My new Olea europaea var. sylvestris pre-bonsai, advice needed for styling.

[Cristian D.]

Hello everybody,

Yesterday I obtained from a club colleague a chinese elm and an achebuche = wild olive.
I already posted a new thread about the elm https://www.bonsainut.com/threads/f...make-a-broom-some-advice-needed-please.34771/ so here is the report on the olive.




The leaves are very very small, the biggest are about 10mm (less than half an inch).I like the nebari and the trunks, but they will need a lot of work.
The tree looked healthy, lots of growth from this season but some leaves yellower than I like.
The cause for it may be the substrate. The tree was potted in a styrofoam box, using coco coir and some crushed gravel as substrate. The gravel mostly on top, inside the container it was almost only coco.
The tree wasn't watered yesterday and today. In the afternoon, after spending the entire day under full sun(and it was a hot day, maybe 35º C (95ºF) the substrate was still very wet. I checked with a moisture meter and the needle was pegged to the maximum.
So I decided to repot it in well draining, well aerated inorganic substrate. I knew from previous threads here about olives that they can be repoted during summer, so I went ahead.

Upon removing the three from the box I saw the bottom half of the soil was soaking wet and almost no roots there. The soil was like a kind of mud and adhered to the box.
I the upper part of the box the things looked better. Lots of fine roots and no obvious problems, apart from a thriving fauna of earthworms and bugs, especially millipedes.


Fortunately the soil wasn't too difficult to remove and we managed to clean everything from the roots without much damage.

Finally planted in a new plastic box, walls with holes, using seramis as substrate.



I made sure there were no air pockets and I inoculated the roots with mycorrhizae (Glomus interradices). Now is well watered and sheltered from the full sun but still receiving plenty of light.

There are many new branches on the tree and they are growing chaotic, so something needs to be done about it.
I would like to hear advice about styling the tree.
I have the Mistral Bonsai magazine about training olive branches (Thanks @hemmy !) but I am not sure what branches to keep and what to remove, so ideas about what to do with the tree are more than wellcome.
Thanks!

 

[hemmy]

Nice tree!

I think you should look up some images of old cultivated and wild olives and also some olive bonsai for inspiration. Once you have a desired form then you can decide which branches to keep.

For example, you’ll have to decide if you want to grow out the next sections of the trunk to add taper or maybe create the canopy from the current height. It’s hard to see from the pics, but if there are is bludging and reverse taper at the top from multiple branches at one spot you may want to cut it back or incorporate into the styling.

Do you have the “Olivos que paracen olivos” (olives that look like olives) article by J.M. Miquel with the Thierry Font drawings of the curvy drooping branches? It is certainly a distinct branch style created by wiring the main branch down and then wiring down the phototropic shoots that emerge from the leaf axil buds to get that curvy style. I had mixed results and think timing is important to get the best flush of secondary and tertiary shoots.

This curvy style may require a trunk with some movement or character to unify the design. You’ll have to decide if it would look right for your straighter trunks.

The other method from the Mistral book is the simple clip and grow to change the primary branch direction and then defoliating and cutting the growing tip for back budding. Which you can also add more movement to by wiring before you cut back.

I think I would look to keep the tree shorter by create two lower flatter canopies with one trunk shorter (preferably the thinner of the two trunks). Any vertical growing branches that are too thick to be wired down should be removed or cut back to one node (one set of leaves). Also any branches with too long of internodes should be removed and those branches between the lower portions of the two trunks.

The tree looks healthy and it looked like you preserved a good portion of roots so you should be able to cut back and eliminate branches. You still have plenty of growing season left right?

 

[Cristian D.]

Hi hemmy, I have the article you are mentioning. In fact I found it reading one of your older posts, in another thread. I will try to create the branches using the first method. I see lots of olives here, cultivated on the field or used for landscape. An old olive i always wonderful for me, no matter how is pruned, but I prefer the look of the trees grown on the field, for olives, so I hope to obtain a similar look using that method of wiring the branches.
In fact, I think the method described there is very similar to "breaking technique" used by @bonhe on his pomegranates. Even if J.M Miquel don't break the olive branches, and he don't mention auxin, I'm sure it plays a big role in promoting back budding on the branch.

Yes, I preserved most of the roots. It was my first bare rooting on a tree that is not a seedling. Also, I was a bit worried about the yellowish leaves, about the tree being in a new place, being transplanted in a different substrate etc so I wanted to stress it as little as possible. At the next repot it will be possible to plant the tree about 2 inches higher, if I keep only the roots starting exactly at the trunk base.
In this moment my priority is having a healthy tree. i will remove some branches, if there are more emerging at the same spot. Hope after a bit of cleaning it will be clearer how the tree wants to grow and how it can be styled.

 

[JudyB]

The best thing about these trees, is that they grow so rapidly and give you so many options. I have a thread about mine here on the forum that you might find interesting. I think that clip and grow is very successful after you have the majority of the primary branches as you want them. Fortunately they are happy to grow new roots in warm weather, even if you cut most of them off.
I think my advice for this particular tree would be to separate the two. It just looks like two trees planted together instead of a twin or double trunk, and probably always will as they are just too far apart at the bottom. They are fun, enjoy!

 

[Cristian D.]

Hi @JudyB , I've seen your olive and I'm subscribed to that thread, I like your tree very much.
For the moment I'll keep the tree as a twin, I can always remove a trunk later if I don't like it.
I started cleaning the unnecessary branches and it started to look nicer.
I still have work to do and I haven't settled on a final design but I'm not in a hurry.

 

[Cristian D.]

I will continue to update this thread with the progression.
After repoting and reducing the long branches, the tree is growing again. I pruned the left trunk later, that's why there is less growth there.


I think I know how I want to develop it, inspired by those trees:






Most of olive trees found here are Olea europaea (the tree that makes the olives). For bonsai we prefer Olea europaea sylvestris (called achebuche or ullastre) that have smaller leaves.
My tree have the smallest leaves I've ever seen, I think it may be Olea oleaster (Olivastro), a wild olive https://www.kaizenbonsai.com/bonsai...of-the-mediterranean-the-olive-tree-as-bonsai. It seems I was lucky when I found it, and next spring I'll try to propagate some cuttings.
Next summer I will expose more of the base, repoting higher or just removing the upper part of the pot and some substrate and will start developing branches. Until then the tree will grow freely, in my sunniest spot, well watered and with plenty of fertilizer and I'll have time to plan how to develop the branches.

 

[John P.]

I would so appreciate an air layer from this tree if you have an errant branch that you’d like to set up. Been looking for Olea Oleaster for a while now and haven’t found it in the US.

 

[Cristian D.]

@John P. are you in the US?
On this tree I saved a branch for taking cuttings next spring.
Last week I got 4 more olives, I will post a new thread as soon as I'll be able to take some good pictures. 3 of the new trees are like this one, and one of them has thicker branches, so I think an airlayer could be possible.
I'm glad you like my tree and I would be happy to help you but I'm not sure about postage. Maybe we can talk on private about it?

 

[Cristian D.]

An update about this olive tree.
The trunk on the left was nice, but the one on the right was too strainght and boring. I tried to prune the tree leaving more branches but wasn't happy with the results.
So here is the tree after a hard pruning at the end of February.
Now a lot of buds opened on both branches and I can see them growing from one day to the other.
Maybe I will eliminate a couple of them, where they grow too close one to another, but for this year the plan is to let the tree grow without much pruning, just a bit of wiring to give some movement to the new branches.

 

[John P.]

Looking good!!!

 

[Cristian D.]

Haha, bald is beautiful!

 

[Leo in N E Illinois]

It is just my goofy imagination, but the two branches look like two lovers having quarrel, they turned their backs to each other. Maybe a divorce is in order?

Just the image that popped into my mind.

 

[Cristian D.]

You are not wrong Leo. But who knows, maybe in the future they may came back together. Or they can find new things to fill the space between them? Will see how the image will evolve in time.