Rarely offered
Six O’Clock
Chaenomeles japonica
Fourteen centimetres, and it flowers like a shrub
Informal upright · 14 cm · c. 35 yrs
£2,400
Little Black Pine
Pinus thunbergii · Japanese black pine
Shohin, with bark that has no business on a tree this size
Nineteen centimetres of black pine with plated, fissured bark — the detail that normally takes a trunk four times this thick. Short needles held by a decade of disciplined feeding rather than by any trick.
£4,200
Available
No tree leaves here on the strength of a photograph. Come and walk round it first — we will hold anything for a fortnight while you decide. Delivery is by hand, in our own van, anywhere in the British Isles.
Every tree goes with a year of aftercare: repotting when it wants it, winter cover, and a standing invitation to bring it back if it sulks. Most people use it. Nobody has ever been charged for it.
Arrange a viewingor ring the nursery on +44 1273 841 209
Through the year
- SpringCandles, alarmingly vigorous for its size
- SummerNeedles short and stiff, held two years
- AutumnCleaned out, and the bark comes forward
- WinterDark green against frost
The tree
- Style
- Slanting · shakan
- Age
- About 40 years old
- Training
- In training since 1996 · 30 years
- Height
- 19 cm
- Spread
- 24 cm
- Pot
- Unglazed drum, Tokoname
- Keeping it
- Feed hard in spring, starve it after the candles are cut. That contrast is the whole method, and it is what keeps the needles in proportion.
Where it came from
Bought as raw stock at a club sale in 2011 for nineteen pounds. Everything interesting about it has happened since, which we mention because it is the honest counterweight to the ledgers elsewhere on this page.