(soil tapping)
(gentle music)
- My name is Darren.
I would describe myself as a bonsai practitioner.
I'm going to walk you through how I restore to health
a hemlock bonsai tree.
As I look at the tree,
I can see straightaway that there are a couple of issues
surrounding its health.
First of all, the foliage is off-green.
It should be a nice medium to deep green color.
As I look at the soil,
we can see that it's mounded up quite a lot,
and it looks very black, very dense.
All of these signs combined tell me that the tree
is suffering due to some kind of root issue.
Now that I'm repotting this bonsai tree,
I need to remove it from the pot,
and when a tree's been in a pot for this long,
it's quite a task in and of itself.
To start with though,
I'm going to remove some of the topsoil.
I'm searching for structural roots.
In bonsai terms, we call it nebari.
And what that is, is, if you ever look at a tree,
they've got kind of thick roots gripping the ground.
That's a valuable feature of the bonsai tree.
It will give me clues as to the depth of the root ball,
where the tree ends and where the root system begins.
Now I need to free up the edges of the pot.
To do that, I'm gonna use a tool that in Japanese
is called a kama, or in the West
we might call it a repotting sickle.
I'm using the kama to scrape away matted roots
and compacted soil from the edges of the container.
That's going to give me a little bit more room
to use the leverage of the trunk when trying to extract it.
It also frees any roots that have adhered to the side
of the pot
so that the tree's no longer really gripping onto it.
Now that it's out of the pot,
I'm going to turn the tree over
and have look at what we've got.
And I'm actually blown away by the amount of root
that has developed underneath this root ball.
The roots must be a couple of centimeters thick.
There's no soil in and amongst these roots.
I'm going to use a simple paint scraper that I've sharpened
so that it's got a nice edge
and slice through roughly where I think the matted roots end
and the actual old soil begins.
Once I've removed that big, thick mass of unwanted roots,
I need to work my way through the soil.
I'm searching for any broken-down soil
or any mucky organic matter
that doesn't support the right balance of water and oxygen
for healthy roots.
To do that, I'm going to be using a bamboo chopstick,
which I've sharpened to a point.
The bamboo chopstick is able to work soil from the roots
while doing minimal damage.
I've also got my root shears,
which allow me to cut away any roots
that are clearly not needed.
(shears snipping)
As I'm working through the soil,
I eventually come to what I've been dreading to find,
old field soil or whatever it is.
Definitely don't want it in a bonsai pot.
It hinders the passage of water and oxygen
through the roots,
which can affect the health of the tree moving forward.
I have to use my chopstick and my sheers to dig the lot out.
Now that I've completed the remedial works
to this root ball,
I need to seat the tree into the container.
The first step of doing that is to prepare my pot.
I'm now inserting what we call an aeration layer of soil
into the bottom of the pot.
This allows air to enter the pot
from the drainage holes beneath
and permeate through the root ball.
The soil that I'm using is a mix of akadama,
pumice, and lava rocks,
which I'm using in a 1:1:1 ratio.
In order to seat the tree in the container
and minimize the risk of air pockets,
I'm going to make a mound of soil
roughly where the hollow section is underneath the trunk.
And I'm now seating the tree onto that mound.
Now that the tree's seated in the container,
I need to secure it to the pot.
I'm using some small sections of bamboo
pushed into the root ball to secure the tree into its pot.
I tie the wires, which wrap underneath the container,
to those stakes.
Doing so is going to prevent any risk of the tree swaying
or moving, and therefore damaging newly forming roots.
Now that this tree is secure in its pot, it can't move.
It can't go anywhere
And the repot's complete.