dansai wrote:Thanks Mojo
So would you recommend taking wire off and wrapping first with rubber?
Yeah Dan, that is how I would be approaching it. It is a horses for courses kind of choice, if I had 200 Cedars to trunk wire and I wasn't sure that I could inspect them on a regular basis to check for wire constriction, and all I was trying to do is put a little wiggle in them to make them look nicer than they would look if they were thin and straight, then wrapping them around a stake makes a heap of practical sense. From a design point of view, a thin straight trunk screams immaturity, no matter how well you hang a set of branches on it. Add some interesting curves to the same trunk, build branches and you have the beginnings of a presentable Literati, perfectly fine if they are thin and don't have a lot of taper. In my opinion, wiring gives flexibility in design that is nearly impossible to achieve using stakes, pull-downs, clamps or clip and grow. A real advantage with wiring trunks like this is that it is very easy to compress section of trunk between branch tiers as you go up the trunk. Instead of dropping branches down or wiring them up into an ideal location for a branch pad, usually at the outside of a bend for aesthetic reasons, you get a much better result if you use a series of trunk curves to not only add variety of movement, but also soak up the vertical distance between branch bases, have the branches EXIT on the outside of a curve closer to where the foliage pad needs to be. Looks a lot better and much less contrived than a branch manipulated in a way that is out of character with the rest of the branches, just to fill empty space in a canopy. The rubber or raffia wrapping gives the safety net needed to apply heavy wire and bend a thin trunk, just the act of applying a 5mm wire to a thin trunk exerts a lot of force, on unprotected trunks indentations can and do occur right from the start. Bending it, adjusting those bends, that is a lot of stress and risk without protection. Cedars have thick bark and it is easy to have the bark separate from the wood when bending them with just wire alone.
dansai wrote: And have you found the same as Alpine that small scars can grow?
Yes, what Alpine has said is true, I have sort of touched on why that happens above, if you leave wire on a Cedar for too long, and it imbeds in the trunk even to only a third of its diameter, you will get long term scarring that does expand. Even with many years growth, mature bark on cedars does not completely hide the result of severe wire constriction, not even when the impression in the bark has flattened out. The texture of the bark is often different or darker, you don't want that spiraling up your 20 year old trunk. Stakes left too long are not ideal either as it turns out. I used to wire Squamata Junipers years ago for a nursery, they were all staked and growing in 20cm pots like that for 2-3 years, my job was to wire branches to make the trees saleable and leave the trunks as is and retain the existing height as much as possible. A lot of them had vertical impressions from the stakes.
Dan, both methods (stakes and wire) work, a lot depends on the material you are working with, ideally young material with plenty of small branches or buds right the way up the trunk is best, but your tree is workable, but I suspect too large for Alpines method in any case. At a glance, the biggest challenge is the lack of foliage on the branches in close.
I've found there are a few tricks to getting the rubber wrap applied correctly to provide the best result, if you want to give it a try, you need to cut off the existing wire asap, look closely at the trunk for any signs of damage that occurred while applying the wire and bending. I'm more than happy to talk you through as little or as much of the project as you like, whatever you need to make the tree look great to you. If you are prepared to be patient with the trunk, it may be a good idea to concentrate for a year on getting foliage growing where you want it, replace the foliage that you have removed, looking at what branches to retain, possible fronts etc. and get a bit of a design plan going, maybe give the tree some relief from it's current soil. Making a decent tree out of her is going to be a stressful thing if you are going to wire the bejesus out of it, no matter how careful you take it. Getting the tree flying along makes a lot of sense, if the tree is growing steadily, the trunk when it is wired will set better too.
Just to give me an idea on scale, how big is the pot that the tree is in, what size wire is on it at the moment and how far up the trunk is the base of the 1st right branch?
For the long drawn out reply, my apologies. I seem to have made a design conversation out of trying to point out that you do have alternatives, and hijacked Alpine's thread somewhat in the process. Time for some shut-eye I think.
Cheers,
Mojo