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Bay tree cloud pruning

steve.fowlessteve.fowles Posts: 1
in Tools and techniques
Has anybody tried to cloud prune a bay tree. If so, was it successful 

Posts

  • DevonianDevonian Posts: 176
    Bumping this up cos I'd like to know too!
  • Hostafan1Hostafan1 Posts: 34,889
    I think you should give it a go. Take lots of photos and show us the process/ progress.
    Devon.
  • Butterfly66Butterfly66 Posts: 970
    No experience but I wonder if it has the right structure and type of growth? I think most plants which are cloud pruned have small leaves dense twiggy growth whereas bay is quite lax. Having said that if you started with a young plant the growth would presumably get denser the more you clipped it?

    As said if you have a plant give it a try but yes please please update us on progress
     If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero
    East facing, top of a hill clay-loam, cultivated for centuries (7 years by me). Birmingham
  • pinutpinut Posts: 194
    Go on youtube and watch Peter Chan's bonsai channel.

    He regularly demonstrates how to prune garden trees to give it that bonsai look, ie creating layers and pads.
  • ObelixxObelixx Posts: 30,090
    We have two large bay trees here and both are multi-stemmed in a mostly vertical sort of way.  I have raised the crown on one to shoulder height leaving the bare, almost straight stems visible and letting us see beyond it rather than having a big heavy green blob.  Not really suitable for the kind of cloud pruning that leaves clusters of foliage at the end of stems..



    The other is planted on a short steep slope between two levels and handy for the kitchen so I just take off the occasional leaf for cooking.
    Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
    "The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
    Plato
  • DovefromaboveDovefromabove Posts: 88,147
    @Obelixx ... what about if you had raised each individual crown to a different height, then hard-pruned each individual head so it thickened up to develop as you would a lollipop. I think that could look quite like cloud pruning? 😊 

    Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.





  • ObelixxObelixx Posts: 30,090
    I think the individual leaves are too large and too spaced for that to work on a bay tree.

    However, it does work with small leaved, evergreen plants like box, yew, small leaved privets, some conifers..........
    Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
    "The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
    Plato
  • DevonianDevonian Posts: 176


    Not very easy to see, but there's a cloud-pruned bay at the back of this border (photo from Jake's Niwaki blog). Worth a shot I reckon, this looks really good!
  • bgushurstmoorelA2Fui99bgushurstmoorelA2Fui99 Posts: 1
    There are a couple of lovely cloud pruned bays near the Saatchi gallery in Chelsea.
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