I got eight of these Small Leaf Privets from a garden Nursery in Hervey Bay in 2007 - for free! I was looking around and found a skinny one for sale for about $7.95 and was talking to the owner about it and what I wanted to do with it - Bonsai of course! She told me to follow her out into the nursery and went to one of their established beds bordering a lawn. There was a row of these privets on the border and she told me that they were going to pull them out because they weren't doing too well and no, they weren't! Four of them were completely shaded out by a large clipped Lilli Pilli bush and the others were in the shade of some larger trees. On top of that, the irrigation system that was supposed to be watering them had broken. So - no sun, no water and these photos are the results - very straggly and very little foliage. Some of them still had the labels on them.
She told me I could have them for free if I dug them out otherwise they were just going to throw them away. I went back the following day armed with all the tools - axe, crowbar, shovel, secateurs, pruning saw, branch cutters - the lot! Turned out I didn't need any of them. The first one I grabbed hold of just fell over. The rest all came out with just a little pull. Went home one happy little Vegemite! I clipped them back a bit and gave them a good dunking (that's why they're wet in the photos). I put some into styrene boxes and others into large black plastic pots. From there, I didn't do too much with them - just clipped them back when they sent shoots up towards the sky.
Earlier this year, I had a cursory look at them and decided that four would take a fair bit of work to even look half decent and sold them - got $35 each for two of them and $25 each for the other two.
I still hadn't had a real good look at the four I kept until four days ago - and even then, all I was going to do was renew the potting mix and prune them back again. When I raked the old mix away, I had some pleasant surprises.
I'll do separate topics on each of the four otherwise this one will be absolutely huge
The first one below had developed its own natural root connected style. That wasn't there when I originally shoved them in the styrene box. I think that from now on I'm going to take a bit more notice (and care and attention) of them all.
Finally, after a prune, I cut the styrene box down to make it more shallow and re-potted the tree. I reckon that by either Autumn or next Spring, I'll be lifting it and putting it into a Bonsai pot. It now stands 300mm tip to tip across both trees and largest trunk is 17mm tall.
