Saturday 1st April was the first of two workshops booked with Chris Thomas who has become a regular with our club.
The format is quite simple members bring in trees and each one is placed on the centre table, Chris will discuss the tree with the owner adding his views, members can add their own comments.
Using the expertise of Chris to restyle and/or improve their trees members carry out working on their trees with breaks for Chris to reassess progress.
I have said it many times with these workshops you can gain so much more knowledge with so many different species and styles presented and listening to the critiques of each tree, also when a tree is placed in the middle of the room you often see what is needed to correct or improve a tree that you have had for many years.
For example from picture six of a twin trunked Larch where the right hand trunk is straight and featureless from the lower right hand branch to the next rear facing branch, it also lacks taper.
Decision was made to remove the trunk just above the right hand branch re wire the whole tree, this allowed the right hand branch to be moved and create it as the new trunk line adding movement and taper.
The rest of the tree was shaped to create a more cohesive design.
As you can see there was a good mix of species and styles worked on this day.
