Shohin Lonicera, work in progress

Back in January, I was fortunate enough to "relieve" Stone Monkey of a Lonicera with great potential. The poor little devil got the treatment at our Club meeting that month but it had been let to run free for some time so did need some lightening up and clearing of dead branches.



After its Winter rest, I thought it was about time to finish the initial hard cutting back to give the tree some shape and me some direction with its future development. The tree had been growing well and put on a lot of new growth so I was more than happy to go quite radical with the pruning.



Here's the result after a couple of hours pruning & wiring. This little guy has lost 5 inches in height but is now well on the way to becoming a lovely powerful Shohin. I'll leave the tree in a bright, sunny place to help give it a boost and keep the foliage quite tight in the crown to hopefully encourage back budding on the lower branches as they are a little tip heavy at the moment.



I hope that you like what I have done and any input would be great.
Thanks for looking,
Regards,
Simon

Very nice material, and very good work too.

Maybe I wouldn't bend the branch on the right so downward, on the contrary, I would give it a more upward movement, and the ones above as well for fear they might look like bows with pompoms at the end in the future. But that's just a point of view, I may be wrong. It's your tree and it already looks very nice like that.

(PS : to the mods, the "POST REPLY" button doesn't appear any more, it's replaced by a "Document" icon on my computer...)
(PPS : ... and some of the other buttons either don't show or are in the wrong place. )

Very nice material, and great job!
Good luck!

(PS : to the mods, the "POST REPLY" button doesn't appear any more, it's replaced by a "Document" icon on my computer...)
(PPS : ... and some of the other buttons either don't show or are in the wrong place. Shocked )

It all looks "normal" on my side, Alain. It may go away by itself.

Nice work! I do like the taper too. Thanks for sharing.

Here we are in sunny June and as you can see the tree has come on leaps & bounds.
One feed and 2 serious haircuts later and here's the result.............



The left hand branch is filling nicely and I'm starting to get a nice back branch to work on. I've still got plenty of work to do but I'm really suprised at the image I've managed to produce in such a short period of time. Does anyone have any thoughts on a pot???

Thanks for your time & interest,
Okk, Okk,
Simon

Looks really cool!

I would trim the first branch on the left further to the trunk, but it really looks like it's going to be top-of-the shelf.

Hi Alain,
Thanks for your comments, is this the sort of thing that you mean??





Please excuse the poor visuals as I'm limited to the PC programmes that I can use. I sorta like v2 but I'm also taken with the wider image that I'm heading to at the moment. Any other suggestions??

Regards,
Simon

Good work Simon. v2 works for me but the apex could be reduced. These fill out in no time so you will be choping the top soon.
As for pots, Gordon Duffet made me a great one for my shohin but Andy also has a nice range.

bonsai monkey wrote:Hi Alain,
Thanks for your comments, is this the sort of thing that you mean??




Please excuse the poor visuals as I'm limited to the PC programmes that I can use. I sorta like v2 but I'm also taken with the wider image that I'm heading to at the moment. Any other suggestions??

Regards,
Simon

Yes, a bit like #2. but now that you've made a virtual, I wonder if it wouldn't be too "geometric"...