Sleeping Beauty Restoration of an old juniper

Chinese junipers are busy trees - they need constant attention during the growing season, almost daily pinching of the growing tips, to prevent them from "ballooning" as all the dense shoots extend in unison. Every year the thicker extension shoots must be cut back hard, thus thinning the foliage and allowing light and air to penetrate, inducing fresh growth from the inner branches, which eventually replaces old and clumsy outer areas. Then every four or five years the branches within the clouds of foliage will need to be drastically thinned by cutting out old and congested branchlets. New ones that have been induced by hard pruning the extension shoots during previous seasons are wired into position as replacements. Sometimes even major branches will need to be wired and rewired with frightening regularity to combat this species' stubbornness. If there are jins and sharis, these will need treating with lime sulphur at least once a year, preferably twice, but only after a thorough cleaning with a stiff brush. And, of course, there's the repotting. Following the standard advice on repotting is all well and good for a while, but there comes a time when the soil in the centre of the root ball becomes old, stale and hard. Fine roots within this inhospitable area die. Even some thicker roots may die if the problem is serious. So this old soil has to be replaced by new. All these tasks I have mentioned are not optional - they are obligatory if the tree is to remain in pristine condition and form. Maybe you can miss a year or so here and there with the odd bit of pinching or pruning without noticing too much deterioration in either the tree's health or appearance. But just because you don't notice it, it doesn't mean it's not happening. It creeps up on you slowly. The more trees you add to your collection, the less attention each one gets. Imagine, then, what could happen to a specimen juniper over a period of thirty years in a nursery where, inevitably, no-one ever has enough time to do all maintenance that an individual private collector would. This shimpaku juniper was imported from Japan over thirty years ago by Bromage & Young, and for many years it was a regular feature of their displays at the Chelsea Flower Show. By the time it came to me for refurbishment in late summer 1997, it had deteriorated considerably. When it was in its prime it certainly didn't look like this. All the branches have been allowed to grow far too long, especially the lower ones. There is evidence of several newish jins which indicated that branches had been removed in the fairly recent past. Inner growth was non-existent, and the foliage itself was grey and lacked vigour.

"These tasks are not optional... they are obligatory if the tree is to remain in pristine condition and form"

Originally this juniper was styled as an informal upright, but time has taken its toll. Now, an image of a much older tree has emerged in the form of a neo-literati

My first decision was to put the tree in the conservatory to keep it growing for as long as I could - all winter if possible. Carefully controlled watering and feeding for the next few months paid off. By January this year, the juniper was bright green and much more lively - ready for my work to begin. Before starting any major work on a tree that has clearly been suffering, it is important to understand a little about the trees history. Branches began dying off around fifteen years ago for no obvious reason. Every few years another branch would go. In fact there was still one branch with just one solitary tuft of dead but still-green foliage at it's tip - this year's casualty. There was no obvious reason for branches dying, but there is always a reason somewhere. The clue was in the sharis that had also developed during the last fifteen years or so. These ran from the jins which were the remains of branches that had died, right to the roots. The placement of the remaining live branches was such that they would have kept the bark below dead branches active, so the sharis were not caused by dying branches. On the contrary, the branches must have died because living tissue beneath them had died, which indicated a problem with the roots. I noticed substantial areas of lichen growing on the soil around the base of the trunk - the sort that takes many years to establish. I became suspicious, so I scratched away at the surface and was really quite disturbed by what I found. The soil in the central core of the root ball was very, very old. It was hard and bone dry, even though I had taken great pains to wet it every time I watered the tree for the past three months. This block of hard old soil radiated for seven or eight inches all around the trunk. There was a three-inch ring of fresher soil around this - that's all. Previous repottings had consisted of merely teasing away the outer edge of the root ball and planting the tree ever-higher in the pot. Totally inadequate. It was clear that unless all this old soil was totally replaced soon, more branches would die and whatever work I did on the tree would be wasted. There was another problem. The sharis has rotted, and the wood just fell away in flakes. Even accepting that they had never been properly treated, they shouldn't have decayed quite so rapidly unless the heartwood had been dead for some time before the bark had died - another indication that the root problem was an old one. I devised my strategy. Remember that the tree had been kept in my conservatory so, even though it was now the middle of January, it was still growing, so I could begin work straight away. Then it could be allowed to recover - still in the conservatory - before repotting in late March. I needed to retain as much foliage as possible to maintain vigour, so I resolved not to trim each tuft of foliage to a flat "fan" as I would with a stronger tree. Instead, I would retain the domed shapes but position them in such a way that the worked together to form fuller "clouds". This juniper has now been repotted into a deeper round container with all fresh soil and is back in the owner's nursery, growing strongly.

Old junipers have round "pom-poms" of foliage which mustbe thinned and wired into overlapping horizontal "fans" like this