Bougainvillea truncheon cuttings

I was trimming a big bougie in the garden…want to turn it eventually into bonsai but want to heal first all wounds and develop branches while it is on strong roots in the ground. The trunkis over 30cm diameter. I planted lots of cuttings and some I selected as potential bonsai material.

I planted all the cuttings in washed sieved river sand, and put them in the shade.

That was january 2014.

As you can see they were trimmed and all leaves removed.

21 days later the first shoots appeared:

All of them rooted and eventually were transferred first on lighter shade and now in full sun. This is how they look like now 5 month later.

It is our winter now, so I left them to establish a good root system and in spring they will be chopped / carved and I shall start working on them. Some might be ground layered also or just cut of and replanted.

This one that airlayered, but seeing how easy they are to root, airlayers for me are waste on effort.

It is also growing well now.

All the above airlayers are from Bougainvillea Pixie, the next cuttings are from Grabra.

My neighbor is building so as usual invited me to dig out some trees. This one was just too big to dig…the diameter of the trunk  must be close to 1m. So I decided to just chop few branches.

See the blocks on the floor. They are 20×10 cm, to give you idea of the size of the cuttings. The cuttings were taken in winter so they are not doing so well and the tree was burned before I took the cuttings, but few are already having strong shoots. The rest not too sure if will root. And as usual the best ones dont have any shoots.

 

I shall update later here to see how many survived.