A Lucky Find

sweetgum_master

Hi all,
I'm probably the luckiest guy I know I found 2 black jack oaks 1 that 50+ if not 100+ years old and has 23" of bark and is a clump style it looks like a mugho pine it has been dwarfed for one reason or another the other is either 4 trees or 1 tree with 1 trunk having about 1/2" fissures in the base of the trunk and 66" of bark and it is also dwarfed and I permission to collect(it is about 200-250 years old). I will post more on the day of collecting these trees.

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Mcspeed

What do you mean it has 23" of bark or 66" of bark?

An oak that looks like a mugho? Must be a diciduofer - sorry joke from another thread.

!/2" fissures what are these, hope not borer holes??

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sweetgum_master

the bark goes 23" up tunk on the smaller tree and 66" on the bigger one and the big tree has fissured bark that is about 1/2" deep. the big tree has fire ants at the base I'm sure if the other one does or not. After further inspection the big tree was cut down many years ago and it is problably closer to the 400-500 year old range!!! Also the big tree has a small trunk size of about 3-5 inches the younger tree has a base of about 3-6 inches.

Attached Images

	bark1.jpg (57.7 KB, 95 views)
	bark2.jpg (54.8 KB, 97 views)
	bark3.jpg (51.4 KB, 68 views)

rockm

Good luck getting those out alive You will not be able to take them all at once. If the tree is 500 years old, it will have a rangy deep root system with no feeders near the trunk.

sweetgum_master

yes I know the big tree might allready be dead do to age but we will see this spring when I start year 1 of 5 for the big one and 1 of 2 for the small one. Best part is these trees are both walking distance from my house :-D.

rockm

Have you kept blackjack in containers before? If not, I would get a few lesser ones to collect and experiment on before you attempt to collect the larger ones. Blackjack leaves are pretty large and growth is coarse. THey may not take to hard pruning or even to container culture. Native US oaks can be quirky about some things. It's best to find out what this species will be quirky about BEFORE you dig the nicer trees. You mess up a 10 year old sapling, not a big deal. The boss ain't making many hundred year old specimen trees .

Five years is too long a time to collect a tree, by the way. Two or maybe three is optimum. Wait any longer than that and the roots you severed five years ago will be large enough to be worked all over again--at the risk of the tree.

I would also be very wary of collecting a "big" tree just because it is big and has nice bark. Those qualities are not the primary ones in making a bonsai. Ability to adapt to container culture and bonsai practices are higher on the list.

Big doesn't always equal "good." From the looks of it, the big one has very little taper in the area you're looking for and any new apex growth will take an extremely long time to develop enough to make it look "right."

I've been working with a large old (over 200--I've counted the rings at the chops site) collected live oak, dug 15 years ago in Texas. The trunk starts out at nine inches across, narrows naturally to two inches within two feet --which is highly unnusual for any old tree. In any case, the remaining foot of new leader beyond where the initial trunk chop was made is only now starting to look presentable. It's taken longer than a decade to develop a leader that's basically an inch and a half in diameter to match the underlying trunk--and the bark on the new leader will NEVER quite match up with the flaky old bark beneath it--good thing its a live oak and the leaves hide things.

If your tree is three to five inches in diameter at the intended chop site has all that deep fissured bark, well, you do the math...

rockm

"clump style it looks like a mugho pine it has been dwarfed for one reason or another the other"

THis could mean the top shoots all share the same root system--from a previously cut down tree, which could mean a very very VERY arduous dig. It could mean the original tree's roots are still operational all the way around and underneath. How big across is the clump? THat could tell you how big a stump you're about to confront.

sweetgum_master

what do you mean by across if you mean the width it is about 5-7 feet wide and less than 6 feet tall except for the largest trunk which is about 6-9 feet tall.
the really old tree is 4 trunks but i'm only keeping 1 because of the placement
that one is 10-15 feet tall and the actual width is about 3-4 feet. about growing these in containers they do great in lava rock and bark collected a 4 year old last spring the nebari is all but perfect also collect a 15-20 this fall and another that is 10-15 years with live growth about 3-4 years that one has about 20-40 maybe more buds to the inch it ended up growing sideways.

rockm

I mean how far apart are the bottoms of the trunks? Are they arranged in a more or less circular pattern, or growing along the same line? If they are, it probably means they are shoots from a much older tree that was cut down and resprouted from the stump, or possibly root shoots from another tree nearby. The trees could be sharing the same root mass, which means you may not be able to pick and choose which ones you can dig effectively. I've seen trees like this that have no roots directly under them, but are growing from roots on a separate portion of the older trunk, or from the main root of a neighboring tree. It is a frustrating thing as feeder roots are never near the trunks on these.

It's good that you've begun keeping smaller specimens. However, I would not take a year as evidence they do well or take to bonsai treatment. Several years of applying bonsai pruning techniques and care are usually necessary to tell if a certain species will work. THere is very little information out there on the vast majority of US native trees as bonsai. It's alot of trial and error.

By the way, height of the trees in the ground isn't really important. You are concerned about only the first three feet of the trunk, anything beyond that is kind of irrelevant as it will be removed.