Hi YouTube! Unskilled Bonsai here. It's the end of spring here in Australia and I'm
here with my ginkgo biloba, maiden hair t tree, and and it's time to do a bit of pruning
on it. With these plants there's
not much in the way of styling that you can do other than
generally an upright broom or flame style. Typically with this I've...a little
bit of back bit of background on the tree. I've had this tree for maybe ten
years and I think was about four years old with my wife gave it to me. Its spent
the last nine years in a pot, the same pot, same potting mix fairly neglected.
In about the last 18 months I've bonsai’d this. What I’ve....it's it's got
some interesting bits and pieces on it but what I fastly learned was these
trees scar so you need to be really strategic and careful with your cuts and the other
thing I learned that when you do do cuts don't do them close to where you intend
to leave a little bit extra a little stub and wait for the stub to dry out a little
before removing fully. Um, but what I've been doing with this tree,
It originally started throwing up lots of new growth, I kept trimming it back
trying to get a one a single trunk and that's when I learned that it's scars
and I could have known this if I actually researched on the web.
There's a million of resources on how to care for ginkgo on the on web
but if I have a just google that I would have I would have been being aware of it.
What I'm doing here is on all the new growth I trimmed back to two
leaves and just above this second leaf and hopefully that second leaf is facing
outwards. The idea, the premise behind that is it forces just about above every leaf...
..huh a spider, there you go a spider...um just above every leaf is a a bud or
node we can grow other branches so the idea is to trim it down and force it to
Grow more branches and keep the growth controlled. Before I...
At the beginning of spring this tree was quite short you can see the original
stump and it's at this height here. So its been a bit of a busy plant
particularly with these longer ones. The..I might show some extra
some close-ups now but yeah what I'm going to do is trim back all the tall
growth to try and promote further branching. So I'll show you some of the detail.
Trimming this should be fairly simple process. Um but I really love these trees.
I think they're the remnants from a prehistoric period and I just
love of the interesting leaf shape. Um I understand this not much means to be
able to reduce the leaf shape down. um I think I just appreciate these because
these are such an ancient species and have known to grown very old
and have proven medicinal properties particularly with the leaves, so.
Rightio I'll start making some cuts this is the the most ever grown in in one one spring
so let's hope I don't bugger it up!
So well the other things I might do here is I'm just noticing there's a
lot of foliage shadowing the underside foliage. One other thing I have done is
reduce each of the spots down to two three or four leaves. So I might do that now.
So tree is trimmed and a bit shorter now. Um, I don't really want to trim
too much back from there because again every cut has to be very strategic.
These trees do back bud a little but not always this tree was quite tall and when
I cut made this this cut here there was a number of buds down the trunk and only
two of them really kicked off this one's just one here started this year but it's
a bit strange these plants are a bit of a weird science so that's probably I'm
gonna do for now and hopefully in the summer cycle we'll get some more new
growth come up and then probably trim that back down at the end of summer
leaving enough leaves for it to generate build some energy up for the winter
months when the drops all its leaves and and hopefully we're back here in a
year's time so that's what I did last year was I cut it back to three leaves
at the end of summer and fertilized that quite heavily during
autumn and just lightly water the during spring and this is what I got I got all
this growth so um I might show a quick close up of this tree.
Yeah I quite like these ginkgo trees and if you know, I got all these
leaves here, I really wish I knew how to use them for medicinal purposes. I'm sure
I could make a tea but I'm not game too. I'm sure there's some recipe out there.
I you’ve got your own ginkgo, keen to hear about it and how you care for it and and style it.
Also if you could if you subscribe to my channel and like this video that helps
support me a bunch. But until the next time I hope someone enjoyed this video
and I will see you in the next video!