My 1.5 year old Acer Palmatum

[safallon]

Hi All,

This plant sprouted up from a seed in my back garden 18 months ago, and I've been doing my best to train it for the past year or so. It was one of my first ever plants that I started to train. It has fought off a case of powdery mildew.

Attached will be two photos of what it looks like at the moment.

Any advice or anything as to how best to treat the tree and possible training routes/feedback would be much appreciated!

Cheers,
Saf

[Josh]

The first thing I would do is try and get heaps more movement down lower on the trunk. At the moment they seem fairly straight. Remember to get taper you will need to grow, chop, grow, chop and repeat. At this stage you mainly be just growing to get size and taper into the trunk depending how big a tree you want.

Josh.

[kcpoole]

it is good fun when they self sow.
Needs a lot more growth yet to worry about shapes and future direction.

trunk chop every year or 2 to develop some taper in the trunk and each chop, wire a new leader to have the direction changes required

https://www.ausbonsai.com.au/wiki/index.php?title=Trunk
then follow the pages to a great thread on how to build taper

Ken