Update on twisted shimpaku

I’ve posted before about wiring up very young shimpaku cuttings to get good bends into the trunks before they harden up. Here’s one that was wired and bent earlier in summer.

I noticed the trunk was just starting to bulge around the wire.

Time to get that wire off. Experience tells me the trunk will be well and truly set by the time the wires are tight like this.

The bends on this one are not really very inspiring. It could be OK if the tree is grown out to a medium sized tree but I would really like the bends a bit tighter. In the initial bending I pushed the trunk as far as I thought was possible at the time. There is actually evidence of some fractures that have since healed .

How to get better bends into this trunk? I have found that after being bent the first time the trunk will now be much more flexible (except at sites that have previously fractured and healed) so now I rewire this trunk.

Better to wire in the opposite direction if possible so there is less chance of a wire sitting in the same groove as a previous wire and marking the trunk even worse.

Now the existing bends can be compressed much further and new bends introduced between previous curves if required.

These new, tighter bends should look far better on a smaller sized tree. Now, if only these would grow a bit quicker………….

Leave a Reply