Wild Rose

I moved to Montana in 1999 to help my Dad with a few things and while I was there, I collected some wild rose plants for use as bonsai and because they are one of my favorite natives. The Latin name for this species is Rosa woodsii and is quite common in southwestern Montana. The ones I collected were growing at the 7,000′ elevation but they also grow in the valleys along rivers and streams. The planting I’m featuring in today’s post was grown from the seeds of one of the collected specimens. It was really the by-product of puttering around the garden one day, spying a rose hip (fruit of the wild rose) ready to drop and ‘rescuing’ it by squishing out the seeds, popping the fruit in my mouth and planting the seeds in with one of my trees that was in a grow box. I forgot all about them until they sprouted and let them grow a bit before moving them to their own 4″ pot. I let them stay in that small pot for three years and they had totally colonized it to the point where I had to transplant them. So I put them into a shallow oval bonsai pot two years ago, which they quickly outgrew.

When I was in Montana, I was fortunate to find a source for the steel discs that are used by farmers to break up the clods of soil after plowing their fields. The ones I found are 16″ in diameter and have a square hole in the center, perfect to function as a drain hole for a pot, if one chooses to do so. This proved to be just the right size for my rambunctious little rose planting and that’s what you see it planted on in this posting today. The first photo was taken around the time of the new year and you can see the buds beginning to swell:

We had a pretty wet and cool spring this year in Portland and this planting flowered a little later than usual–around the first week in April. It can be challenging to get a good shot of a wild rose as the flowers only last one or two days if you’re lucky; rain spoils them quickly, so there’s two strikes against you before you even start 😉 Here are some shots of it at about the peak of flowering:

Gilding The Lilies

Pouring rain in Portland just now and decided to try another post that ties my experience as botanical model maker and the grower of the specimen plant; like my earlier post on bird’s foot violet. The subject(s) of today’s post are The White Dogtooth Violet (not a violet but a lily) Erythronium albidum, and The Oregon Trout Lily, Erythronium oreganus. I did the model of the White Dogtooth Violet around 1990 while I was living in Cedarcreek Missouri and placed it in the habitat group pictured a year or so later after re-locating to Tucson, Arizona. This lily is native to southwest Missouri and has pale lavender on the outside of its petals–quite stunning. I included  a wolf spider model as they are quite often seen in the same habitat and to add some interest. Let’s start with a shot of the habitat group first:

 

Another view of the habitat group:

Can you see the wolf spider front and center? How about a detail shot:

I’ve kept this piece in a glass vitrine I made especially for it and it’s looking pretty good after twenty two years. It hasn’t changed a bit as far as I can see.

If we fast forward twenty two years, I find myself living in Oregon and my focus has shifted from making replicas of wildflowers to growing actual specimens in bonsai pots for use in displaying them with trees to give a sense of the season of spring or whenever it is they’re flowering. We have a very elegant version of the White Dogtooth Violet here in the Willamette Valley–The Oregon Trout Lily, Erythronium oreganus. I potted a nice clump late last month and got some pictures of it in its peak. The flowers are not very long lasting–about a week and it was a challenge to get a shot between downpours and hail and all else the weather could throw at us 😉 This plant is called a ‘trout lily’  for the similarity of the leaf markings and those of the brown or brook trout. And without further adieu, I present the Oregon Trout Lily:

The leaf markings are very faint in the photo as this was growing in semi-shade. The markings can be quite pronounced if the plant is growing in full sun. And another shot, slightly different angle:

And a close-up of the flower in the foreground:

 

I apologize for the soft focus as the breeze was moving the flowers around quite a bit. Lilies have a bulb that can be six to eight inches below the ground, which I hope explains the mounded look of this planting. It would have been nearly impossible to try and reduce the rootball to fit in this shallow pot so I decided to embed it in pumice, which will retain a little moisture and keep the planting healthy and well. It required watering twice daily when first potted up but now that it has established, I’ve got that down to once a day. I’d also like to find some appropriate moss to place over the rootball as this will help retain moisture as we go into the warmer summer months. I might eventually remove it from the shallow pot and put it in a deeper pot until I want to show it again next spring as these lilies are perennial. Please feel free to leave a comment!

Collected Cottonwood Update

May 2nd and it has been a real challenge to get a photograph in this changeable spring weather we’ve had recently! I wanted to show the cottonwood in full leaf and the day finally came that was dry and sunny. This tree came through being styled earlier this year and re-potted without losing a single branch. I’m very pleased with that! I will fertilize lightly with organic cakes once the leaves have stopped growing and have ‘set’. Then it’s a matter of pruning long shoots through the summer and watching the wires to see if they’re digging in. I will probably also have to do a little selective defoliation to allow light into the interior of the tree so the inner branches don’t weaken. The other thing to stay on top of with this species is the watering as they can get quite thirsty during the hotter summer months.

Red Flowered Currant Bonsai

The red flowered currant is native to the Portland area and is widely used for landscaping because of its attractive coral-red flowers followed by clusters of dark purple fruits resembling miniature grapes. It goes by the Latin name Ribes sanguineum and I’ve never seen it used for bonsai material before, although I’ve been told it has been tried. I collected this one in the spring of 2008; it was dangling over a road cut made by a logging operation. The root system was partially exposed and it required a fairly long box to contain the roots I was able to get. I potted it in 100% pumice and the box was completely colonized with fine feeder roots when I went to pot up this spring, four years from collection. It has flowered and fruited every  year and what I like about this species is that it has kept most all of the branches that were on it when I collected it. All the curves and contortions in the branches were already there when the tree was collected; I did minimal pruning for shape and of course the angle of the trunk is completely different from what it was on the mountain. This is a big deal when looking for new material for bonsai–finding something that will keep its branches and not kill them off and send up suckers from the trunk. Those types of trees that loose branches and sucker from the trunk are called ‘pioneer’ species and are difficult if not impossible to turn into a bonsai. They should be avoided as they are a waste of time. So, add this species to your list of natives worth working with. Its other pluses are seasonal interest throughout the year as the fruits last well into fall.

23 Year Old Bird’s Foot Violet

This is the first post I’ve done that ties my experience as a botanical model maker with my other love–bonsai. I collected this clump of bird’s foot violet from a ditch along Bull Shoal’s Lake in southwest Missouri 23 years ago with the intention of making an exact replica of the plant in its surroundings using various materials–epoxy, acetate, vinyl tubing. I was working for one of only a handful of studios at that time that produced museum quality botanical models for natural history museums. You might be familiar with dioramas that include taxidermy animals that recreate a specific habitat and also have plants and flowers, even trees. People often assume they have been preserved in some way like freeze-drying. The best museums like the Smithsonian or the American Museum of Natural History in New York City contain models that are fabricated from archival materials designed to last indefinitely.

The process I used to make the model of the bird’s foot violet in this post was to dissect a flower and make molds in silicone rubber of all its various parts, cast them in resin, assemble the resin parts and finally paint them with an airbrush. My process is unique in that I make the model while the plant is in bloom. Most of the museum companies I’ve worked for collect the specimens, make the molds and preserve the plant in order to come back and finish the work when the time is convenient. I was always disappointed with the result of that method because something is always a bit off when you have to use photographs for color reference and how the plant goes together in general. I like to think I can achieve the highest level of believe-ability by following through while the plant is in its bloom cycle. That means being in sync with nature’s schedule, which isn’t always convenient for us.

Here’s a photograph of the model before I get bogged down by the technical description:

 

And another close-up of the morel mushroom model cast in epoxy resin:

 

The six spotted tiger beetle in the first photograph is a spread specimen, not a model. I hadn’t master making insect models at the time I made this little habitat group–that came later 😉

You may be wondering how this relates to bonsai, which is the art of growing trees in bonsai pots? When we display our trees, we often include a small pot that contains a plant that indicates the season in which we are showing our tree. This is called an ‘accent’ plant. I became seriously interested in bonsai right around the time I made this botanical model, and while I didn’t know much about bonsai display, I was interested in keeping these plants I collected as specimens for models alive and well in containers. The first container I planted my bird’s foot violet clump into was an eight inch terracotta flower pot. It wasn’t long before it dawned on me this tiny plant looked pretty silly in that huge pot and it was established enough after a year to get it into something a bit smaller. I don’t have photos of all the pots I’ve used in 23 years of growing it but the pot I’ve got it in now is a piece of scrap iron I found from what was left of a piece of heavy equipment that was abandoned alongside a mountain road. A bulldozer or something like that. It’s cup shaped with three drainage holes built right in–a ready-made!

Here’s a shot of the violet used 23 years ago to make the model from as it is currently:

 

Part of the magic of the art of bonsai is the fact we can keep small plants like this for a very long time in such a small pot; I have not done anything but water, fertilize and protect from extreme weather conditions all those years. You can tell if the plant needs re-potting by how quickly water drains out the bottom of the pot. When drainage is slow or non-existent, it’s time to remove the plant from its pot, rake out some of the old soil and trim any damaged roots with a scissors. Then you add a little fresh soil to the bottom of the pot and you’re good to go for a few more years. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing these images and how I’ve managed to tie these two art forms together in this post. Feel free to leave a comment if you’ve got any questions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More on Collected Cottonwood

This post should be positioned below the photos of the buds (in a perfect world) I decided to re-pot my collected cottonwood today, as the buds were breaking. This is the best time to re-pot deciduous bonsai as it shows the roots have become active and can tolerate pruning. I styled the tree for the first time earlier this year and put some pretty good bends in the branches. I have a close shot of one of the branches that actually cracked many places:

Next I’d like to show the tree in the pot before I re-potted to see the change needed; the tree has to be rotated clockwise from twenty past the hour to half past the hour. Hope that makes sense:

What followed this was a process of removing all the heavy moss cover and removing the tree from the pot. I collected this tree in April of 2008 and put it in this Chinese pot right away. The pot was root-bound after four years; I used 100% pumice to pot the tree in and it worked very well. The pot was loaded with roots of all kinds but the ones I like most are the fine feeder roots, which were in abundance! I would like to have included photos of working on the roots but the sun was out and I like to work quickly so the time the roots are exposed is minimal. A photographer would have been handy today 😉

I didn’t remove much of the root ball; only enough to allow me to rotate the tree in the pot clockwise. The new soil I used to re-pot the tree was 1/2 pumice 1/4″ particle size and 1/2 hard akadama. Pumice and akadama were pre-sifted before mixing together. I also used a slick method to secure the tree into the pot I learned from Michael Hagedorn. I drove a bamboo stake into each side of the root ball and aluminum wire through the drain holes was tied to the bamboo stakes. It really made the tall tree steady in its new position in the pot. Once the tree was tied in, pumice/akadama was worked in around the root ball and the walls of the pot until all the air spaces were filled. Following that, I watered the tree very well until the discharge from the drain holes ran clear. If you have re-potted correctly, water should flow freely through the surface of the pot and not pool at all. Here is the result of 1/2 day’s work:

Collected Cottonwood Update

I’ve been patiently watching and waiting to see how the tree recovered from its first styling earlier this year and judging by the condition of the buds throughout the tree and our mild winter, I made the decision today to re-pot the tree. Here’s a couple of shots of the buds at just the right stage for re-potting deciduous trees:

Japanese Mountain Maple, Acer palmatum, early December. 7 3/4″ high, trunk 3 1/2″ in diameter at soil level tapering to 2″ at the ‘waist’. Acquired in 2002 as a stump with lots of small branches emerging all over the place, most all the branches you see here were grown from scratch in the last ten years.

Japanese Mountain Maple, Acer palmatum. Shohin size, acquired as raw stock in 2002. Pictured in fall color, 2011, 7 3/4″ high. Trunk diameter 3 1/2″ at soil level, 2″ at waist. Japanese pot.

Standing against my house, all 5 foot 8 inches of me to show the size of the collected cottonwood bonsai before work to style started earlier this month. Look to the posts below to get the full story.