Conifers take a bit longer to set than a maple, for example. A maple can set within a growing season but junipers and the like need a few years some times. I’ve had wire on some trees for years cause those branches just pop back up. It’s just a waiting game.
How do you know they’ll stay? They stayed in place when I took the wire off. It wasn’t until now, 10 weeks later, when I noticed things had gone awry. Being in a nursery container, this guy just sits on the ground and gets watered, so it isn’t easy for me to notice its structure on a day to day basis without really trying.
In bonsai, there is no trying, only do. 😉lol. But really, they just have bouncy branches. Restyle and leave the wire longer, and then rewire when the wire bites. That’s the game.
It’s pretty common for conifers to slowly creep back to where they were pre wiring. I had to rewire my bird’s nest spruce many many times until it mostly stayed. I’ve found guy wires to be really helpful for getting the bigger bends to take since you can leave them on longer without worrying about the wire cutting in, just make sure to put some rubber tubing around the part that contacts the tree to protect it from the wire.
If you have wire bit you can be pretty sure it will stay. The trick is to catch it right before you get bit. For sure you don't want wire bite but depending on the species it might not be a huge deal as long as it's minor. Maple for example you want zero ever while my Junipers I try to not let it get so bad that I lose bark when removing the wire.
Which part? I've read all the feedback and it's roughly all the same. A single month is not enough, wait for the wire to bit or almost bite. If for some reason an individual branch start biting before the others, rewrie that branch and leave the tree wired for ~a year or so. Outside of some very young and smooth barked trees I've never seen anything bite in a month. Maples will bit in ~6 weeks or so if you wire tight but it's hard for a tree to grow enough to bite in a month.
Maybe it's a problem of what wire bite looks like? [Here is as far as I ever like to go for wire bite](https://imgur.com/gallery/wire-bite-Nl8s4Fw). Three months after that picture in March you couldn't tell that branch had ever had wire on it because of the species. Something like that would ruin a maple. Notice the wire didn't break the bark.
It would help to have pictures of the wire on the branch and after you took it off. It's hard to understand the problem you had other than one month of wire not setting the branches.
yeah some branches will bite in faster, so I take mine off as it bites in each branch.
And than you will reapply wire in the fall...Like someone else said guide wires are great too
Yes, a month wasn’t long enough but your statement was that if you have wire bite, you can be sure it will stay. My wire bit deeply, so it isn’t enough to have wire bite as an indicator. Also, wire bite in junipers isn’t a problem like it is in trees like a maple, sometimes it is even a design feature.
So specifically the parts that aren’t in keeping were 1) the statement that it will stay if you get wire bite, and 2) the statement that the goal is to catch it right before wire bite. Since the image is of a juniper, my interpretation was that your advice was towards junipers.
It's hard to understand how you got wire bit in a month, so I was trying to show you an example of what wire bite looks like in case that was the confusion. If you get wire bit it will stay, I don't know of really any exception for that. If you hold the plant in place and let substantial growth to occur, that growth will lock the branch in place.
Perhaps the confusion is that the parts of the branch that didn't grow and get wire bit can go back. So if you wire a branch and just the base bites in and you unwire it, the rest of the branch won't hold. This is when you should rewire it as soon as you unwire it if you don't get consistant hold on the entire branch.
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I wonder how long the wire has been on. But yeah, I’ve heard some people say conifer wire should be semi permanent. You hear a lot of things. Walter Pall doesn’t think you should ever repot unless there’s a specific problem you’re trying to solve.
How long did you leave the wire on?
For conifers I leave it for at least a year. The wire will bite in but conifer bark has flakey cork cambium so it will look fine not long after the wire is removed. Depending on the species and how hard the bends were I may re-wire in the opposite direction. If you have a lot of hard bends it will hold faster because the small cracks in the branches will heal in the position it has been wired in. Subtle bends take longer to hold because there isn't as much cracking and healing happening, you have to rely on the growth of sapwood to hold that branch in place.
Wiring isn't a once and done process. I try to take a photo before I remove wire and check the next day to see if all the branches held. Sometimes you know within an hour of removing wire sometimes it's three days before they try to spring back. The more you do it the more you'll know when the wire has been on long enough. Conifers are generally flexible so they will need more re-wiring than a deciduous tree.
Yeah, I’m learning wire bite is not equivalent to being done setting. I probably left it on a month because beginners are taught that you do remove the wire once it starts to bite.
Anyway, lesson learned.
Any feedback on the original styling before it popped back?
Just a note… this tree got into wire bite territory REALLY fast which freaked me out. It was really deep on branches that I wasn’t sure if they could handle it. I just assumed that wire bite = the branch has set in its new position. Apparently not.
Wire bite is the result of vigor, which you should pat yourself on the back for. It says that after you wired, the tree responded with thickening instead of stressing itself out. In the early stages of conifer development (when you are setting up your primaries and secondaries, as you have been) vigor is a great thing to have, and a vigorous response after a heavy wiring operation is a confirmation that you were precise/clean enough in wiring that the cambium was left unscathed.
The thickening that threatens to bite in or even does bite in a bit is what helps to set the positions. The more new tissue you've grown in the new position, the less the older tissue can muscle back to the old position. Keep doing what you are doing. In professional bonsai it is quite common to still be pulling spruce (etc) branches down with guy wires years/decades into their development. My teacher often says to apprentices and advanced students: "compress, compress, compress". This is especially true in formal upright design.
Take stock of where you're at because you have made progress with bending even if there's been a bit of reversion to the old position. Incremental bending is completely OK in bendy/revert-to-old-position-ey species. This is how obtuse branch departure angles gradually get converted to acute angles or how you dial in the last 10% of visual appearance (i.e. making sure all the branches agree in the way that they descend). Everything in conifer building is incremental, including bending.
Way too short of a time frame, it’s the new growth wood that sets the bend and it has to compete with all the wood that was already there. If the wires were biting that quickly you wrapped it too tight. In the future if you have to take the wire off rewire away in the opposite direction.
You can rewire in the opposite direction to avoid wire bite and keep wire on it. So instead of clockwise around the branch it would be counterclockwise! Hope this helps
There's no set rule for this but I often unwire and rewire a tree on the same day.
Whether wiring is safe is strongly determined by skill (experience with wiring and also with that species) and by somewhat by timing. I say somewhat because skill can override timing to a degree. Professionals won't wire spruce, fir, hemlock, dougfir, etc, during the same time that those species are pinchable (i.e. when the shoots are new, ultra soft and delicate), but they might wire in mid-summer with no problems at all while telling their students to wait to rewire until fall -- that's the skill/experience gap.
If you wanted to walk away with a simple fool-proof rule though (at least for softer conifers, basically non-pines) you could say that if you unwire in fall you could rewire right away, but if you unwire in spring or summer, you might choose to wait until fall to rewire. Certainly in CA zone 10 where the fall-winter period is extremely mild and chill for branches recovering from wire while the spring and summer can be super roasty.
You've got some branches that arch up and then down, and other branches that just go down. It would be better to have a more consistent look, with all of the branches going sharply down from the trunk, rather than up first.
I’ve never been clear on how to get that right when the tree’s growth habit is up first. Maybe that is part of the reason for cutting off all the larger growth and starting from scratch with branches that emerge young that you can better control?
https://preview.redd.it/9st76btg2r7d1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dd50acb0304e414411785acfcab149ecdcc0d989
For example, those in purple naturally emerged from the trunk more or less downward and I just used wire to address their tendency to lift, while those in purple emerged moving up, and thus when I tried to have them going down, they curve. Pretty sure I’ll snap the branch of I do it more severely.
So am I right that the solution is to chop that branch and grow a better one?
When you see wire bite starting you need to take the old wire off and wrap new wire in the opposite direction. Tie down wires work very well to get the branches to droop down. You can leave them on for years without any wire bites. Conifers are normally covered with heavy snow in the winter months. The branches are very resilient and pop back into shape
It’d be nice to focus on getting a better taper on the trunk and just fattening them in general (I say as a total newbie so feel free to disregard or tell me I’m wrong).
Honestly I think it has a great shape without the wiring, but I’ve always been into the more natural look so I’m biased. I think you should leave it as is except maybe wire the branches downward slightly
Natural looking spruces/firs/hemlocks/etc are still the result of wiring at least as far as the primaries and secondaries go. When you have finally grown pads you can then indeed revert to scissorwork to keep a natural look and to avoid the toil of wire/rewire but if you don't initial-wire the primaries and secondaries there are whole categories of naturalistic styles which aren't attainable without at least some branch lowering, either through coiling or guy-wiring.
Conifers take a bit longer to set than a maple, for example. A maple can set within a growing season but junipers and the like need a few years some times. I’ve had wire on some trees for years cause those branches just pop back up. It’s just a waiting game.
How do you know they’ll stay? They stayed in place when I took the wire off. It wasn’t until now, 10 weeks later, when I noticed things had gone awry. Being in a nursery container, this guy just sits on the ground and gets watered, so it isn’t easy for me to notice its structure on a day to day basis without really trying.
In bonsai, there is no trying, only do. 😉lol. But really, they just have bouncy branches. Restyle and leave the wire longer, and then rewire when the wire bites. That’s the game.
It’s pretty common for conifers to slowly creep back to where they were pre wiring. I had to rewire my bird’s nest spruce many many times until it mostly stayed. I’ve found guy wires to be really helpful for getting the bigger bends to take since you can leave them on longer without worrying about the wire cutting in, just make sure to put some rubber tubing around the part that contacts the tree to protect it from the wire.
If you have wire bit you can be pretty sure it will stay. The trick is to catch it right before you get bit. For sure you don't want wire bite but depending on the species it might not be a huge deal as long as it's minor. Maple for example you want zero ever while my Junipers I try to not let it get so bad that I lose bark when removing the wire.
This doesn’t really jive with a lot of the other advice in this thread.
Which part? I've read all the feedback and it's roughly all the same. A single month is not enough, wait for the wire to bit or almost bite. If for some reason an individual branch start biting before the others, rewrie that branch and leave the tree wired for ~a year or so. Outside of some very young and smooth barked trees I've never seen anything bite in a month. Maples will bit in ~6 weeks or so if you wire tight but it's hard for a tree to grow enough to bite in a month. Maybe it's a problem of what wire bite looks like? [Here is as far as I ever like to go for wire bite](https://imgur.com/gallery/wire-bite-Nl8s4Fw). Three months after that picture in March you couldn't tell that branch had ever had wire on it because of the species. Something like that would ruin a maple. Notice the wire didn't break the bark. It would help to have pictures of the wire on the branch and after you took it off. It's hard to understand the problem you had other than one month of wire not setting the branches.
Also, to comment on how deep the wire bite was, I could see white with no bark when I removed the wire.
yeah some branches will bite in faster, so I take mine off as it bites in each branch. And than you will reapply wire in the fall...Like someone else said guide wires are great too
Yes, a month wasn’t long enough but your statement was that if you have wire bite, you can be sure it will stay. My wire bit deeply, so it isn’t enough to have wire bite as an indicator. Also, wire bite in junipers isn’t a problem like it is in trees like a maple, sometimes it is even a design feature. So specifically the parts that aren’t in keeping were 1) the statement that it will stay if you get wire bite, and 2) the statement that the goal is to catch it right before wire bite. Since the image is of a juniper, my interpretation was that your advice was towards junipers.
It's hard to understand how you got wire bit in a month, so I was trying to show you an example of what wire bite looks like in case that was the confusion. If you get wire bit it will stay, I don't know of really any exception for that. If you hold the plant in place and let substantial growth to occur, that growth will lock the branch in place. Perhaps the confusion is that the parts of the branch that didn't grow and get wire bit can go back. So if you wire a branch and just the base bites in and you unwire it, the rest of the branch won't hold. This is when you should rewire it as soon as you unwire it if you don't get consistant hold on the entire branch.
Looking at my plants this morning, I see healed wire bite along the length, wrapping. But who knows.
Sucks that some species are harder to set than others!
Many specimen trees are permanently wired.
The 400-year old pine at the National Arboretum is still wired. Any day now it'll come off...surely..... :-)
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I wonder how long the wire has been on. But yeah, I’ve heard some people say conifer wire should be semi permanent. You hear a lot of things. Walter Pall doesn’t think you should ever repot unless there’s a specific problem you’re trying to solve.
How long did you leave the wire on? For conifers I leave it for at least a year. The wire will bite in but conifer bark has flakey cork cambium so it will look fine not long after the wire is removed. Depending on the species and how hard the bends were I may re-wire in the opposite direction. If you have a lot of hard bends it will hold faster because the small cracks in the branches will heal in the position it has been wired in. Subtle bends take longer to hold because there isn't as much cracking and healing happening, you have to rely on the growth of sapwood to hold that branch in place. Wiring isn't a once and done process. I try to take a photo before I remove wire and check the next day to see if all the branches held. Sometimes you know within an hour of removing wire sometimes it's three days before they try to spring back. The more you do it the more you'll know when the wire has been on long enough. Conifers are generally flexible so they will need more re-wiring than a deciduous tree.
Yeah, I’m learning wire bite is not equivalent to being done setting. I probably left it on a month because beginners are taught that you do remove the wire once it starts to bite. Anyway, lesson learned. Any feedback on the original styling before it popped back?
Just a note… this tree got into wire bite territory REALLY fast which freaked me out. It was really deep on branches that I wasn’t sure if they could handle it. I just assumed that wire bite = the branch has set in its new position. Apparently not.
Wire bite is the result of vigor, which you should pat yourself on the back for. It says that after you wired, the tree responded with thickening instead of stressing itself out. In the early stages of conifer development (when you are setting up your primaries and secondaries, as you have been) vigor is a great thing to have, and a vigorous response after a heavy wiring operation is a confirmation that you were precise/clean enough in wiring that the cambium was left unscathed. The thickening that threatens to bite in or even does bite in a bit is what helps to set the positions. The more new tissue you've grown in the new position, the less the older tissue can muscle back to the old position. Keep doing what you are doing. In professional bonsai it is quite common to still be pulling spruce (etc) branches down with guy wires years/decades into their development. My teacher often says to apprentices and advanced students: "compress, compress, compress". This is especially true in formal upright design. Take stock of where you're at because you have made progress with bending even if there's been a bit of reversion to the old position. Incremental bending is completely OK in bendy/revert-to-old-position-ey species. This is how obtuse branch departure angles gradually get converted to acute angles or how you dial in the last 10% of visual appearance (i.e. making sure all the branches agree in the way that they descend). Everything in conifer building is incremental, including bending.
It’s rarely going to be “one & done”, totally alright to unwire / rewire / rinse repeat indefinitely for all of time :)
How long was the wire on?
About a month
Way too short of a time frame, it’s the new growth wood that sets the bend and it has to compete with all the wood that was already there. If the wires were biting that quickly you wrapped it too tight. In the future if you have to take the wire off rewire away in the opposite direction.
You can rewire in the opposite direction to avoid wire bite and keep wire on it. So instead of clockwise around the branch it would be counterclockwise! Hope this helps
Time to re-wire. With a bendy type of tree you will have to wire multiple times before they set.
Noob question, how long after removing wire can you rewire the same branch?
There's no set rule for this but I often unwire and rewire a tree on the same day. Whether wiring is safe is strongly determined by skill (experience with wiring and also with that species) and by somewhat by timing. I say somewhat because skill can override timing to a degree. Professionals won't wire spruce, fir, hemlock, dougfir, etc, during the same time that those species are pinchable (i.e. when the shoots are new, ultra soft and delicate), but they might wire in mid-summer with no problems at all while telling their students to wait to rewire until fall -- that's the skill/experience gap. If you wanted to walk away with a simple fool-proof rule though (at least for softer conifers, basically non-pines) you could say that if you unwire in fall you could rewire right away, but if you unwire in spring or summer, you might choose to wait until fall to rewire. Certainly in CA zone 10 where the fall-winter period is extremely mild and chill for branches recovering from wire while the spring and summer can be super roasty.
Any feedback on how it was styled originally?
Looked good!!
You've got some branches that arch up and then down, and other branches that just go down. It would be better to have a more consistent look, with all of the branches going sharply down from the trunk, rather than up first.
I’ve never been clear on how to get that right when the tree’s growth habit is up first. Maybe that is part of the reason for cutting off all the larger growth and starting from scratch with branches that emerge young that you can better control? https://preview.redd.it/9st76btg2r7d1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dd50acb0304e414411785acfcab149ecdcc0d989 For example, those in purple naturally emerged from the trunk more or less downward and I just used wire to address their tendency to lift, while those in purple emerged moving up, and thus when I tried to have them going down, they curve. Pretty sure I’ll snap the branch of I do it more severely. So am I right that the solution is to chop that branch and grow a better one?
Yeah, if you can't bend it down with heavier wire, then you will need to remove it and replace with new smaller growth that can be bent down.
When you see wire bite starting you need to take the old wire off and wrap new wire in the opposite direction. Tie down wires work very well to get the branches to droop down. You can leave them on for years without any wire bites. Conifers are normally covered with heavy snow in the winter months. The branches are very resilient and pop back into shape
It’d be nice to focus on getting a better taper on the trunk and just fattening them in general (I say as a total newbie so feel free to disregard or tell me I’m wrong).
Yeah, that’s one reason I haven’t removed a ton of foliage.
Honestly I think it has a great shape without the wiring, but I’ve always been into the more natural look so I’m biased. I think you should leave it as is except maybe wire the branches downward slightly
Natural looking spruces/firs/hemlocks/etc are still the result of wiring at least as far as the primaries and secondaries go. When you have finally grown pads you can then indeed revert to scissorwork to keep a natural look and to avoid the toil of wire/rewire but if you don't initial-wire the primaries and secondaries there are whole categories of naturalistic styles which aren't attainable without at least some branch lowering, either through coiling or guy-wiring.
Right, that’s why I said he should wire the branches