You know it’s time to repot when the roots have pushed a tree (or in this case, a small Taiwanese maple forest) up and out of its pot but when the pot cracks, there is no more procrastinating!
But finding a suitable vessel is more tricky; this forest had very specific needs- a beautiful, shallow, 20cm tray which proved hard to find. The internet was scanned, nurseries were visited but nothing was ‘just right’- too deep, too big or too ugly. But needs must, so a less than desirable pot was purchased and the plan was to use it with the compensation that it would be any easy repot.
However, when searching through boxes of pots for something suitable for a black pine, there at the bottom of the box, forgotten and hiding in bubble wrap was the perfect container- a beautiful and unusual Tony Remington pot bought for Bonsai Island (bonsai island.net) nearly a decade ago.
But now things weren’t so simple. This was a trickier repot as a lot more roots would need to be removed so it was undertaken in a workshop with Hugh Grant (treemakers.com.au).
While trying to loosen the forest, the pot broke in half saving time and revealing the long twisting roots and dense root mass that had cracked it.
A root hook and a fair amount of brute force was needed to entangle the matted base which was cut off in stages. Once this was done, a bamboo chopstick was used to tease out the bottom and sides of the root mass and remove any remaining field soil.
Four weeks later, most of the trees have the trees burst into lush spring growth but some of the ones on the outside of the group (and most brutalised) are a little slower.
