SBBK Workshop: Pruning, Cut-back

Valerie Monroe led the club workshop, providing a lesson on the purpose of pruning.

Pruning

  • Difference between cutting back and thinning

  • Wherever you cut the tree, the tree will react depends on where you cut

  • Every time you cut the outside, it will ramify and crate new branches

  • The leaves below the cut send off new buds

  • Boxwood are bilateral in the same plane

  • Maples bilateral but changing 90 degrees

You have to cut back to make a small tree

Cutting back makes the tree weaker

  • Same energy more terminals

  • Peter Tea—“the more ramification on top takes it one step closer to death” —supporting more on that one branch.

Thinning will strengthen the tree

  • And thickens a branch

  • If a lower branch is out of scale, let the branch run and grow long

Recommends YT Bonsai Shinshi

Michael Wei