I couldn’t script this post if I tried. A couple weeks back I stumbled across an ad for selling a large flowering shrub. With little to go by I made the journey and, as luck would have it, I scored a large +-20yr Azalea that had been removed from a garden 2yrs back.

The owner wanted to keep the plastic tub that it was in, so I removed it and bagged it up and brought it back to the garden.

Now, you are met with some choices: (ask yourself what you would have done here.)

1) Put it back in a tub and add some extra potting mix and call it good.

2) Take the opportunity to explore the soil system and repot it into a training pot/ container. Then call it good.

3) Repot the tree and make the hard cuts. Saying goodbye to all those pretty flowers.

Don’t get too caught up in the choices, but some things that should influence your decision.

1) what did the root ball look like?

2) what season are we in?

3) what species are we dealing with?

4) what is the overall health of the tree?

The irony of me referencing the azalea, which is a shrub, to a tree, given a previous blog post, is not lost on me – it’s just easier for writing!

Anyway back to it! So looking at the photos: you’ve probably guessed it. I went with option 3. Now hear me out here. The Azalea had recovered well post collection, with a decent root ball, but the branch structure, as you can imagine, of an ordinary garden shrub was terrible – unusable for the creation of a quality bonsai. Straight, no taper and poorly positioned.

Understanding energy and the step down effect, the time to make these hard cuts diminishes the further down the bonsai road. Absolute optimal time would have been straight after being dug out of the garden, this was out of my control. The next best time would have been a couple weeks just before flowering, again the timing out of my control. So the next best opportunity for me, was now.

This is where you have to make the hard calls. It is hard to remove old branches, let alone ones covered in beautiful flowers but failing in doing so will only kick the problem down the road, which may or may not ever be resolved.

My decision has given the Azalea a chance at becoming a quality tree.

What’s next?

Time to just recover and grow.

I’ll end with this…will you be looking at your bonsai 20 years down the track going: I wish I made that cut back then…