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Timing is the key to all pine bonsai - once you understand the tree and your gardens climate most methods are easy and give the expected results. Dont follow a book without thinking - if it was written by or for Americans the advice will be timed wrong, much the same as japan - while their timing is close to us their climate, temperatures, humidity and growing season are all quite different to Cornwall.
As I'm writing this in winter we'll start with the winter techniques, and to make it relevant we'll use a tree that has not had any prior special preparation. It is a lovely old black pine, imported to the Uk from Japan quite a few years ago and it stands about 26" tall with an 7-8" wide trink base.
From the picture you can look closely and see areas with lots of long needles, some areas of much smaller shoots and needles and then areas that fall between the two. It is essential to identifty these areas on your own tree as they are the zones - 1) Strong, 2)Medium 3) Weak. When we go into greater levels of detail you can be even more accurate and define 4 or even more zones, but for now 3 zones is fine.
November/December/January
Task 1 - Needle plucking & reduction
November - your tree may have needles on every branch going back 2 or even 3 years - pluck off all the needles from previous years that are in the strong and medium areas. Leave all this years needles on the tree along with all needles in the weak zones. This is a one off job on a newly worked tree as from now on only a few old needles will remain in place in years to come.
All the needles that have sprouted from this years buds are still on the tree so we need to pluck some out so the energy in the tree is spead out evenly rather than concentrated in the strong zone 1. We will start at the bottom of the shoot and work towards the tip pulling out needles either by hand, with tweezers or by cutting them off near the base. I have cut needles off before leaving a short stub and I have pulled them out with tweezers. Neither method has produced more, or less, buds so use whichever method you feel most comfortable with. This year I will pluck with pine tweezers so I have very neat shoots for wiring.
In the strong zone 1.....leave 4 PAIRS of needles on the branch tips - so 8 actual needles
In the medium zone 2.....leave 7 or 8 pairs of needles on each shoot
In the weak zone 3.....leave all the needles on the shoot, pull none off
This technique lets light and air into the inner tree, it also limits photosythesis on the very strong shoots so the weaker areas can become stronger. When pulling needles remove the sheath at the base too, working neatly is a good habit to get into.
November/december/January
Task 2 - wiring and pruning
Now the needles are mostly off and the shoots are bare to nearly the tips we can wire neatly. We'll use copper wire as it has far greater holding power for a lower diameter and also 'work hardens'. This means the wire gets even stiffer once it is wound on, doing an even better job of holding the branches in place. The entire tree will be wired to form the neat pads but more importantly to expose the bare branches to sunlight. This, plus the fact the wire restricts the sap flow will make new buds form on the bare wood between the coils of wire. One final trick I read recently was to scrub the tops of the wired branches with a very stiff plastic tooth brush - this further increases chances of new buds on the bare wood, so we'll try it and see what happens.
A black pine will respond to hard pruning by 'back budding' (unlike a white pine). Early winter down here is a good time to hard prune unneccessary growth in the strong zones and this will direct energy back into the tree while making new buds form back along the older bare branches. After a year with hard styling and pruning it is best to let the tree recover and resume strong growth before hard pruning again.
Winter storage
We will not get cold enough to harm the tree here so no excessive protection from the cold is needed. No fleece, greenhouse protection or bringing the tree indoors is neccessary. What you must protect from is excesive rain though. Using a well sieved very free draining soil is essential and even protecting the soil with a cover so the rain runs off can work well if we get days on end of rain. As you develop the tree it will become nice and dense so very little rain reaches the pot anyway.
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