Harry Harrington transformed a 90-year-old hedge cutting into a bonsai over 13 years, working around a stone trapped in the trunk and extensive deadwood. The oval-leaf privet flowered by 2019, proving the species ideal for beginners because of its fast growth and responsiveness to pruning and wiring.
Chapters
In this week's video, I'm featuring a privet collected in 2009 from a hedge in West London by a good friend, Francis Chan. The tree formed part of a boundary hedge put in when the house was built 90 years ago. Note that with privet, the thickest part of the trunk is nearly always buried just below the soil surface. Having grown in London clay soil for 80 years, the tree was bare-rooted before being potted up, and all unnecessary branches were removed. Ligustrum ovifolium, oval-leaf privet, is a very common hedging plant here in the UK, and as bonsai are very robust and almost indestructible. Native to Japan and Korea, they are very fast growing and a great subject for people learning how to handle the development of bonsai for themselves. Over the past 13 years, the stump has been carved to hide wounds and to add interest to the trunk. New branches have been grown and wired into position over many growing seasons. If you look at the progression images of the tree, you can see how the tree slowly improved step by step and year on year. By 2019, the tree had even started flowering. The stunning pot was made for the tree by one of my favourite potters, Victor Harris of Aran Pottery. It has an area of distressed clay on the front panel that picks up on the cavity in the middle of the deadwood of the trunk. The deadwood itself has been heavily treated with cyanoacrylate or super glue to harden it. Privet wood is quite strong while live, but it can degrade in a short number of years after carving, so it's important to protect it. One point of interest with this tree is the stone that became trapped within the trunk of the tree in the years it was fastening up in the ground. The stone is still there, although after removal of a large amount of the surrounding wood, the stone now sits on the outside edge of the trunk. Privet root out well to total defoliation, and once the branch structure has been set, carry out defoliation at midsummer and during the winter to increase ramification. In summary, privet are a great species with which to learn bonsai, as there are Very fast-growing and responsive to bonsai techniques.
