Old White Spruce

[RMJoe]

Here's a white spruce I picked up at a club this spring. It was collected in Maine over 20 years ago, and was very potbound.

I reported it that weekend, into pure pumice, and have fertilized the heck out of it this year.

It grew vigorously all spring and summer, and now it was healthy enough to style so I did some work. Aside from a couple whorl branches in the apex I didn't take too much foliage off. I wanted to wire up the lower weak branches, and thin out the apex which was overly vigorous in order to rebalance the strength of the tree. It should fill out nicely over the fall and next year.

Before styling:

After Styling:

 

[pandacular]

You've done an excellent job with it! I've heard spruce can be finicky with root work, did you do anything special in that regard?

Design wise, I wonder if bringing the daugter trunk back to the right, to echo the movement of the mother trunk would improve the consistency.

 

[RMJoe]

You've done an excellent job with it! I've heard spruce can be finicky with root work, did you do anything special in that regard?

Design wise, I wonder if bringing the daugter trunk back to the right, to echo the movement of the mother trunk would improve the consistency.

Thanks! I've heard the same, so while I was conservative as I could be, there was still a lot that came off. For old pot-bound trees I find there's always a lot of dead roots, so I just tried to only cut the dead ones after getting through the bulk of inseparable root mass. Actually, here is a photo of the rootball before adding soil. I tucked the long roots into the pot, hopefully next repot can be a bit more thorough.

For the design, I will probably bring it more to the right eventually, right now I want as much sun on the smaller trunk as possible, so I'm trying not to shade it out with the upper branches.