June Candling

The last week in June tends to be prime time for candling Japanese black pines as well as other two needled pines (in the Kansas City area and environs). The reason we do this by the calendar is to prevent needles from getting too long.

Forget everything you have heard about breaking candles in spring, cutting them and leaving half, timing your candling by grouping them from strongest to weakest, etc. We cut all but the weakest ones all at once, and then pull needles to further regulate energy in the tree. The results are phenomenal. I'll be posting ongoing results of the trees I worked yesterday as they develop new buds, trying to share as much information as possible.


Here John Kirby is working on a phenomenal old twin-trunk Japanese black pine he brought with him. He believes it is two trees planted together years ago, as the shorter of the two is much more vigorous than the taller. He will remove more needles on the more vigorous trunk to hold it back and allow the taller tree to catch up. This won't happen as quickly if they are two trees on their own roots as it would if they shared a root system. I'm looking forward to seeing the ultimate results of this tree.


Tom Conley got the great opportunity to work on some of John's trees as well, and he expressed a lot of excitement at working on trees far better than what he has in his own collection. This is one of the real benefits of this kind of training. We only get better at chess by playing folks better than us, and we only see significant improvement in bonsai by working on trees better than ours (with proper instruction). Doing is a far better teacher than gleaning from others' writings.

This is a beautiful Japanese red pine in fantastic health that John brought. I candled this one but didn't pull needles because it is going to be shown this year.

Here's a nice silhouette of John working on his tree after getting almost finished. He's just pulling remaining extra needles from the smaller tree.


Here's a selection of my trees that got worked on yesterday. (No work was done on the shimpaku or the Colorado blue spruce).