Crepe Myrtle Bonsai Tree For Sale

Crepe myrtle bonsai tree

We will be working on this crepe myrtle bonsai tree. I have right here it’s a 5 gallon from my nursery and we’re going to see if we can come up with a foundation and the structure for the branches.

So the crape myrtles are one of my favorite types of trees, they’re, drought, tolerant, so they can be a little bit more forgiving when it comes to watering, but one nice thing about them is that they grow extremely fast and do not flush.

This is, I mean this is spring growth. Look how green it is. They are deciduous, so they will lose all their leaves during the winter, but when spring comes around they just pop out everywhere. So you can be a little bit more aggressive on your pruning and you can train your branches really easily with some wire.

The branches are a little bit brittle, but if you catch them, young they’ll still be flexible enough to put wire on there and actually shaped a little bit so right here. I chose this front because it had a nice root base.

It has nice taper from this angle right here right there, it’s got a couple main trunks. It’S got two actually one two. So one of the things we have to do is choose one. We have to choose one primary trunk and I think it’s gonna be this one right here.

It’S the longer one tapers really nice. It goes all the way up to here. So basically just follows this one right here. So if you got one inch open this one and this one, so I won’t choose this one and essentially what I’m going to do with the other one is.

Crepe myrtle bonsai from cutting

We will cut it back so that it serves as a side branch and one thing about these trees is that you’ll actually see these a lot in the nursery. So if you go charge your honey, you go nursery yawning. These are trees that you’re gonna find a lot of times.

You’Re, not gonna find you know those ideal branches, all the time in the nursery not gonna find a 5-gallon can where you’ve got one main trunk. They’Ve got this really nice for us branch. Coming off the side, a lot of times, you’ll find them where they kind of clump up, or they have two branches coming up and what you can do, instead of just eliminating it.

You know in one of the previous videos I discuss how you can do a full reset and then wait for a new growth and then develop those just basically from a reset. What’S one nice, one nice thing you can do with these trees is that you can work with one of the thicker branches and just turn it into a first branch.

So sometimes they’ll go up a little bit, see how this one right here this one right. There it’ll go up a little bit, but then, after that we can trim it. We can cut it back and we can train a branch going to the side or even still coming off at an angle.

It looks really natural, but you can put it off to the side and it can still take advantage of this thicker branch right here. So one of the nice things about this tree is that they grow really fast, so it’s deciduous, but once spring comes around, they always butt out.

Even when you think it’s not even when you cut this back to just a tiny little trunk right here, they always come out. So what we’re going to do on this one is we’re going to select some branches or try to get some general branch structure going on, and what happen is that we will reduce this tree a lot and the goal of it is to set a foundation so That, as each growing season progresses every time, you know we have another growth growing season, we’ll get new branches and from there we can start to create those paired branches.

So from one I’ll split into two and from those two I’ll split it into four and then we can contain to do that until it’s got some really nice branch structure. Alright. So since we’re going with this one as the trunk, this one right here dangled this a little bit more, that can I set it right there.

So can always already tell from this tree that I’ve got competing apexis here. So I got one branch right here. This one right here, that’s growing extremely tall, which is great because that’s going to be a perfect leader to keep on using to keep on growing out the trunk or too thick in the trunk.

So I’m just gonna leave this one alone, and so I’m ready to cut it back, but I’ve got though, on as a problem, though, is I’ve got all these branches here and they’re competing with that main trunk? So what I have to do is turn those into side branches, so that I can put all the attention down to the main trunk here and then these guys on the side here, these thicker branches, I’ll, reduce them down and develop some new, smaller branches, so that The proportion stays it stays correct because see right here.

I’Ve got this really nice branch right here and I got a little bit lucky because this one is thinner than this one on the right here on the cameras angle, this one on the right. So what I can do is I can save both these fake branches, no still stay in proportion just because this one on the bottom is thicker than the second one.

Now I’ll have this main trunk? Here’S once I cut this one back this one back right here and I let this main one grow with this leader, all the way up to the top here that one will thicken up and get thicker than this side branch, so I’ll stay in proportion.

They’Ll, look really nice so right now I’m going to do some major cuts to these branches, so I can start to develop our first cutback, this growth. So this one right here doesn’t contain the growth that way, and this one right here doesn’t continue to grow out.

This way and thicken up as opposed to this one in the middle, that’s enamel go break out. My saw my favorite saw and I’ll make some cuts right now. Let’S go reduce this tree and get about alright. Here we go [ Music, ].

Okay, so you can see, I reduced some branches. Basically, these were all going up. If you remember a few seconds ago, they were going up and I cut them back to where I had some side branches coming off.

See these little guys right here see these ones right here, and what I’m going to do is put some light wire on these guys just to train them into the spots. I want them to grow, but I’m not going to cut them yet and we’ll.

Let them continue to grow so that they can thicken up and kind of establish themselves before I can cut them back:  So I wired the tree right here and basically all I did was wire them into the spots that were empty.

This tree is going to have a little bit more of a broom style quality to it, since all these branches are kind of coming up. This way, I’m not going to fight it by pushing everything down, I’m going to kind of go with it and cut them back as they grow, so I can start to split these into pairs so rather than if I didn’t make this go down, because this right Now the movements all kind of going up, so I want my branch structure to continue to go up like that.

As you can see, it looks a little bit funny because I’ve got all these branches are basically growing that I’m going to cut back later on, so that I can start to develop more ramified branches, so right these right now.

All these right here are just basically structural branches or our primary branches that I’m possibly going to use. I save some that I might not keep, but for now I just want to keep the distant make.

This tree look a little bit more. Full I’ve got this crazy leader right here. That’S going straight up, it’s actually past the camera. It goes about maybe another two feet over it and over it doesn’t see how long that is.

So it’s pretty long, I’m going to let that keep on going and that’s basically going to be used to thicken up this part right here, so that we can get some better taper or thinking up the trunk as well.

And then you can see that there’s no triangles or anything right here, because it’s still basically in repair mode, it’s not a full reset. I actually did the reset two years ago, so this is actually already getting some of the inside branches.

These ones, right here I’ll be able to cut back, wants us to sit. You know once it loses all its leaves I’ll, be able to cut back again in late winter early spring and then I’ll be able to select the two that I want to keep, because right now, there’s only one so eventually I’ll get branches and the growing seasons Coming up I’ll get branches coming out of these, so next February or March I’ll, be able to cut it back a bit more and select the pears and from there the next season kind of gets easier and easier, because then I’ll just be able to build pears On pears on pears and then that’s how you get sort of that that finer tertiary branches and sort of those smaller branches right, but for now that’s how it kind of looks right there, I’m going for more of a broom style on this one, just because the Branches are kind of fanning out from the base like that, rather than lower all these down coming down like this and fight the tree, we’ll go with it, so it kind of go reach upwards kind of like this.

Can you imagine the branches go kind of reach outward like this, as it continues to grow? When I get to the desired thickness right here, then I’ll just cut this off, and then we just work on maintaining and cutting back and putting backed up branches over here.

So the nice thing about these crepe myrtles is that this one I’m working on a little bit late, but had I worked on it mmm before all the leaves had come back, it would have been better cuz, then that wouldn’t have had to contend with.

All these leaves and then I could just focus purely on the branches instead of all the foliage, but it’s not a big deal. I know I’m still gonna get bugs out of here. I’Ve got another one. I’Ve got to feel my nursery still there just budding everywhere, so I’m not too concerned about that, but for now I think this is as far as I’m going to go.

Pocomoke crape myrtle bonsai

I’M gonna cut this back again in February and we’ll cut it back to those parents, because right now I’ve got one branch coming off here. I’M pretty sure I’m gonna get branches coming off of this, and I also be able to select two from there and then possibly even be able to cut this one shorter.

And then I can start to get those finer branches shutting up on the tree and then with the movement I’m just following with the movement here. It’S kind of fanning out like that. It’S not a full broom style where it’s all going to be fanned out like this it’s kind of in between.

I really don’t want to fight the movement of this. You know, though, if you look at the movement when we’re on this. If you look at the movement on the branches here that kind of comes out like this comes out like this and so my branches right now, I’ve got them wired kind of agree with that.

So it kind of is gonna go out like this. The tricky part is getting past that first year, which is basically the repair year after that you start to get some branches and then from there you can select it.

But after that, when you get those growing seasons coming every year, you’ll be able to select the two and then you’ll start it’ll start to develop really quickly, just because it’s a no exponential growth on the branches.

So at some point you know you got two to four to eight. You got eight branches coming off with all these and you’ve got to start cutting back or eliminating branches. Just cuz you have too many, but the hard part is always getting past.

Those first two years, which is the repair the reset here and then the first year, where you get just a single branch, so in terms of care where these guys are located in minor, so they’re in full Sun, so they’re hit they’re getting full Sun even during The heat and they love it, the full Sun.

They don’t mind the heat that much in terms of root printing. When it comes to repotting you can you can put them really nice, you can put them really aggressively as long as you wire it. In put some good soil mix and you’re good to go, so if you have a chance at getting a crepe myrtle, I recommend them.

The leaves are very nice, they’re, very small and, as you prune them back, you print them back. The leaves actually get smaller. One thing we always got ta keep in mind. That is that the tree is always in development, so over here it’s really heavy.

You can see it’s really far out it’s really wide over there over here. It’S really far out there. Eventually, that’s going to get pushed back and we’re going to let this grow in, and so this Gopi balanced a little bit more and once this is developed in here this little empty spot right in here, let’s go create a really nice crown.

It’S got! Ta! Look very nice. We have to imagine what it’s going to look like in the future when this section is all filled in and that’s when that’s the harder part to visualize. But once you can kind of visualize and imagine your structure or your branches developing there and actually let me take a take a branch really quick.

It’S not cut it. So if you can visualize it when you start to develop structure like this, that’s when your tree starts to when you start to see the you know if you’ve got branches up here, that’s when you start to see that okay there’s the tree, that’s starting to form, But unfortunately, when you don’t have it, it looks a little bit bare, but you can imagine that you’re going to wait for something like that and that’s when you go start to create that that crown when that’s when you start the one that a tree starts to Really take shape and that’s when it starts to look really nice, I said.