Lonicera/Honeysuckle Bonsai

Hi. So this week I thought I'd, uh, Show everyone one of my favorite bonsai at the moment. It's a Lonicera nitida, and the variety is Agassiz Gold. Now, the ordinary Lonicera nitida has a darker green leaf, and that is preferential to this, this variety, which has more of a golden color. So this particular tree was collected from garden only 6 years ago. And it's developed really, really rapidly. Collecting these trees and finding them in gardens in the UK is very, very easy. They're a very commonplace garden and hedging shrub, and they take very easily with barely any root. In fact, you can take quite large cuttings of Lonicera nitida or the shrubbing on itself. Now, if I take you through the story of the tree and its development, Since 2016. You can see that the main attraction with this tree is the roots and the deadwood. There are live veins running up around the deadwood that are supporting the, the live foliage, and the density of this foliage has spread and been grown out over the past 6 years. The deadwood itself, carved like that, it's some extra grain to the woods just to give it a bit more of a flow. And I was lucky enough to have some spiraling deadwood, naturally spiraling deadwood on there, and I could accentuate that with carving. One of the important things I have had to do is to use cyanoacrylates just to harden all the deadwood as much as possible because Lonicera nitida has quite a Softwood generally, and it does need protecting after a number of years. The pot was made by Victor Harris for Alan Pottery, a superb potter, and it really picks up on the flow and the movement of the tree. I hope you've enjoyed watching and visiting my garden again on a Saturday morning. If you'd like to catch my videos as they come out, please hit the subscribe button, and we'll see you next week.