hackberry

Cleft grafting, commonly used in grafting of fruit trees, is a technique which Taiwanese Hackberry masters have adopted for use in developing incredible bonsai. In this blog post Terry Erasmus explains the steps which Master Chang Yong Zhou, in video, follows to perform these grafts.

Learn how to successfully graft Hackberry (Celtis) bonsai using these two methods. Terry Erasmus visits Taiwan and is shown these reliable grafts by a Taiwanese Hackberry master. Easy to follow step by step instructions with accompanying high quality video will ensure you grasp these techniques quickly.

The story of this Hackberry broom-in-the-making continues in this 3rd part where it is removed from the temporary wooden growing box and repotted into a shallow bonsai container.

With the repotting season just starting, with some early risers; an Elm and a Hackberry I thought I would share some tips and suggestions in this brief blog on the subject of repotting bonsai trees.

At the end of each growing season deciduous trees need to be worked on. The tasks which need to be completed include removing the dying leaves, cutting back twigs where needed, wiring and general assessment of the trees development over the past season.

Last spring I began to layer an ugly Hackberry (Celtis sinensis) which had a terrible root base but which had loads of potential as a broom styled tree. A year later and I am ready to remove the layered tree from the donor plant.

In this second part of a 2 part series on field growing Celtis sinensis or Hackberry, we will revisit the same trees, 2 years later from when the first blog was written and I will describe and show the steps taken to arrive at the next stage of two of the trees' development.

Last work of the season on these two Chinese Hackberry originally field grown by Terry Erasmus from seed.

What do you do if you have a cut which has never healed over, for some or other reason? After all the goal is for the wound to callous over completely so after a few years you cannot see a cut was ever made to begin with. How to get such scars to disappear is the subject of this post.

Field growing is one of the techniques by which you can rapidly attain thick, tapering trunks with which to develop quality bonsai trees. In this blog post we will cover the basics of field growing and how you too can develop some incredible trunks.

In this blog post I will ground layer a Hackberry which is destined to become a broom style bonsai. The nebari of broom styled trees should be very impressive, radiating out from the trunk in all directions, something which this Hackberry definitely does not have, but something which we are going to change.