dk07
Seedling
This is a fun one. One of the first trees I ever started, all from a posting on Facebook marketplace for I think $15-$20. In the summer of 2021, I drove out to the middle of nowhere, where this woman was selling this schefflera which was haphazardly laying in a pile of other plants in the woods behind her house. I brought it home to my apartment I had at the time (no full sun for this poor guy for the first year I had it), and this is the picture I took when I got in the door.
I was eager to try a hard chop as I had read so much about on the bonsai subreddit (a veritable treasure trove of highly skilled practitioners who readily share quality information free of judgement), and I even drew up a design for the future on microsoft paint! Here's the tree after a month and some budding back. The original planting had 8 trunks; I guess one died off or I wised up at some point, because I counted recently and there's only 7 now.
Here it is growing in nicely under a pathetic fluorescent light that I found for cheap at a hardware store, October 2021
And then a month later, I defoliated it with more of my high quality reddit knowledge and Youtube education. Who needs vigor?
Despite all odds, it pulled through 2 months later. This is the last photo I took while this tree was growing purely indoors in my apartment.
From there, the design definitely moved a bit backwards as I attempted to pot it in an extremely shallow saucer in the hopes of getting more aerial roots. I'm guessing this is when the 8th trunk died, but it's hard to remember quite honestly. I completely lost any kind of structure or design at this point, and it just looked like a weird bush on a mound of soil. July 2022, living at the new house in full sun.
Just terrible. After a year of mediocre growth and little root development, let's fast forward to May of 2023, where I put it back into a somewhat more reasonable pond basket, and I made some smarter design decisions. A bit of wire, and an actual decision for the front. Living in a tiny Amazon greenhouse that was being retired from the local elementary school's gardening club:
Finally, where it's at today. Temps are starting to warm up here, so it's taking turns inside and out as the weather allows. I potted it up in this cheap glazed pot my mom found on her back porch, and the plan now is to just practice partial defoliation, let branches elongate where they need to, and hopefully we can get some more aerial roots going this summer. Thanks for looking!
I was eager to try a hard chop as I had read so much about on the bonsai subreddit (a veritable treasure trove of highly skilled practitioners who readily share quality information free of judgement), and I even drew up a design for the future on microsoft paint! Here's the tree after a month and some budding back. The original planting had 8 trunks; I guess one died off or I wised up at some point, because I counted recently and there's only 7 now.
Here it is growing in nicely under a pathetic fluorescent light that I found for cheap at a hardware store, October 2021
And then a month later, I defoliated it with more of my high quality reddit knowledge and Youtube education. Who needs vigor?
Despite all odds, it pulled through 2 months later. This is the last photo I took while this tree was growing purely indoors in my apartment.
From there, the design definitely moved a bit backwards as I attempted to pot it in an extremely shallow saucer in the hopes of getting more aerial roots. I'm guessing this is when the 8th trunk died, but it's hard to remember quite honestly. I completely lost any kind of structure or design at this point, and it just looked like a weird bush on a mound of soil. July 2022, living at the new house in full sun.
Just terrible. After a year of mediocre growth and little root development, let's fast forward to May of 2023, where I put it back into a somewhat more reasonable pond basket, and I made some smarter design decisions. A bit of wire, and an actual decision for the front. Living in a tiny Amazon greenhouse that was being retired from the local elementary school's gardening club:
Finally, where it's at today. Temps are starting to warm up here, so it's taking turns inside and out as the weather allows. I potted it up in this cheap glazed pot my mom found on her back porch, and the plan now is to just practice partial defoliation, let branches elongate where they need to, and hopefully we can get some more aerial roots going this summer. Thanks for looking!
