Kudzu penjing idea!

zen

Hi you guys, just had an idea ,a landscape covered with kudzu! Here in GA in the south eastern U.S. errosion "specialists" brought the vine over from China in 1876,...and something like 7 million acres are now covered with it. I wonder if there is a miniaturized version with smaller leaves and a bit slower growing,...big shallow pot with some tree-like structures and some hills for the vine to grow over.Thought it may be cool,...leme know what you guys think about this crazy idea.

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Jerry Meislik

Ficus pumila/repens is a crawling vine that will cover rocks, trees, brick walls whatever.
Jerry

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bonsaikc

'Nuff said.

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rockm

Kudzu itself is "unbonsaiable" since it is a vine that makes little, if any, woody stems or trunks. It's leaves are enormous and it's growth habits agressive. To work with this plant in a container would require a pretty huge pot, one that would have to be measured in feet (and would cost a pretty penny)..

The creeping ficus that Jerry mentions is probably the way to go if you want to recreate the boring, monotonous leaf draped vague shapes that are typical in a kudzu infected area in a container.

Ralph

Here is an informative link to the Plant that Jerry mentioned:

http://images.google.com/imgres?img...2004-04,GGLD:en

If you are going to use this in a landscape penjing, and have other plantings it still may be tough to get everything into scale.

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Newt

I am working on something similar but I don't have any pictures right now. I started with a dead chinese elm, many ivy vines and some green stretchy garden tape. Ran the ivy vines up the trunk, out the branches and tied the vines and trunk together. This was last year. By this year the roots of the elm had rotted and the whole thing was flopping around (good thing the ivy is tough). I just re-potted using a rock to support the trunk. I'll try to get a picture this weekend. I have just cut everything back hard so no hanging vines or draping effect right now.

Newt

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rockm

I guess I'd be concerned about draping vines on my trees. Vines shade out sunlight and kill trees. Vines baaad...

bonsaial1

I wonder just how much light a dead elm needs?....humm..

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ozzerbon

G'day Zen,

As a matter of fact I've been training [for several years] a Ficus pumila to do just that, and if you'd like me to send you some pics [4] that I've picked up from the web, please send me a private message.

The pics that I have show that the F.pumila can be trained into quite a nice little substantial tree.

Success to you,

Nigel

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