a primary branch and this is also a primary branch and because these are about the same size I can use one wire to wire two different branches. So I'm going to cut a piece of three millimeter aluminum and I'm going to use the trunk as the anchor point. So I'm going to start just below and behind the lower branch and I'm going to go underneath it and then start forming a spiral and I'm going to go about one full turn out and then I'm going to use the wire to go around the trunk to ensure that it doesn't, when I go to bend the branches, that the wire doesn't move relative to the trunk. So a full turn around the trunk and then taking care not to smash the foliage that is on the I'm going to wind that wire out the large branch and I want to go just past the junction of the branch or the splitting of the branch into smaller branches. Now as you can see I have the wire going from this branch around the trunk and up to this branch. Now I'm going to use this wire to bend these branches to a different angle. With the primary branch wired and bent down it's now time to look at the junctions of the sub-branching to decide how we'll wire those. Now that this is bent down I can tell that all of these sub-branches are a little bit longer than I actually need. So I'm going to cut the branches, I'm going to prune the branches back to just a few leaves rather than leaving and there are four branches here. One, two, three and this fourth one on the top. Now if I rotate this a little bit you can maybe see the structure a little bit. Four branches is perfect because we can wire one branch to another with two different pieces of wire. So again starting at the base of a branch and holding the wire against the branch at that base with my thumb and forefinger I'm going to wrap the wire going clockwise around one twig and counterclockwise around the other. It doesn't matter which one is which but in this case because I already have this wire on the main branch I want to follow that wire. Okay so that's one branch wired. Now I'm going to go ahead and wire the rest of the tree pruning back larger older branches and this is one example of that. There are some smaller branches that are here close to the trunk that we can use to replace this larger branch and that are easier to wire and more flexible. So I'm going to cut this one off and then use these smaller branches the tree to be a new iteration of itself a ficus bonsai. I hope you enjoyed that. If you'd like to more videos about shaping bonsai please check out some of the other episodes in our channel.