Clip and Grow Appreciation Thread

[TinyArt]

Brief tangent, for what it's worth...

Annealed copper wire blisters my fingers, and you can't do it wearing gloves.

Leave that mess to the metal industry!
To get fully-annealed copper wire, make sure you're buying/ordering "dead soft."

 

[Potawatomi13]

Directional pruning is clip and grow. Does anyone not use this technique. Regardless sometimes wire is needed.

 

[Lutonian]

All trees are clip and grow even if your wiring, clip and grow can put movement and taper in your tree & wiring can put movement between nodes in a way clip and grow cant and allows you to move branches.

Every branch I trim I am thinking about direction and I use wire too.

 

[PA_Penjing]

Going back to the harsh bends I mentioned, they definitely don’t suit every tree. This is all just my personal opinion/taste but I wouldn’t just clip and grow a juniper, maple or spruce. In my opinion some amount of wire is needed to elevate those species. The old photos of Chinese styled junipers don’t do it for me. But in the other hand elm, pine and most fast growing broadleaf trees will take on an amazing tortured tense appearance from chaotic angle changes. And now .. those photos I said I’d share a few days ago

 

[PA_Penjing]

When I talk about clip and grow I don’t just mean “directional pruning”. I’m talking about lingnan school aesthetics. Branches that move up and down, not just horizontal. As zhao calls them “elk antlers” and “crab legs”. Doing this is nearly impossible without having crossing branches in some places. Which my eye sees as a ton of depth in the tree, it is more chaotic than defined layers but trees in nature are chaotic. It always comes down to a matter of opinion, one style could never be deemed better than another of course

 

[Forsoothe!]

There are lots of trees where the branches naturally radiate zig-zag, but also lots that branch at an ugly 90° and/or have uneconomical internode reaches and no amount of C&G can make them look right. Wrapping wire widens the world of working wood with wise & worthwhile whimsy without waste. We manufacture wabi-sabi!

 

[Maiden69]

I was watching one of the Yatsubusa elm streams in Mirai and Ryan touched up a little bit on clip and grow. He said that the angle of the new shoot depends on how long you leave the stub before the bud you want to elongate. That for Penjing style sharp angle you should leave a longer stub, and that for a lesser angle cut as flush to the new bud as possible. I think that is something I may try once I start working on my elm.

 

[Forsoothe!]

I was watching one of the Yatsubusa elm streams in Mirai and Ryan touched up a little bit on clip and grow. He said that the angle of the new shoot depends on how long you leave the stub before the bud you want to elongate. That for Penjing style sharp angle you should leave a longer stub, and that for a lesser angle cut as flush to the new bud as possible. I think that is something I may try once I start working on my elm.

I remain dubious.

 

[Agriff]

Annealed copper wire blisters my fingers, and you can't do it wearing gloves.

Wait, what!? This is news to me- I've never used copper before. What causes the blistering?

 

[Forsoothe!]

Wait, what!? This is news to me- I've never used copper before. What causes the blistering?

Reaching into the fire to grab the spools...

 

[Agriff]

Reaching into the fire to grab the spools...

Ohhh- duh! For some reason I was trying to imagine how wrapping the wire around a trunk could cause blisters. Do most people anneal themselves or is it more common to just buy annealed? Hard for me to get a sense of the cost savings involved.

And sorry for veering even further off topic but does anyone have any good resources for doing this?

 

[Paradox]

Ohhh- duh! For some reason I was trying to imagine how wrapping the wire around a trunk could cause blisters. Do most people anneal themselves or is it more common to just buy annealed? Hard for me to get a sense of the cost savings involved.

And sorry for veering even further off topic but does anyone have any good resources for doing this?

Not really worth doing it yourself. Good anneled copper isn't hard to get. I anneled my own once and it really didn't save me any money and was time consuming

Forsoothe is being sarcastic. The person that gets blisters might be allergic or something

 

[Agriff]

Forsoothe is being sarcastic. The person that gets blisters might be allergic or something

Hahahahaha I really need to stop browsing this forum while amped up on my morning coffee. Internet sarcasm flies right over my head

Thanks for the insight re: annealing though!

 

[Leo in N E Illinois]

Just as some people can not wear copper or silver jewelry, some people do get an allergic reaction to handling annealed copper wire. The wire has a coating of copper oxides, and they flake off in fine particles as you wind the wire around the tree.

@Owen Reich - did a very nice summary of the history of wire use versus clip and grow.

 

[Agriff]

When I talk about clip and grow I don’t just mean “directional pruning”. I’m talking about lingnan school aesthetics. Branches that move up and down, not just horizontal. As zhao calls them “elk antlers” and “crab legs”.

Yes! This is partly what inspired me to start this thread. I'd love to see more of those trees

 

[Agriff]

What was sacrificed with detail wiring in my opinion was the soul in many bonsais’ designs. When precision and super detail overtook the appreciation of inherent beauty due to planned or left imperfections, something changed.... Every branch is different and interacts with it‘s surroundings.

Beautiful description here. Funny to think how a lot of us were inspired by Mr. Miyagi. Well, a man in his 80's in 1984 probably would have been more accustomed to this school of thought, no?

Although in The Karate Kid his advice to Daniel is "close your eyes and think of a tree. Now open your eyes and cut it so that it looks like that tree"

 

[leatherback]

And sorry for veering even further off topic but does anyone have any good resources for doing this?

Not in this thread. This thread is about clip and grow techniques

 

[TinyArt]

Just as some people can not wear copper or silver jewelry, some people do get an allergic reaction to handling annealed copper wire. The wire has a coating of copper oxides, and they flake off in fine particles as you wind the wire around the tree.

There may be hope, @Michael P -- I recalled that some copper wire is coated or tinned, depending on industrial purpose. Did a quick search -- nickel is often used, and I'm guessing might last through after-market annealing. Many people react to nickel -- I definitely do -- so I'd order "bare" or "pure" copper.

Not in this thread. This thread is about clip and grow techniques

Well, I'll throw in the kitchen sink, and then shut up (especially because I really like this thread!) -- any edition of Tim McCreight's The Complete Metalsmith.

 

[badatusernames]

This tread has made me bold enough to speak heresy:

I hate wire.

I hate putting it on. Annealed copper wire blisters my fingers, and you can't do it wearing gloves. I hate the way trees look with wire on them. I hate watching the stuff every day to prevent it from biting in and scarring branches. I hate when I forget for a few days and it disfigures a branch anyway. I hate taking the stuff off. I hate the waste of a semi-precious metal, copper.

There. Burn me at the digital stake if you wish.

I can absolutely see this. I think if I were more into junipers I might feel this way too but I really enjoy zoning out and wiring. I'm interested to see how that changes over time, as I could certainly see it becoming a chore, but even detail wiring is kind of like "well I'm here anyways, let's tweak it to what i think is perfect".

I'm glad for this thread, I want to pay more attention to clip and grow vs. wiring techniques to be more aware of how it changes trees. This thread has answered a question I had about a bald cypress I saw though, I was trying to bend the branches on mine this year based on something I saw earlier and I am almost positive that I have been erroneously trying to create the feel of a clip and grow technique to create dramatic angled branching.

 

[SU2]

Other folks who eschew wiring as a method and rely soley on clip and grow tend to attract controversy, like Nigel Saunders

And Nigel's trees - ***IMO*** - are WAYYYYYYY inferior to his passion, the time & effort he's put in, etc....I don't like to disparage & know this is an ugly thing to say but I've virtually given up on ever watching his vids because of crap like 1" trunked ficus benji's and other things that simply don't make sense as bonsai yet he's already doing clip&grow (despite the absence of any real skeleton/structure in the tree yet IE the thing still just needs grow-out yet he's working Refinement...)

Clip&Grow, as I understand it, means a doing prune jobs that are "reduction cuts" IE cutting-back to a fork/union/node, and "directing the growth over time"....the time required to do this well would automatically limit a FULL-TIME artist to a seriously low # of specimen...

BUT what of W.Pall's "hedge pruning" method? Silhouette/hedge prune approaches -- IMO -- achieve comparable results to clip&grow, only - because they're allowing far more growth-per-year - they achieve the results quicker. Sure, you've grown-out a bush, not a well-defined tree structure, but then you simply go do your "clipping" to make it the shape you want, the "growing" part is already done. Nevermind that this lets you treat/work many dozens, even over 100, specimen in your nursery!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

This seems as good a spot as any to propose/explain a method I do or "created", I'm gonna go and call it "Bend & Grow", basically on some of my specimen that I WOULD have done clip&grow (yes I do have a handful that are/were done this way), instead of doing the clip to direct growth, I'd simply wire or guy-wire the limb/branch/twig at the spot I would've clipped/cut it. Due to the apical / tip-growth nature of trees, if you bring a stem's growing tip below horizontal, you get to keep all those resources, all the solar panels of the leaves, AND the tree responds by budding at the first node before the downward bend as-if you'd simply cut it at the bend!!!"
Obviously this isn't something unknown (that bending below horizontal causes hormonal reactions where the tree "chooses a new apical tip for that branch now"), but using it instead-of simply cutting lets you keep so much more tissue/mass/solar-panels on that limb that it greatly exaggerates growth of that limb (and when, 1-2yrs later you actually do go in and do some hard-prunes, you have absurd/significant taper from union to union