Bonsai Of Major Oak, Sherwood Forest

JohnPalmer

Hello Folks,
First let me say I know nothing about Bonsai. But I am growing a small wood of 300 Quercus robur oak, all offspring of the most famous oak tree in the world, called the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest (hidden in by Robin Hood). I run a website about this tree:
www.eyemead.com/majoroak.htm
and the planting of my oakwood:
www.eyemead.com/oakwood.htm
A reader contacted me to know if it was possible to bonsai one of my oaks. I searched Google on "Bonsai,oak" and came up with Mindori Bonsai Club and John Thompson (your president?)

Can someone advise me on the problems of Bonsaiing oaks, how to begin, is it possible to create cavities in the Bonsai (the Major oak has a huge cavity). I can start with a small quercus robur in a 10 litre pot

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Best wishes,

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John Palmer, Dorset, England

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Ian_Homer

Hello John,

Firstly welcome to the world of Bonsai and this forum.

Well, where to begin.

Firstly, I would forget any pot-bound specimen. Carefully (during the growing season) feed with weak fertilisers a selected few of your seedlings in the ground. They will develop girth much quicker in the open. This will give you a couple of years to read up and see all the other replys on this forum before advancing onto stage 2. If you wish to keep an eye on them - it is obviously best to find some space in your own garden. (Growing bed)

Stage 2 is when you can select 2 or 3 of the potential bonsai's for further refinement. To achive a bonsai of such stature as the parent oak deserves will be a 20-30 year process, so be prepared for a long drawn out love-affair !

You will have plenty of other advice in due course.

Best regards,
Ian

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Ian_Homer

John,

The link to your wood details will not work- is this correct ?
However the photographs on the Major Oak itself are very interesting.

If the saplings are in a 10 litre pot - I guess they may already be of a decent size, but they will need to be close to hand in your garden if possible to enable you to work on them.

If you are by the Oak shortly, pop into Greenwood Gardens. the home of Harry Tomlinson, who will have plenty of trees for you to look at and will offer advice. He is a widely travelled bonsai expert and author of several books. see www.bonsai.co.uk

Meantime, the basic early needs are to keep well fed during the summer and to select the ones that have a good selection of low down branches that can be used in early development. You will get a better feel by looking at the many pictures held in the gallery section of this forum. This ultimately will depend on the finished size of your intended bonsai - but lets say you intend it to be 30 inches - the first branch should end up being a third up (general rule only) so at present you need to pick one with an interesting branch about 6-8 inches above ground. As the tree grows, this branch level will naturally become higher anyway.

It is then a case of feeding, trimming and then digging up - trimming the roots and re-planting every couple of years to help reduce down the size of the leaves, while at the same time building up as realistic a looking branch structure as possible. Then you could "style" it which is where the crossover of horticultural needs become linked to your artistic talents.
Eventually, on one of the dig ups you will be able to transplant into an oversized pot and then gradually reduce down the roots and pot size more as time goes on.

As I said in my first post - a lot to take in really - but do the basics for now and enjoy collecting in all the data you will need to progress

Ian.

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Ian_Homer

John,
sorted now - "eyemead" and not wyemead (typo) is all that was needed. Very good site.

Good luck in spreading a little bit of Nottingham down in Dorset !

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TreeBay

The best oaks I have seen as bonsai have been collected. They have a character of bark it takes decades to accomplish, and the limbs have lots of twisting, bent shapes from having been browsed by deer and animals, burnt, chopped and crushed by falling wood, and basically abused for years.

I'm sure it's possible to make nice oaks from scratch with the investment of time, and dedication, but IMHO, they'd fall well short of what you can obtain by (legally) collecting oaks from areas where they grow wild.

Regards,

Matt

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Ian_Homer

Matt,

I totally agree that collected material will probably give a better image in time - but John was asking about using his seedlings from a parent tree with over 1000 years of history.

I would certainly like to have a tree in my collection with such a parentage.
The first link in his opening post gives an interesting insight
in old photographs of this well known tree.

Best Regards,
Ian.

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JohnPalmer

Hello Ian and Treeboy,

Many thanks for your advice. I have 300 oaklings of the Major oak in Sherwood Forest. They were all acorns in Oct 2000. 142 are now planted out, the rest are in pots waiting to be planted out, or acting as "spares". There are about 70 spares, which are of less stature than the rest. You are welcome to a spare, but must collect it yourself from my Nursery in Dorset, England. Importing to USA is next to impossible because of phytosanitary laws. All my oaklings are exposed to sun and wind, have been allowed to adopt a natural shape, and all have a "flared" base caused by flexing in the wind. Those in pots are lying on the ground, and are watered quite often by hand. The pots are 10 litre size, so the oaklings probably won't know that they are not planted out!

Sorry about the typo in my URLs. They should have been:
www.eyemead.com/majoroak.htm
www.eyemead.com/oakwood.htm
As suggested, I will welcome further advice from the "greybeards " of the bonsai world, and also do some reading up on the subject.

Thanks again,

John

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John Palmer, Dorset, England

Treebeard

This seems like a good place to post these photos of the Major Oak.

On our recent family holiday to Northumberland we stopped off to see this famous tree, very impressive it was too.

I wonder if all the props are necessary though. Thousands of majestic old oaks survive without them. The shedding of old, large branches is par for the course with oaks.

Regards,

Chris.

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