Harry HarringtonArtist and Author, Bonsai4me · Author, Publisher, Webmaster, Bonsai Artist

Bonsai Artist Harry Harrington Interview / Hawthorn Bonsai

4 Sept 2020 · 4 min

Watch on YouTube

3:35

In this interview, bonsai artist Harry Harrington, joined by the Nobara Boys, walks through the detailed work he performed on a hawthorn (Crataegus) yamadori collected in Wales in 2008 for a client named Claude. He explains how the tree arrived with an extensive, tubular root (a "big foot") that needed to be shortened for potting while preserving the underlying live root system and sap flow. Harrington describes his method of cutting off the top of the root, leaving the buried sap streams intact, and how the remaining root will gradually be reduced as secondary roots develop. He then addresses a pronounced inverse taper in the trunk, which he corrects by splitting the trunk and adding ornamental carving to create the appearance of two upper trunks and a distressed, dying-back look. Harrington also discusses a crossing branch that, while technically a flaw, adds character to the yamadori and should be retained to preserve the tree’s natural story. Throughout, he emphasizes the yamadori philosophy of working with the material’s inherent imperfections rather than seeking sterile, field‑grown perfection.

Chapters

Hi, I'm Harry Harrington and I have the Nobara Boys here in my garden. We're just having a look at the hawthorn that I've just worked on for Claude. It's a tree that he's brought to me, absolutely beautiful Yamadori collected in Wales in 2008, and we needed to sort of do a little surgery on the tree and some carving. One of the biggest problems with this tree was the big foot that the tree had been collected with. This is just an extended root that may have traveled up a hillside for a few meters. Now, to get the tree into the pot, it's been shortened off in time. It still looked too elongated for the rest of the tree. What I've done here is I've taken the top of the root off At the ends, but all the material and the sap streams underneath the root are still completely intact. They're just buried beneath the soil surface. Now, if you know what you're doing, this is a relatively straightforward job and something I've done many times with hawthorn and any, any trees that have big tubular roots. And you can just take the top half off, carve it out. And if We look underneath, underneath here, you can see the actual root system is still intact, and this is just ornate decorative deadwood. If you look at the back of the tree, spin this round, you see where I've actually kept the back half of the root completely intact, and that'll be reduced and removed in time as the tree becomes accustomed to using These secondary roots that emerge further up. That said, given the visual weight of the top half of the tree, we need something of a base and can't reduce it all the way back. So one of the other problems with the hawthorn, if you look at the tree straight on and then compare it with how the tree was before I started working, There's quite a large section of inverse taper here. This can be difficult to, to rectify. There's little possibility of taking the edges off because there's branches, living branches growing off those edges. So what I decided to do was to split the middle of the trunk, and being able to see through the trunk makes it look as though it's 2 heavy upper trunks become branches. And just putting in some ornate carving to make it look as though it's distressed and it's dying back over the years. So one of the comments that I've heard about this tree is this branch that crosses over the trunks to the right-hand side. Strictly speaking, this is wrong. You shouldn't have branches that are crossing, strictly speaking. But this is a feature, it's an anomaly, and it's something that actually gives this tree character in itself. And to remove it, as well as losing foliage on the right-hand side, you'd lose that natural character that you get from Yamadori. If you want something that's very, very sterile with no faults at all, you need to be looking at field-grown material. Yamadori, you take what and make the best of what you're given.