Transforming One Nursery Tree Into Two Bonsai Trees _ Air Layering Tutorial (Step-by-Step) (1080p)

Before I begin the video, I would remind you to please click like if you like my content and subscribe to our channel, tell a friend and more importantly go to our website and send us your email address to become a VIP that we can send you announcements and you know VIP benefits that we'll come think of as we go along. So thank you very much and let's go on. Hi I'm I'm going to work on this Procumbens Nana which I bought about a month ago or maybe a month and a half ago and it's really amazing I came across this juniper in a nursery because it has been grown from a small plant one gallon move up to stake up move it to five gallon and move up to 15 gallon and it's been in this 15 gallon can they said almost 20 years and what a what a wonderful find. Procumbens Nana is known to generally grow on the ground hovering the ground and so unless you take an effort to pull it up it doesn't have the the long trunk and what's particularly desirable for this tree to make into a forest since it's straight already is that the needles are very fine and also you can see it's kind of a yellowish but if you keep it water well in a bonsai pot almost by soaking a little bit from time to time the the needles will become really really beautiful soft green. So this is a rather tall tree and I don't really want to make that tall a bonsai. It could be a iterari style but I'm going to choose to make it into two bonsai. One is that because it's too tall. B is that I want to show you how to air lay layer anything. In fact this tree or most junipers are really easy to air layer because they're interstitial in sense of hidden roots underneath the bark. Once you keep it moist and it will come out and become a separate tree. So with that in mind then let me get to work to begin to turn this tree into two. One it become part of the grove that combined with one that I did last year month about this high. We can have a grove of three upright juniper as a grove that would be very nice. I think in the long run when it's in the in a bonsai pot you'll really love it. So let me clean off some of the dirt and let's see. This can be one tree about this high and then another tree a little bit taller from here. So with that in mind then these branches should go because that will be the tree and the bottom 10 out of a branch. And rather than cut it all off I leave a little stub to make it into a gin because you expect trees in nature the bottom branches to die off and create gin. In fact you can keep the gin a little bit long to give it more feature in a sense more natural look. So you can just cut off big pieces and you can try to make some of these to root. Wow look at this. Such a big branch coming down and go all over the place. So I would just cut it off make it into a gin. Gin means dead branch. I don't know why we always try to use the old Japanese words but I guess that's traditionally the bonsai folks do. So now if I air layer this tree right here this is obviously had to go and you can see this is a really nice tree. And I don't think the tree wants to be hovered to the ground but I can make an exception by keeping some of that green but some of that I can make into gin to give it a little bit of more interesting feature. So that's what I'll do like for example this branch right here I can make it into a dead branch. You can see it's very easy when it's actively growing. I just peel that off and when it dries out it'll be the dry gray look to complement the brown bark. And I can let this one become a branch and I can actually make I think I just keep that also a little bit of a green and also a gin kind of an in nature anything goes you know. So well this tree for example it can be a really nice tall one but you know it's kind of a little bit off scale. So what I would do is that I would try to air layer right about here and so that's a tree and then this would be another tree. In fact I should probably do it here earlier here so this would be that tall and this tree can start from here. So in fact that's about where I would air layer it and I would do it nicely a little bit later. So let me work on the tree up on top and see how that works. So this would be the apex and so I think this could be a nice branch going down and this one can be a little bit shorter. So if I thin off a little bit of this you can see this is a really nice little bonsai. Look at that about this tall and this thick and I think these branches are a little bit way too low to have any green. So I can cut all of this off and again I will make this the apex of the bottom one. So the tree up on top let me refine it a little bit so you can see where I'm going with it. Basically I'm just cleaning off the redundant branches so the rest of it can see better. Hold on. I do a lot of clipping in the early stage of the development of a design of a tree but once the tree is more established then I will take a much slower approach by pinching or by wiring the little branches to make it fuller in a sense I have the ramification at the right places a little bit faster. So don't always assume that I'm being brutal to cut off too much too fast but in fact I'm not sure what else I could have done to in order to change the design the look of the tree to establish the look of the tree. So like right now as a mature tree will never have growth all over the every branch so I'm just cutting them off like this one I just make it into a gin and all of these I want to clean up and like all junipers at the bottom tend to die off so I'll cut off the bottom to in some sense starting to create a pad at the top. Well I'm just cleaning off the redundant small branches to show off the main branch better and because in nature the small branches eventually got girded and died off whereas the big branches continue to take over and so you want to create that aged look by getting rid of the small growth and let the big ones take over the big branches take over to show the structure of the tree as it's dictated by nature and so that's what I'm doing I'm pulling off the smaller branches so that when they grow up they will be have a greater spacing like alternate spacing like in a mature tree and then at the same time you can see the main trunk a lot better or the bigger trunk branches a lot better. I'm almost done I want this part to have a growth going up to become the apex so for example this could be the apex so I this is close up I can show you how to do this so like right now this branch this one is coming out sort of the right angle this one is not so I pull that off and so this one would maybe I'll use this one as the first one to start so this one will be starting off and then the other one will be on the alternative on the left side it was too close so I want this one to become the one two and this one has to go so I space out the alternate branching you see so it's going to be like this like this like this like this and like this so that's a branch will fill up to be a nice pad and I'm basically doing the same to every branch to to give it more of the alternative spacing alternate spacing of the branches because that's how they seek light one side will block the sun for the other one so that it will die off and so that's why they always grow in alternative in alternate position so I have one last branch to do then I'm done it's not perfect but it will grow and then the next time I do it after three times of refinement then I'll start to wire it because there's a you know it's getting closer to being finished like this one it's kind of veer off a little bit weird so I'd rather have it cut it here so it would be that kind of like this way instead so you do a little fine tuning and it will glow up and you will find a different set of alternatives you want to do so I've decided that's the height of the tree and I'll start to air layer about here so I cut off a layer of the bark and remember this trick or the tip about air layering is that you must remove a complete layer all around the the trunk so that it will root otherwise it will not root properly and you can see all these little bumps these bumps are actually going to become roots once you make it wet so junipers are really really easy to propagate and I'll take a knife and later on to clean that up in fact this is a just a broken cutter I'll use half of it as a knife that works very well because it's basically a pretty sharp edge and you have to clean off the bark as much as possible to all the way to the trunk so that it will root and I should spend more time more carefully go all around and don't miss a spot then you will wrap what I found the best thing to use is the New Zealand moss which you get when you buy a orchid from Taiwan so-called the moth orchid or the Phalaenopsis and they are the best material because if it's once you wet it properly and you make it wrap it tight basically it will keep moist until the trunk is rooted so that's very easy now you can see this is my first tree look at that look at that how nice it is and once it fills out you can begin to see the structure and the design you can see how nice this is and this I'll make into gin because it's too low these will be all made into gin so that would be an old looking tree in nature hit by rain hit by lightning in fact today what I'll do is I will actually make this look rough to show you how to do that so this is a gin maker you can very easily I can peel this off to make it into a gin you can make gin very quickly during this growing season because the cambium layers got a lot of juices so it's very easy to peel so you can take time to do the peeling to make that into a gin into a dead branch you should really take time I should really take time to get this all cleaned up very nicely so that when it dries out it'll be nice and white but anyway I don't want to take up too much of your time so now imagine as I said imagine this is the tree right that's the tree here's the dead branches this one probably go because it's way too low and you can see with the sides going down like this it's actually quite nice well I hope you enjoyed the video so far we got a lot more going on this about halfway please click like if you like my content and subscribe to our channel tell a friend and more importantly go to our website and sign up to become our vip for goodies and what I'll do next is that I would get the bark out all around and wrap it with moss and then in about six months it'll be rooted and I'll cut it off and to work on the bottom one so in the meantime today I will cut off the bottom a little bit to clean it up to get ready for the next phase and you can see the potential of this tree first so you got all those dead needles I'm going to clean up so you can see where you're going actually wonderful thing about this Procumbus nana is that they actually actually will branch out a bit in a sense of a back bud on the old branches that you can see these old new growth coming out of it so now let's study this tree on its own you can see this tree is a little bit hovering it's coming up like this so there are actually two possibilities one is that you can make I'm gonna cut this off and make this the apex because I need a little bit of height to be a little bit taller than this one as part of the growth and then the other one's even taller so let me still go with that assumption I will try to make the tree grow up to here now the problem with this tree right now is that it's tilting and I can't see where I'm going so what I'll do is I'll put a pot underneath of it and so what I will do is to clean up the roots because I always want to make sure the roots are okay now this tree will have no problem with roots when I air layer it and plant it into let's say a five gallon pot the roots will be radial I don't have to worry about not being radially out which many pot growing grown plants are really ugly because of that there's a root going down this way and there's a root going down this way and then this one right here that's in the way that means it's a crossover to the other side so what I'll do is I'll cut it so none of the trees we sell will have kind of crossover roots it didn't happen by accident we are very careful in making sure they are all gone the crossover roots are all gone because I think that's unsightly it will never get be right I think there's having cross and you can see now one two three roots and I bet you I can find one on this side to make a totally grasping the earth concept to show the power of the tree now you can see this tree is kind of a little bit crooked which is fine and then it's about this high which is about a little bit taller than that one and then it's got all these branches I need to fine-tune to design it properly so let me work on the branches for now and then I'll go back work on the apex to show you how to create an apex so like this tree given the dominance of this branch that one keeps some of these can go to support that one can be made into a gin etc so this tree is going way too over on the other hand going way over is to be a little different to get attention so that's okay but that one has gone over way too much so let me cut this off to make it part of it into a gin so now the tree doesn't look like going all the way over but it's rather coming down and maybe it should come down even further and so I'll cut it off here to get a little bit of that but mostly not gone too far so you can see the tree goes like this and a little bit of the pad going that way trying to create an alternate branching so the tree starts here and that will become the apex and just imagine this was kind of a hit by lining and then this one still was going keep going and therefore this will become the apex oh yeah so so that's what I'll do I will let this part to grow become the apex so this tree will be a little bit like this and then come down and just the apex going up so a tree coming out like this going like this like this so I'm not going to work too much on that right now I wanted to grow up a little bit next so that it's easier to so that I have more design options this branch is really close to the main trunk so I'll cut it off because it's right next to another weeping branch so you can see that opens up significant amount that's a big chunk and so this one comes down and this one comes this way so you kind of want to give yourself some option like this like this branch is coming down that's nice and this is branches coming down so maybe what I'll do is I cut it off here for now and see what happens next look at this interesting branch no rhyme or reason it's going up like this and going down like that I didn't curl it right so I think that's a little interesting feature if someone asked me how does that happen I would say I don't know but that's what nature did so I think I'd rather like to save this branch for a little interesting feature you want to save this little interesting feature as a vignette to show off your bonsai I may cut it off someday if it doesn't work out but in the meantime I have a chance of making something really different so in fact I'll cut off this as a gin to show that nature can grow in a funny way and don't try to create it arbitrarily but on the other hand if it's there make use of it you know when your lemon make lemonade and that's what I mean by taking advantage of the branches that are already there so some of these angle going not quite right I have to wire them but probably not now until it grows up the next time I see where the tree is going there on its own mind with its own mind and then modify it to to suit my design criteria so I'm about five minutes done from getting this tree done you can see very quickly I created two bonsai it'll be six months before I can break off the top to make it into a separate bonsai so this is my bonsai I show you this is my top tree right with this as a dead branch and now if I flip this you can see this is my bottom tree this tree is curling up going like this and then this is coming up like this is the apex and this one will grow like this to complement that side now you can see I have a perfect very unusual tree with this branch coming out and start to go that way maybe I'll make this into a gin make it go this way and then this branch is coming up like this I can make it for example like this you can see how interesting it is that's a feature I didn't wire it to get that that's what nature gets so this is actually going to be quite an interesting tree and if I put them the three of them the one with the last week as well our last few weeks ago that would be a nice bonsai and you can see the roots is grappling grasping the earth as I said and in all angle all directions four directions it would be a nice tree you know even like this you can see this is coming down like this is going down like that nice I don't know I like it of course I'm praising my own work but I hope you like it too today a couple of things I want to show you one is a procumbent nana it's really a good wonderful bonsai material you can see the branches of the leaves and needles a little bit yellowish but once you put it in a bonsai pot give it a lot of water you'll be surprised how quickly to turn the soft wonderful soft green that's very tender and you will love this bonsai these are very difficult to get thick trunks this is actually 20-30 year old to get this size trunk so find yourself lucky to come across these old trees just latch on to them almost at any price because as you work on it they become magnificent so what I've done is I show you how I turn a tall tree into two trees by air layering and I point out the secret air layering is removing a complete rim of bark off the trunk and then wrap it or of course with the rooting hormone but wrap it with the moss you save from the phalaenopsis orchid that you saved after they are finished blooming and you wrap it and you seal really tight it would actually get to root without having to rewater it again and now I've created one tree about this height this tree is a little bit taller than that and the next tree is even a little bit taller so the three of them makes a really nice grow so with that in mind that I thank you very much for watching so together we can make bonsai as popular as houseplants thank you very much well thank you very much for watching today's video subscribe to our channel and tell a friend and most importantly go to our website and sign up to become our VIP so that we can send you announcements of special considerations thank you very much see you next week