This Trident Maple, or Acer Buergerianum if you like, is the first tree that I bought from a real bonsai dealer. December 4th 2017 if I’m not mistaken.

it’s been growing in my garden for 2,5 years now without much work being done to it. Yesterday evening I was looking at it and suddenly I realised that the nebari could be improved a lot by ground-layering it. I decided to use the same technique that I did on my Ulmus Procera under Danny Use’s guidance.

This is the tree before I started working on it:



Stripping the bark where the new roots should emerge.



Getting there…



Made it all the way around.



Added some root hormone to the top of the stripped area and placed a “basket” of screen mesh around the trunk.



The basket gets filled with wet sphagnum moss.

A layer of bonsai substrate is added to put some weight on the sphagnum moss.

There ya go!

In september or october when the leaves start to color I’ll check if enough roots have grown from the cut that I made. If that’s the case the ground layer will be removed and the tree will be repotted. I’ll keep you updated!