AusBonsai

Don't mind at all

great tree Bretts i like it alot and i think in the future it will be quite a stunning tree . i don't have any olives in my collection but i deffinetally plan to get hold of sum, as i always get inspired to do sum when i see example from others as well as from pictures i see of olives by european bonsai artists, they just seem to do them so well over there
i deffinetally want to see were this tree goes thurther on in the future.

Hugh

any chance of some other veiws brett? side shots? i am interested to see side shots


jamie

Can do!

beautiful taper brett im wondering did you receive the stump like the first original pic or did ya introduce the taper yourself? the one i have has a tuber so i am wonder how to either incorporate this or elimnate it? im thinking it will have to be a carve job to clean it out a bit.


cheers

jamie

Thats how I got it Jamie. As far as I know it was collected chopped back and that is what I got. The guys that came over from West of here for the Cowra festival picked some trees up from Don Deluca. Out of 4 trees I got this olive and a persian ironwood. A friends son got the fig and an olive much like mine went back

I don't know much about Olives, why they grow this way in the wild or how old it is.

olives have a large tuber that grow under ground. With brett's olive, its clear the collector knew how to deal with that factor soon after collecting.
You can halve the tuber at its widest point and treat it like a cutting. Sometimes they will sulk for a year or so, but will 90% of the time live on and start to re shoot.

I screw mine to board, notch the edges of the cut base for force roots to form a nebari. I didn't get a chance to repot them though this season to root thin, so Ill have to wait till next year.
I'm starting to build my stock up so I can start sending them up to Canberra. They will all have the bases cut, some will be screwed to boards.

Thanks for the Info Aus. I had heard about even chopping the olive off at ground level with no roots and treating like a cutting. Hopefully I am heading out that way come Autumn and I can try it for myself.

I think that is what Asus is saying mate. Cut the tuber in half (no roots) at it's widest point. I have a shohin one that was treated this way, makes it easy to pot up.

Maybe but I thought people here dig them out then chop which often leaves several roots and is harder work. The way I have seen is to not dig at all but to chop the tree off at soil level having no roots at all thus being a true cutting.

How about some pictures showing us what you are doing Aus. I would like to see how you are screwing them to the board.

I have done that with my Olives and in Victorian climate they did sulk for a while and even lost a couple of branches but it did bounce back. Nice start Bretts. Give us some dimensions of size though.

It somewhere just under 200mm across the base and 250mm high at the moment. I figure this will continue to be much the same finished dimensions.

What did you do Bodi cut the tuber back after being uprooted or cut the tuber off at ground level without digging?

Mine were collected, and yes, as soon as we dug them we cut them off at the part of the base we liked best. the problem with cutting them of at ground level while still in the ground is that you cannot see the whole trunk and might cut off the best bits. The one that sulked was an already styled tree that i had been working on for a few years. I think they lose their toughness in a Bonsai pot. I was not happy with the trees proportions and did the trunk chop and it was not happy about it. I think it is best to do it straight after collection. We pulled them out of the ground with a 4wd by the way.

Dugz Bonsai has a great pictorial of the tuber cut. It does make sense to pull the tree out of the ground first as you stated to pick the best spot to cut at.
http://www.dugzbonsai.com/olivehead1.htm

since brett dosent mind my posting thought id show my favorite olive defoliated and what can be achieved by doing it with heavy pruning. I defoliate it once a year, twice if im not lazy It also gets heavily pruned . The shari at the base needs defining and extending and the reverse taper it has i dont mind as i think this tree has some unique character and it dosent bother me... each to there own i guess. I have larger ones but this one is my fav.
its an african olive approx 700mm high.