Bonsai Riddles: Fertilize Your Brain

Hookeroak

Just havin' some fun. If anyone can think of some others, feel free to post.


1) After much deliberation, a master decides that he will perform a trunk chop on one of his trees. He makes a clean cut, puts some cut paste over the wound, and retires for the evening. The next day he goes out into his garden and finds that the tree is exactly as tall as it was before he performed the trunk chop. How can this be?


2) A young bonsai enthusiast has a tree that has never been exposed to sunlight, yet after many years, it is thriving beautifully. How is this possible?


3) It was a beautiful spring when the student decided to visit his beloved master. Several days later he arrived at his master’s house where he immediately asked for a tour of the garden. To his astonishment, all of his master’s tree’s were leafless and looked as if they were dying, and here it was already late spring. The student was bewildered how his master could have let all of his beautiful trees fall into such a poor state of health. The master, however, assured him that all of the trees were perfectly healthy and thriving. How can this be?


4) There is a tree whose needles are older than it’s branches, whose branches are older than it's trunk, and whose trunk is older than it’s nebari and roots. How is this possible?


Stumped?
Regards, Scott.

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Will_Heath

1) he wired up a new apex.

2) it's growing under artificial lights

3) defoliation

4) have to leave one for the next person....

washout03

I believe number 4 is the result of many diferent grafting techniques.

jloeschner

1. He performs the trunk chop on a cascaded tree.

2. Artificial lights.

3. Defoliation.

4. Air-layering and grafting...or a cutting.

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Treebeard

1. chopped one trunk of a twin trunk tree

2. Grow lights.

3. Defoliation

4. Grafting

Regards,

Chris.

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Alasdair

1)yeah, the twin-trunk sounds good.
2)again, growing lights
3)defoliation, or maybe he moved them in from a different climate, where it was winter?
4)i dont have a clue. surely air layering or cuttings achieve the trunk as oldest, then branches, needle and finally roots?

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I can feel another "I wish that was my tree" moment coming on...
Currently studying BSc Plant Biology at the Universty of Wales, Aberystwyth

ALDEVAUX

1)-Somebody put another tree of the same height and same species while he was retirering.
2)-It was growing in artificial light.
3)-The trees had just been removed from a dark winter shed.
4)-It is an evergreen tree (junperus ?) that was grafted on a short stump with a good nebari.

cbobgo

3) maybe the master lives in the southern hemisphere but the student lives in the North, so it's actually not spring its fall!

- bob

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pootsie

1) It was a cascade.
2-4) yeah, what they said.

pootsie

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