White Pine Pre Bonsai Maybe

[Jim G]

Looking for recommendations on cutting back the height or any other ideas? When do/should I remove the candles?

 

[0soyoung]

That looks to be a p. strobus, maybe. It certainly isn't a p. parviflora (aka p. pentaphyla, Japanese white pine).

P. parviflora, is the model of what can be done to any pine:

• break candles as needles just begin to emerge for balance over the whole tree (don't touch the smallest and break the others to roughly match them).
• prune back to 3 to 5 rows of needle bundles (fascicles) after the new foliage has hardened
  • p. parviflora, specifically. drops needle sheaths
  • all other pines are judged by new needles are now dark green and don't come loose with a gentle tug
• following season you select buds so there is no more than two at each branch tip.

With p. strobus, you can knock off all the soft terminal buds about the time you see the beginnings of needles - for me it is sometime in the next two weeks. This should produce some fascicular buds that you will see before fall. In fall or early next spring you can cut back to these buds and in this way keep the foliage from running away from the trunk. If it is indeed a p. strobus, that is.

If you don't know, treat it like 'every pine' until you know for sure what you've got. Branches are largely autonomous, which means what you do to one branch generally has no effect on the others. This means you can experiment on different branches to see how they are affected by different treatments (but, maybe that is for another day).

 

[M. Frary]

Looking for recommendations on cutting back the height

Looks like EWP.
I cut them off at the dirt.

 

[Giga]

plant it in the garden and forget about it

 

[augustine]

Find yourself a pre-bonsai Scots pine (which is more cold hardy than JBP). This species is tough for bonsai. People may tell you differently but P. Strobus does not have predictable responses to bonsai training techniques. (For instance if you cut summer candles on a JBP it will rebud if healthy. A well fed scots pine will backbud like crazy if cared for properly.)

If you are bound and determined to train this tree put it in full sun and feed. Wire it up, bend and put it in the ground at whatever the proper time is in MI.

 

[Leo in N E Illinois]

Eastern white pine, P strobus, is a frustrating species for bonsai. You will get a wide range of reactions to this question, some surprisingly emotional, the degree of emotion will be directly proportional to the number of years the poster tried to get P. strobus to become bonsai. In theory, they should be good bonsai, in practice, they are endlessly frustrating. I know, I have 3 right now, and off and on over the last 35+ years have had zero success creating acceptable bonsai with P. strobus. One tree I worked for 25 years before composting it. There are a small handful of ''good'' P. strobus bonsai, but they were collected trees, near a century old, very rare and very special. P. strobus is a very poor choice to learn bonsai with. It will frustrate you. If you collect an old, but still small specimen of P. strobus, you may have a better chance of success. It needs to be old enough it already has rough bark forming on the trunk, meaning most likely over 40 years old. Hard to find 40 year old trees that are still small enough they can be successfully collected.

Osoyoung, and a few others have select grafted cultivars of P. strobus that behave different, and much better for bonsai in that they tend to break buds more easily than the type form of the species. Some of these mostly dwarf cultivars may indeed become good bonsai, but most that are working on these cultivars have not had them long enough to be ready for the ''show circuit'', so basically they are too young to pass a conclusive verdict. The ''wild form'' of strobus will frustrate most but the most skilled of bonsai artists.

Your climate is mild enough, you should be able to grow Japanese black pine, Japanese white pine, Scots pine, and many many others, all are better choices. Japanese white pines are not the easiest pine to learn, Scots pine is probably your best choice. Mugo pines are also a good choice, but you need to follow a slightly different calendar than the old books recommend, read the thread ''all aboard the Mugo Train'' if you want to learn to do Mugo pines. There is also a resource page dedicated to mugo here on the BNUT site.

 

[ArtistWolf]

I want more pines.

 

[M. Frary]

I want more pines.

Don't go get one of these.

 

[Adair M]

I want more pines.

Me, too! Lol!!!

 

[0soyoung]

I want more pines.

Do you need to be supine to opine about what species of pine your are pining for?

Regrettably, I cannot carry on like an eTrade ad

 

[Jim G]

Thank you all for the feedback. Maybe I wont keep this eastern white pine in my collection after all. I will stick with my JBP.