每日吃瓜

Hi all,

I'm having some trouble with a very old Fuchsia tree. The tree was very neglected in a garden and was almost dying as of last year, so I decided to ask the owner of the garden to let me try to save it (it was in VERY bad shape at the time, I didn't have a lot of hope but I have had a lot of experience with this species so I decided to try anyway).

I collected it in October 2020 as from my experience it is the best time to collect this species in my climate, the roots where very mushy and it had few leaves, but I tried to retain as much of the roots and leaves as possible and was actually relieved that there where still some healthy looking roots. I planted it in a big container with well draining soil straight away and tended to it as well as I could (the first picture is from early November 2020, a few days after collection, you can see how little leaves the tree had when collected).

I managed to keep most of the leaves the tree had during the winter looking heathy and by early January I could see some good root development.

By early spring the tree started to flush in some areas and by now it has a lot of new growth(second picture is from now - May 2021), so the general health of the tree is not a worry, it is actually reacting very well.

My issue right now is that for the styling I was thinking of I would really like to use the fork at the top (main trunk splits into 3 heavy branches). I would like to cut the 3 main branches quite short and use the backbuding to start creating a structure from this point. This species normally backbuds heavily on old wood when a branch is chopped off, so where there is growth this is not a problem. But only 1 of the 3 branches has good growth on the edge of the branch, the other 2 basically only have the few leaves that where left from the previous year and they seem to be slowly loosing strength.

My question is, should I chop off the 2 branches that have less vigor?

If this was a normal tree (younger tree) I would just completely cut off all the branches at the same time as it would just have a big flush of growth everywhere after a couple of weeks, but this tree is so hollow along the trunk that I actually don't know if I have to treat it as 3 separate trees, or at least by looking at "live veins" because the wood is so roted. Even as such all the "live veins" have good growth on them (I let some suckers grow lower on the trunk just to be sure the tree survived).

Sorry for the long post, any help will be greatly appreciated!

Cool Fuchsia, how old is this beast?
Can't really give you advice on it how to style.
But if you decide to chop of branches, i would re-consider to do an airlayer, so you can make new tree's of it.
But for now i still think it is good to let it recover more first because it is still in it's first year after collectiong. Let it go for 2years. Would be a waste to crash this tree. Less viger can be automaticly solved when roots are more established and grown.
Does it backbud easy? Did you get any yet?
Can you make a picture with a tape messure in the picture? Can't really see how big this beast is without.

The owner of the garden has been there for about 40 years and he says it was there when he bought it, so 40y+ is all I can tell.

Normally airlayer is not needed, if the plant is healthy most choped branches can be put directly in good substrate and will create new roots in about 1 month, I've done this a lot, I have 4 other trees that came from cuttings of this one a few years ago.

I understand what you are saying, I'm just afraid the branches dieback if I just let it stay like this, but your probably right...

I've had quite a few, 4 from cuttings of this tree and some others from slightly different cultivars. It's a really vigorous and it backbuds really easily. And the leaf size is also quite easy to reduce. I'm surprised it is not used a lot more for bonsai actually.

I'll take another picture this week, but it's about 20-25cm wide on the base.

Thanks for getting back!