styling help please.

Another pig's ear. Cork Bark elm I bought a couple of years back. In my defence it has been battered by badly aimed footballs, chewed by and collided with by the world's only dyspraxic siamese cat and knocked over several times. No defence for leaving wire on too long and snapping branches due to not having a clue when wiring. What you see below is a tidied up version with a little bit on new wiring (this afternoon) to try and neaten it up a bit. Any suggestions about where to go from bhere would be most welcome. If I need to plant it again, I swear I will start to self - harm, because I'll only have two trees left in pots.




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sorry about the poor quality pictures - they're from my phone.

Dunno where you live (please read the banner floating across our home page!) but I'd wait until fall and the tree is leafless (or if it doesn't lose its leaves by itself then, I'd do it for the tree in November or so) and then look carefully at the branch structure, getting rid of crossing or too large (or small) branches for different parts of the tree.

sorry chap. I'm in the u.k.

Thanks for updating your profile, it really does help.

Cork bark elm needs some special help to avoid the corky trunk, new corkless branches look. Wire the branches soon to set their position. The branch at 10.30 in your first pic looks too high. Then next year allow some growths at the back of the branches to grow up vertically and tips untrimmed as sacrifice branches. You should cut off any side branches on these sacrifice branches so that they cast little shade over the important lower parts of your tree. Let them continue growing until your branch has thickened enough and hopefully developed cork bark.

Sometimes damage and accidents can actually do you a favour. Most of the best yamadori (mountain collected) material has suffered decades or centuries of damage from sheep, goats, deer, avalanches, stonefall, lightning strikes etc. However, I can't recommend this as a method for instantly improving your collection!

Kev Bailey wrote:Thanks for updating your profile, it really does help.

Cork bark elm needs some special help to avoid the corky trunk, new corkless branches look. Wire the branches soon to set their position. The branch at 10.30 in your first pic looks too high. Then next year allow some growths at the back of the branches to grow up vertically and tips untrimmed as sacrifice branches. You should cut off any side branches on these sacrifice branches so that they cast little shade over the important lower parts of your tree. Let them continue growing until your branch has thickened enough and hopefully developed cork bark.

Sometimes damage and accidents can actually do you a favour. Most of the best yamadori (mountain collected) material has suffered decades or centuries of damage from sheep, goats, deer, avalanches, stonefall, lightning strikes etc. However, I can't recommend this as a method for instantly improving your collection!

do you mean the one on the left? With a bit of wire on it? The third picture is what I see as the front of my tree.

Thanks for your suggestions.