AusBonsai

Today this little gem was found, it resides in a 190mm, plastic pot,
It is Melaleuca Incana, and i have never seen any like this before, very healthy and intriquing,
the first task was to clean out the inside of all the dead foliage,
once most of that was cleaned out i could see into the middle ,
Ahh, there is a trunk hiding in there after all, it even has taper , so i gave it a birthday and cleaned it all up,
i then began thinning out branches i didn't need,
removing any dead or weak branches at this time aswell,
Starting to look better now.

Ill give all the branches a quick wire up and it'll be set to go ,

Starting to get some wire on now ,
slow job as the branches are very thin and break easily ,
and the other side too ,
looking ok, just needs some adjustments now ,
all wired up and oh hang on that's no good

i think the tree needs to be tilted to the right some ,

yep that looks alot better now ,
I'm really liking the outcome here ,
this little Mel now stands 180mm high and the trunk is 30mm thick, it's going to make a great tree,
compared to what it looked like when i bought it today, i'd say it has real potential..
i think i might go get the remaining 3 trees tomorrow

Very nice good luck mate. Hope the other 3 turn out similar of not better

Rintar wrote:Very nice good luck mate. Hope the other 3 turn out similar of not better

Thanks, it's possibly the best 10 bucks i ever spent,.

Fantastic progression shots Craig ,thanks for taking the time to share ...from first to last photo is a dramatic change

Soo good to find such a trunk and make it work.

By the way is the "tooth brush" a tooth brush or is it a wire brush. How do you use it, you must scrub the branches with this??

Thank you for this series.

Cheers David

Good eye Craig, very nice to see how a tree like that is worked on, thanks for posting

Barry1 wrote:Fantastic progression shots Craig ,thanks for taking the time to share ...from first to last photo is a dramatic change

I wish they were a little clearer but at 10pm it's too dark and cold , thanks mate

cuwire wrote:Soo good to find such a trunk and make it work.

By the way is the "tooth brush" a tooth brush or is it a wire brush. How do you use it, you must scrub the branches with this??

Thank you for this series.

Cheers David

David , it's a soft brush that comes with the wire brushes , i use it to brush out old foliage from branches and trunk. Not to scrub them as that would remove the bark from young branches. Cheers mate

Sabamiki wrote:Good eye Craig, very nice to see how a tree like that is worked on, thanks for posting

Cheers buddy


here's some new pics aswell.

Hello Craig,

Nice little tree, Have you dug into the soil to find where it flares the most? Looks like there is some more trunk under there.

AG

AGarcia wrote:Hello Craig,

Nice little tree, Have you dug into the soil to find where it flares the most? Looks like there is some more trunk under there.

AG

Errr welll umm yeah about that not looking good AG , guess i have some work to do after all

Well i decided to go ahead and repot the tree aswell

Started by removing from the plastic pot ,
Then sawing through the rootball ,cutting it in half ,
with the rake i begin to remove downwards growing roots and old soil from beneath the rootball first ,
You can see the trees rootball is now less than half ,
then the sides were raked out removing roots which circled the pot ,
next raking gently outwards so as not to damage too many good outwards growing roots ,
so it's left with a tidy rootball which has very little downwards growing roots and a much reduced root mass , doing this allows the lateral roots to start forming some nice nebari and surface roots ,
The tree was ready for it's first pot. Now i could have potted up into a bigger grow pot but didn't want to, settling on this cream pot which is larger than need be , the tree now stands 150mm high from root level.
I hope you like this little Melaleuca as much as i do , it's been great ,

comments always valued, cheers all

Again great work. Did you end up getting its friends as well?

outstanding progression of your bonsai tree, what a pitty others do not realise this, thanks for the share,

Rintar wrote:Again great work. Did you end up getting its friends as well?

Lol, it's friends, shop was shut so hopefully next week

, Starting to get somewhere now