Understand Root over Rock and creating a taxus over rock bonsai

Hi, welcome back to Growing Bonsai. This is Jelle and today we're talking all about rocks and bonsai and how you put bonsai on a rock. Root over rock bonsai. Do you have a root over rock bonsai? No? Join me. I'm going to make one in this video. I made a video earlier this year about this one. This is a lilac that I'm growing as a root over rock bonsai. In spring I put this tiny little plant on this rock and I was hoping for it to explode. It didn't. Now you could say that's not a problem. Plants don't grow all that well. But I have another one. This is also cutting. It is exactly the same age as that one. So I can be happy that this one's still alive, but it hasn't grown all that much. So I can't give you an update on this one. It has not grown enough. What I can do though This is arguably my very very first bonsai. This tree I started from a seedling. I have found my oldest picture yet and I think it is 2012 that this picture was taken. Take a look and in this picture you can see this plant. You can just see the curve and a tiny little bit of foliage. And you can tell the rock that it is on now is not the same one as it was then because a year later I decided that rock was not good enough and I planted it on a different rock. Now you can tell the plant has grown a lot. It has put its roots over this rock. The aluminium foil is still there. I'm going to take it off later on. But first let us talk about root over rock bonsai. How do you style them? What is the idea behind them? And what am I going to do in this video with some seedlings of a yew and a rock? Putting them together so that you can also make one. So before we take a look at the plant that I made a couple of years ago, let's take a look at the concept of root over rock. Now what is a root over rock? Quite simple, in fact it is exactly what it says. It is a bonsai with the roots over a rock. It's not that hard to imagine right? You see them in stores all the time and many people have made them and I'm a big fan of these. Now for those of you who can't imagine it, well look this is a nice rock right? Now imagine that this rock was maybe 10 meters across and you have a tree sitting on it. That must be a huge tree to make it convincing right? Now we take a pot And in the end this is what it will look like. Need to be careful. The rock sits in the pot, probably on the bottom of the pot or on little supports that the rock just sits a little bit higher. The tree has grown out from the rock, the roots go over the crevices of the rock and they grow into the soil. What that would look like, let me see. I have a little sketch for you. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, this is what it would look like. How do you get I'm sure you get that, right? There's a few things that you need to know when you're starting to build a root over rock bonsai. The first thing I see people do is they use a boring rock. Now if you have a rock that is completely smooth then you can't do very much. You can just put a tree on top of it and the roots just hang down from it or you put a tree on the side and that is what most often done and it just looks like the tree stands on its roots against this rock. This is not what we're after of course. So what should you do? You should take a rock with lots of texture. And then you put the roots on the rock, as it is very young, and you move the roots into the small cracks and crevices of the rock. That's of course how roots would grow. Just imagine you have a big rock outcrop. A seed germinates and the roots start to grow down. There's only a thin layer of soil and the roots find a way down to the places where there's most moisture. That's typically the deeper crevices. So a root would not grow over the high points. The root would follow the natural contours of the rock. That also means that if you are putting roots onto the rock, then you don't just wrap them around as, I don't know, as a mesh or wrapping. No, you take time to put the roots exactly in those cracks and crevices. That is how you will make a more natural looking bonsai root over rock. Now another thing that people might mistakenly do is they take a plant that's already quite old and they try to squeeze it onto the rock. What you then get is roots that stand off from the rock. They go all directions and they do everything except follow the contours of the rocks. So for me, I prefer to work with very young plants. And this is actually a cutting that I took earlier this year. If you haven't seen it yet, watch this video till the end. Then look down in the description. There's a link to this video. Watch this next. Right, now what else should you know when you're putting a root over rock together? I'm getting better. Sometimes I see them and it just looks like a big rock and there's a tree perched on top, balancing itself because it sits right on the highest point of the rock. For me that is not a very realistic scenario. It is usually the windiest, the hottest, the driest, most exposed area of a whole rock. Now, how do I go about it? I'll show you in a minute, but first I'm going to take out the yew that I started 10 years ago. And we're going to take a look at the roots and see what they look like and what I did right or wrong and how I can improve. So, what we have here. This is a windswept or Fukinagashi style root over rock bonsai. So, something to remember. You don't have to make a formal or informal upright. You can also do other things. And on a rock outcrop, of course, a windswept form is quite logical. Now, let's take this out. Let's take this wrapping off, so we can take a better look at the roots. Now this wrapping is on for two reasons. First of all, the roots were not done yet when I lifted it out of the original growing out pot two years ago, and I wanted to develop it further. Second of all, the birds have been on it, so it's been double wrapped, and you can tell they have been on it. But let's see, what does this all look like? There we go. So now, not sure if I can still use this afterwards, or whether I still need to use it. You can tell this really has been on for a long time, and now you see the effect of the aluminium foil. Here you see lots and lots of young roots, in fact there's roots crawling up along the rock, even though there's no substrate. That's very, very nice. So we have these roots, and there's a lot, a big mesh of small roots without any real substrate. I'm going to cover this up again, and I'm going to leave it for another year or two, and see whether that will create more roots. From the front this is nicely attached directly to the rock. The bark is starting to peel, showing the age of the trunk. Quite happy where this is going, and here I'm going to turn this around for you. You also see lots and lots of young roots developing. You see they don't have any substrate, they just grow along the rock surface. So this is actually excellent, this is what I want to see. You see here the root has not grabbed hold of the rock, the rock has moved compared to the roots, so this is not ready yet to be exposed for the long term. I'm going to wrap this up because these roots are excellent. What you do see here is I have roots here going this way, I have a root on top here and a root on the back. So ideally I'd have some roots coming from this side also down so I can shorten this. It's not done yet. Just a little recap of everything that we are going to use. Of course pots, we have the seedling. I have a little bit of substrate which I use. I'm going to put some water to it and I'll use that to keep the roots into the crevices. I'll show you in a minute. Normal scissors, some old scissors for root work, another root hook, a chopstick, aluminium foil, a rock. Few bits and bobs of wire and with that you can effectively put a root of a rock together. And yes of course I'm going to grab some substrate so I can fill the pots up as well. Let's get started. So let us quickly take another look at the rock that we selected. So this is the back of the rock and you see this the surface has some crevices and some texture but it is not all that interesting. It is in fact quite boring. This is a tiny little piece of rock that glued on top of it so it'd be stable in this shape because now i have this as the highest point maybe this as well i can plant something in here grow the rocks the roots through this crevice out to this side through this crevice out to this side and let some come out here as well in the front and with a bit of luck there is a separate root coming down here in the end as well into the soil and the plant sitting here over the pile over the rock this rock It's light and gray with a bit of white and remember the hue that I showed you just before, the bark there is reddish brown, which will make a very nice contrast. So that's another thing to keep in mind when selecting the tree and the rock. You want the bark to contrast with rock, because in the end you want to see the roots, you want to see the bark, you want to see that nice popping of colors rock against the roots. Otherwise it is just another rock that sits next to a tree, and that's not the aim. It is the aim to make something where it's very obvious the roots grab Hold of the rock sit there firmly holding on then growing into the pot below. So I've put the rock in some substrate in the pot and I have made another pot ready. And what I've done I've cut some parts out and I've taken the bottom out so that I can put this on top of the rock. Like this, and with some tie wraps I'll close the top and bottom. And that way I can fill this up with substrate, keeping it nice and cool, and also protected from the birds from digging, because I don't want them to dig again. I've chopped a little piece out here, so that the trunk that comes out can sit here. From a Taxus. Do you know why I took a cutting of this one? If you haven't seen the video, no. But if you have, yes. I took cuttings of this one because it is a female plant and the female plant actually has fruits and I like fruits because you get the nice red berries. Yew is quite sensitive to frost so after this work is done I'm going to plant this somewhere or I'm going to put it somewhere in the garden where it gets less frost and maybe even in winter I'll put it inside the shed. So the roots are out of the soil and you can see it has nice side roots, nice main roots, a good spread. Let's see whether we can get this on the rocks. So what I said is I want to get this to grow from a crevice, right? So that means that this plant will have to go in here, somewhere in between. I want roots to grow over this ledge down in here, maybe over here and something in the back. So how can we orientate this? So from the slant this would be a logical way. Let's see. So these roots should go to the back. These ones come around. This one needs to be split off. Maybe I don't need this one. So that's also part of the process, to decide which roots do you need and which not. Some of them are in the way, so this is on the way. And pruning some of the roots also means that the leftover roots of course need to grow more. Now, two towards the back. This one into the crevice, not break off any roots. So I can't put anything in here right now, or can I? The value of chopsticks. Now I add a little bit of substrate on top. Basically just to make sure the roots stay down against the rock, don't dry out. Here I want to keep these roots really down, same in the back. This way there's just enough substrate for the roots to grow through and under, and keep them all moist. Make sure you also put some at the base, particularly yew makes a lot of new roots at the base if the base is moist. Push the roots really down into the areas where you want them to grow, so that they're as close to the rock as possible. Then use aluminium foil to wrap around the rock, and the nice thing about aluminium foil is, here you see that the aluminium foil in itself holds shape, so you can wrap it around it, you don't have to really pull it, you can just push it into the crevices. And then I'm going to put the other side of the pot on top, fill it up with substrate, and we're all done. Then it's just a matter of leaving it out, letting it grow for a couple of years before we unwrap the roots, and we'll take a look at it. It's been watered and now basically this yew is going to be cared for as normal. When you do something like this with a species that is sensitive to too much water like a yew, be careful that you don't overwater. I think this one will not need to be watered again till springtime. If we do get a lot of frost, yews are sensitive with their roots for frost, this one will be protected a little bit. I probably will put it in shed for the days that it is frosty, but besides that it will just be cared for as normal. This is the future. Ten years from now maybe. That's the thing to keep in mind. Root over rock when starting with seedlings can take a very long time until you have a decent result. It doesn't have to though. Let's take a look at another plant that I've just started two years ago. This is a Trident Maple. It's a seedling. Three years old. And two years ago I put it on this rock. And I'm not sure if you can tell but there's now a pretty decent trunk forming. And I have a few roots here shaping up. There's a small root here in the back that I'm really really fostering and I hope that it will grow. It's a little bit yellow, I should fertilize it more. But this tree, I'm going to cut it down this winter, probably somewhere here, and then we have the start of a bonsai. Then another two or three years and the trunk will be three, four centimeters thick and I can start building a crown and that would mean five, six years until the First potting up in a nice bonsai pot. So that's a realistic timeline, right? So for a very fast growing species like this Trident Maple, about five years and still you start forming a crown and you can start thinking about putting it in the tray. For a yew, the other one I showed you, I started in. 2011 I think, that is 11 years ago and it is now ready to slowly have the roots uncovered and to be in a nice spot. So that's 12 years, 13 years before you're in the area of a bonsai. So those are more or less the timelines. In any case, I hope you enjoyed this video. I thank you very much for watching, keep growing bonsai, see you next time!