Siberian Elm #4 Urban Yamadori

Siberian Elm #4 Urban Yamadori

Its the second really nice day of the year!  March 17, 2019.  Here is my typical collection kit.  Today, I went back to the local plumbing supply to collect some more trees.

All the trees I cut back and sealed last year responded well with new growth.  I wonder if I and cut them on an angle if they would have started closing up.  Maybe I will, next time I do some thing like this again.  This one has some nice movement and swelling at ground level, although the roots were below this point.

Digging pretty easy,  no lateral roots were severed while digging and I knew that It would probably have a taproot.

I was able to get the tree rocking once I undercut it.  I ended up snapping the taproot.  There were 3-4 fine feeder roots which is not much, for the rest of the process I was careful to not compromise any of theses roots.  

This tree I collected at the same time as #5.  When I got home, I decided to work on the other tree first, so I placed this one in the bucket to say moist and hopefully soak up some water.  You can see that there was a lot of growth to choose from.  I gave it a quick haircut, and then started removing any unwanted shoots.  

I was torn as how to proceed.  Part of me wanted to keep this fork, as part of a future canopy.  I decided to keep the lower trunk in this image, because it had more movement and was a touch slighter.  

Taking that part off really opened up the tree and with some future carving will establish some nice taper.  I though about keeping that lower branch as well and keep it a twin trunk.  Much like a sacrifice branch to help with taper, it had to go too, it was pretty straight and lacked taper anyway.  Taking these two branches early will hopefully establish the future direction of the tree.

As to not break any of the few roots, I did my sawing with the tree in the bucket, using a towel to pad bark that rested on the edge. 

Last year, I had a tree with a similar root situation.  I decided to do the tourniquet method, and it presumably worked.  I decided to do the same here, just below the feeder roots. 

I decided to plant it deep after cutting some of the taproot some (just about where it gets thinner in this image).  I placed some collected red lava rock at the bottom, so the stump would not be overly wet.  I placed some soil mix, a thin layer of shredded sphagnum moss, then more soil.  I sprinkled in some rooting hormone and Mycorrhizal spores to hopefully help with establishing the root system.
Here you can see that I had to get creative with the wiring to stabilize the tree.

Here it is all potted up and viewed from what might be the "front" of the tree.

June 5, 2019

This spring I did not repot and just left it to grow.  It responded well and put out a lot of grow.

I reduced the top growth and some of the heavier branches in the upper half of the tree, to encourage branching.  I left some of the bottom branch options untrimmed to thicken up.  I removed any unwanted growth so the growing energy would be focused to where I want it to go. I wired a few branches to give some basic direction/movement, as they will be later cut back anyway.

End of July 

As you can see it continued to grow well.  I did similar work to last month. This time I wired most branches and cut branches back harder.  Below the silhouette of the future tree can be imagined. 

 

Late October 2019