Some of the best growth yet has come from the 'escape method' where I put five gallon cans on the ground and allow the tree roots to escape through the drainage holes and into the earth. I love this method because it is so efficient. You must continue to water through the can to keep the above ground roots alive. When you get the trunk you want, you simply sever the escaped roots at the holes and cut back the top of the tree at the same time or sometime before. I am getting massive 'Seiju' elms by this method. They are putting on more than an inch of caliper per year.

Hi Paul. What do you mean by "the escape method to power growth"? I see the tree is in quite a big crate - what do you do to get it to grow in there at a similar pace to if it was in the ground?

Here's a few pre bonsai of mine - sans make up:

A toyo nishiki quince - the cane is to support the very long sacrifice branch at the base. This is building the structure of a tree - the base is being thickened by the sacrifice and the branch above. The first branch and second trunk section have been wired into position. Next year the roots will be worked & the tree transferred to a large grow box. This tree will take a long time to develop - Quince are painfully slow to thicken.



A rather hazy pic of an air layered maple in a large pond basket - the top growth is about 3 or 4 ft high. It is this high to quickly heal a large chop. Undecided whether to keep the low sacrifice as a twin trunk but if not I have done a bit of shaping and it'll now make a nice tree if I decide to air layer it later.



Ditto with this substantially trunked maple - top growth is 7ft high. This was a thumb thickness maple I 'killed' in 2004, put in the garden bed and forgot about. It now has a base 10 inches wide. I'm using the escape method to power growth and to save me the graft of redigging it later. It will be chopped before numerous layers are taken , then the root underneath severed with my reciprocating saw. Hopefully this time round I will have more knowledge how to develop this as a bonsai.


Building 'believable' branches on raw material is not an exact science - sometimes you have to wait a season or two til a bud breaks in the right spot and then develop it. In the pic below look at the root over rock cotoneaster with the green netting - a bud popped just in the right place for a back branch so it's being left to thicken up so won't be pruned til it's the right thickness. The bottom branch is now in the ramification stage and will be cut back to 1 or 2 nodes after it grows 4. The top needs a delicate apex so again more pruning here.


Above|The big field maple (2nd left on the bench by the fence) was put in a commissioned this month and the last trunk section and a primary branch are being grown out.