A View From Here


by Jack Wikle

In Reaction to the Decline of an Apple Tree

It is with much emotion and many competing thoughts struggling for my attention that I share here, with Dean Bull's permission, his compelling e-mail of June 29 telling of the failing health of his really-extraordinary, old, apple tree bonsai.  

I will bring you up to date on the big apple tree.  It is hard to know when the right moment is to do such things when we do not know the final outcome...
The tree is very ill.  As far back as I can recall--maybe 10 years, the tree would loose a significant limb here or there, maybe once a year or so.  Symptoms would be premature yellowing of older leaves, then newer ones, then everything on that limb just dies.  You may recall at the FMG All-State show, I had removed a large limb near the center of the tree coming out of the left side of the right trunk.  That one died late last summer.  I have pestered everyone I have come in contact with who knows anything about these things to come up with a solution.  Is it fire blight?--No, Is it this or that, No.  Well, what is it then?  Well, nobody can tell me and so I just muddle through, wire a new branch into that area and carry on -- nothing is perfect, and the tree always looked pretty good.
It looked excellent on Mother's Day weekend in GR. (Second place in people's choice award, after Jack Wikle's hinoki).  I lost 2 small twigs in the week or so that followed.  Carol and I showed trees at the Pavilions the Thursday before the NMC BBQ, and it looked fine--I had removed the 2 bad twigs.  Friday morning it was still in my van and I had to make a service call on a grandfather clock.  I decided to try and kill 2 birds with one stone.  Called Duke Ellsner at MSU extension on Front St.  He said to bring the tree in.  Keep in mind at this point it still looked vibrant.  He looked at the tree sitting in the back of my van and said, "Wow."  He went and got Roberta Dow, and she repeated his comment.  She has some experience with bonsai and even knows how to say it.  She fell in love with the tree.  We pulled it out of the car for a better look on a picnic table.  She and Duke took pictures and dug out books and consulted the internet.  After an hour and a half of this, along with examining twigs with a magnifying glass, and so on, we developed a theory.  We think it may be a fungal infection called "Valsa ceratosperma".  It is not possible to be certain.  The descriptions are based on trees grown in an orchard situation, where you have a large number of large trees that have been grown under normal conditions.  In bonsai, the wiring and the pruning and pinching back changes the appearance of the small branches and causes small wounds in the bark.  As a result, it is difficult to match a given patch of bark with a picture in the book and say "Ah-Haa!  That is the problem!"  It just ain't that simple.  And it might not be Valsa at all.  It may be some obscure infection that has not been prominent enough in commercial orchards to merit a study and a survey and all that goes with it.  Therefore it is not something that you can find on the internet...
The other bad news is, if it Is Valsa, there is no cure for it.  Roberta suggested a fungicide called "Fungo-nil", as a possible treatment.  I have used it twice since that time.
Well, the tree looked fine when I left for Washington DC for Memorial day weekend.  When I returned there was a lot of yellow leaves on the left-back of the tree.  I called Roberta on Wednesday.  She stopped by on Friday.  We studied and photographed and scratched our heads.  We unpotted it and I removed much of the growing medium, then put it into a training box and put it out of direct sun.  She took some samples of the roots which looked weak and some were dead.  This is the third year since root pruning and I would have expected more roots in the pot than there were--but the tree is smaller than it was when I last root pruned it.  The yellowing and dropping of leaves has continued.  The right side trunk appears dead except for the 2 branches I started with razor blades in 1998 following the ABS Symposium in K'zoo   (remember that brainstorm?) Today, the upper of those branches only has 3 green leaves on it and it will probably be dead soon, if it follows the pattern.  The left trunk is better but not a lot better.  What is green, looks pretty good, which fits with past experience.  But the yellow keeps progressing.  Not as fast as it was formerly, but progressing.  To add insult to injury, the damned aphids have moved in on what new growth it has.  I keep spraying them with insecticidal soap, but you know aphids...
Well, that is pretty much the current state of affairs with what is arguably my best tree.  Like Glen Johnson's Mom said, "This kind of stuff happens to people all the time, we just don't like it when it's our turn."  And trust me, I don't like it.  But if you are gonna do bonsai, you gotta expect some of this, right?  It could make a turn around and if it does, I think I can still make a tree out of it, but it better hurry up--we all have our limits.  If it does not, we will have to look at what a wonderful experience it has been.  From that Saturday in September of 1992 when Bruce Baker and his son, Sam met me near Luther to go bonsai hunting, to all of the shows and good experiences we have all had with the tree.  Also, you may recall this was the same collecting trip where I found the American Elm that was such a fun tree. (Award of Merit at the Chicago Botanic Garden in 1998...)  That one died a few years ago.  Maybe I ain't as good at this as I thought.
Sorry to not have a better report for you, but that's it. Dean 

Dean isn't alone of course. If you haven't had a similar experience, you will someday if you persist in trying to grow bonsai. If you tell me you have never had a treasured tree decline when you least expected it and eventually die, my immediate guess is that you haven't been growing bonsai very long.  

I too have known Dean's sense of loss a number of times. Maybe it is not like losing a good friend or a longtime family pet, but nevertheless it is a quiet kind of grieving, followed, as Dean predicts so well, by efforts to put the loss behind and focus on the pleasure that the tree brought to me and to others in the time it lived at my home.

Looking back, I ask myself, would I have put the effort I did into that tree with the best of intentions if I had known it would “die under my care?” I am not sure what this says about bonsai enthusiasts, but, it is my impression that for most of us, most of the time, the answer is, ”Yes, the rewards did outweigh the loss.” 

Still, the nagging questions never go away. Why did it die and what could I have done? Reality is that in many cases we will never know why an important branch or an entire tree dies. We can make educated guesses but, as Dean observed so astutely in his e-mail, “It just ain't that simple.” Things happen that we can't explain. Then, in insisting on explanation, the conclusions that we embrace so eagerly and firmly can be – and often are – completely off target. And, to complicate matters, the decline or death of a bonsai is more often than we realize the result of multiple factors, multiple stresses, none of which acting alone could have “brought down” our tree. (An example of group effort accomplishing what individual action wasn't capable of.) Keep in mind here that many insects and diseases are “weak” in the sense that they are only capable of colonizing already weakened and declining trees. Some boring insects in particular lay their eggs only on weak trees. 

I doubt that Dean or anyone else will ever really know what all the contributing factors were in the weakening of his tree, or whether its decline could have been reversed if its problems were diagnosed early enough. But, his story and my personal bonsai losses, as I review them mentally, reinforce my growing sense of the importance of keeping the vigor up -- of maintaining the momentum -- of our best trees. For some time, my perception has been that, “The strong tend to get stronger and stronger and the weak tend to get weaker and weaker.” And, the elderly are without question most vulnerable. It is very difficult to stall and reverse the direction of significant tree decline. Thinking of my own losses, the one element that all of these disappointments may have had in common is that I was somehow inflicting more stress on that tree than it could tolerate at that time. Well, this may be yet another case of inventing a reason when one doesn't know the real reason but I don't have a better idea. 

Hand in hand with this thinking is a strongly felt need to sharpen my sensitivity to tree vigor. Does this tree seem “happy?” Is it gaining in strength or is it weakening (is it accelerating or slowing down)? Is it time to go to work or time to wait for recovery? It is my understanding that even the Japanese bonsai masters do not continuously maintain their most valuable bonsai at the peak level of refinement we see in the show album photos. These trees go through cycles of being allowed to grow out and recover in strength, then being severely restrained in preparation for a special show. This really is “performance art.”  

Now I keep telling myself that my greatest need is to learn to recognize significant decline before it becomes significant. Yes, this is a bit of a joke but I am mostly serious. I really need to keep Dean's apple tree experience in mind and to work slowly and to proceed with caution on my best material. Maybe you should do this with your best bonsai too.

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