Boxwood yardadori

[Kanorin]

When I moved into my house 4 years ago there were a few boxwood plants that we didn't like in the spot they were in. So I uprooted one of them and planted it behind my garage (In a spot with about ~2 hours of direct sunlight), and there it has grown largely unseen until a few weeks ago. At the moment, I have just a few very young plants (just began bonsai a year ago), so I set off to see if I could successfully collect this more mature specimen from the wilds of my backyard and keep it alive to add it to my collection.

I don't have a good shot of it in the ground, but this is what the trunk and roots looked like after I cleaned and thinned them out a bit.


I chopped off quite a few branches and cut some back so it wouldn't take up my entire deck. Maybe I took off too much in the process? Maybe not enough?
Here is how it looks now. It's been alive for about a month post-transplant.

What things did I do wrong?
And moving forward, what additional branches would you remove (and when?)
Thanks!

 

[Maloghurst]

Since it was already in the ground I would have left it in the ground and pruned very hard. Trunk has potential but you need to prune much closer to soil.
You can play it safer and prune at the red marks and possibly make something nice but hard to see from the one photo. I have one that I played it safe and after two years I took it down to the blue marks anyway. So I basically wasted two years. Either way you need to prune a lot more off. They will back bud and it looks like you kept plenty of roots.
FYI my tree has a lot more foliage now. This pic was last year.

 

[sorce]

That right trunk has no nodes on it.
Strike one.
It's the same size as the middle one.
Strike 2.
And if you keep it you keep your reverse taper.


I'd be red cutting and tilting to the green soil line.

Now?
Probly after spring growth. Before summer growth.

Sorce

 

[Kanorin]

Here are the other angles of the boxwood

90

180

270

 

[PaulH]

You absolutely need to chop it shorter and loose the right trunk. I've collected over a hundred boxwoods over the years and I chop them to about 2/3 of what I expect the styled height to be once new branches grow (and they will). No need to seal the cuts as boxwoods won't callus over. Remember that all of your tree is going to be created from new buds that form branches.

 

[CWTurner]

What @PaulH said.
Here's what I would do.

CW

 

[Kanorin]

I chopped 2 out of the 4 additional branches back in mid April.

Update: It's alive, with some back-budding and new growth!
I'm thinking it's probably a decent time to finish cutting this thing down to size.
Some pictures
A

B

C

D


I'm thinking that low branch in image C that heads left and has no buds on it has to go. That'll leave me with a twin trunk.
Then I'll cut the two main trunks about where @CWTurner suggested 2 months ago.

 

[leatherback]

To be honest.. When it comes to chopping down I am in the camp of "cut when digging or leave for a year".

So I would not cut anything else. Just because you get a few leaves does not mean the tree has finished getting settled. I do not see you gaining anything from cutting back now. But I see a lot of energy buildup if you leave everything on till wpring and then consider your final cut-backs.

 

[Kanorin]

To be honest.. When it comes to chopping down I am in the camp of "cut when digging or leave for a year".

So I would not cut anything else. Just because you get a few leaves does not mean the tree has finished getting settled. I do not see you gaining anything from cutting back now. But I see a lot of energy buildup if you leave everything on till wpring and then consider your final cut-backs.

Thanks for the feedback! The reason I posted it rather than just doing it is because I wasn't sure if it was a good time to chop.

It has been a stress-filled year for this plant already - pruned back, torn from the ground, roots reduced slightly, bare-rooted and put in a pot, chopped back some more.

 

[leatherback]

so give it a break? What you have to loose? A year development time, vss risk of the tree giving up?

 

[sorce]

I agree.

Every cut initiates a response wether we see it or not. Meaning, cutting another half inch off a trunk is equivalent to another entire chop, even if no energy seems expended, even if we remove no green.

So sometimes, the response is death. For seemingly no reason.

Sorce

 

[Kanorin]

so give it a break? What you have to loose? A year development time, vss risk of the tree giving up?

Yeah, I'll give it a break. Thanks for the encouragement. At the outset I was a bit more aggressive with this tree because it was a free tree from behind my garage that would have otherwise gone in the waste bin a few years ago. So I viewed it as some hands-on learning. But now that I've put many hours into it, I think it's better to slow down and let it recover. I'm sure I can learn some more from this boxwood...next year.