Chinese elm varieties

[Phil Rabl]

Speaking of leaves, the following photo is of leaves from two of the three Ulmus parvifolia suber I have growing as a group. All are grown from roots from the same parent tree. I have noticed over the years that young trees grow large leaves until they get to a certain stage of maturity and then the leaves reduce in size.

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[MJL]

This thread has been really helpful and insightful. My 'mother tree' (for the lack of a better description) is a 10-12 metre high Chinese elm that I planted in my courtyard about 17 years ago. It provides lovely summer shade put is only partly deciduous in winter, which is a bummer because we wanted the north light into the kitchen ... oh, well.

Here are pictures of the bark and I am guessing therefore this is just a 'standard' park variety Chinese elm that Shibui referred to. The bark is quite beautiful.

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Then seedlings pop up every year. Here is a forest planting that is currently in a sieve and the sieve placed on the ground.The speed of growth is much faster than when planted directly into a bonsai pot; I hope it transplants well next spring.

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And here is a seedling I pulled from a garden bed this morning.I'll cut the tap root and it will start it's life pre-bonsai.

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The attributes of this tree (in my garden) that I have observed are:

- Extremely hard to kill; tolerant of quite wet soils. I have had some ridiculously wet soils (not ideal and not on purpose) and cannot believe the roots survived and did not rot... (not ideal but to shows the tree is good for the beginner.)
- The leaves seem to reduce well when basic bonsai root pruning and standard clip and grow techniques are applied.
- I think they are a wonderful tree for beginners and experienced folk alike either as single trees, forests or other groups and when young, they bend well for these that like to apply wire.

Ideally it would be good to own some of the other, perhaps rarer and more interesting varieties that Neil and Watto mention... but even this basic 'street' variety is pretty cool.

Cheers,

Mark

[TimS]

I've always just assumed my Corky Bark is whatever the normal Corky Chinese Elm species is. Reasonably large leaf, so reasonably large tree.

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