Why I Oughta...

Last Fall, I planted a singular cypress conifer called Lemon Thread False Cypress in the backyard by the Hornbeam trees .  It has mostly just gotten along without much attention, so I decided to add something similar to the front yard - IB2DWs - Conifer Garden:  a Golden Mop False Cypress.  Chamaecyparis pisifera.  They're similar...but I'm learning they're different in some ways.  From Oregon State  University, I'm seeing that Golden Mop is a 'true dwarf' : ‘Golden Mop’ - it is a mutation of ‘Filifera Aurea’ and a true dwarf, to 1 m, with more intense yellow. I've planted in a full sun, so I'm sure hoping that we get some of that 'intense yellow' and based on what I'm reading (below) in Midwest Garden Tips, I think we have a winner with Golden Mop.  From MGT: The dramatic foliage of the ‘Golden Mop’ is bright yellow green with a feathery, almost stringy appearance. The glowing gold foliage creates a lovely accent to deeper green conifers....

With the hard gardening days on me in mid-January (and not being a seed catalog guy), I've turned to dreaming about trees, shrubs and grasses.  And that means that today, I'll post another 'tree dreaming' post to create a document/reference post for future use in my landscape/garden/backyard planning.  A few days back, I shared two deciduous columnar trees that I wanted to create reference posts about here on the blog: the Columnar Swedish Aspen and the Dakota Pinnacle Birch . Today, I'm posting about the Slender Hinoki Cypress .  I'm filing this under [ columnar trees ], but I suppose this is technically a 'narrow, upright form' and not necessarily columnar.  And...technically, this is a shrub, not a tree.  But...this is my garden diary, so I'm calling the shots. The Slender Hinoki Cypress is 'pyramidal form' that has new growth with  'ferny appearance'.  Love that. Via Monrovia : Description via this Monrovia listing .   ...

Back on May 7th of this year, I shared a couple of photos and talked about my initial excitement of giving the art of bonsai a shot with a piece of nursery stock that I picked up at Home Depot for $10 .  It is a Cypress Hinoki and had one large(ish) trunk that seemed to have decent trunk taper, very little reverse taper and priced so cheaply that if I killed the poor thing, I wouldn't be that upset. In that initial post, I talked about how I was following some of the Mirai Bonsai Basics video directions and started with the roots and trunk.  More recently, I moved on to the next few steps and began to try to prune the Cypress into a bonsai of sorts. I know that every article you read talks about how you aren't supposed to prune more than 30% of the tree at any one time and that pruning an evergreen like this Cypress is best done in the late fall when it the tree is heading to dormancy.  But, I couldn't, umm, help myself.  I dove right in. I began by prun...

With my past few trips to Japan for work, I've increasingly become interested in Japanese-style gardening and the art of bonsai.  I've been thinking about the large-scale conifers that I saw across Tokyo like this one and these pines in the outer gardens of the Imperial Palace  and thinking about how I can bring something like *that* to our yard as we grow our conifer collection. At the same time, my visit to the Morimae Bonsai Shop in Ginza along with subscribing to a few bonsai YouTube channels like Heron's Bonsai out of London  and Mirai Bonsai's Beginner Series has sparked my interest in the art of bonsai. This video that talks about nursery stock material selection from Mirai Bonsai pushed me to head to Home Depot to see if I could find something I could buy that was inexpensive to try my hand at shaping a small tree. My bonsai journey starts with this Cypress Hinoki that you see in the photo above.  Bought at Home Depot for $9.98, this Cypress is go...