Chinese Pistachio Trunk Chop

Here is my Chinese Pistachio which was given a trunk chop on 07/08/11. I have left the two lower branches on in the hope of fattening the base and the shoot at the top will hopefully draw energy up the tree to prevent massive die back.

Eventually I plan to shorten the tree further, however, I have very little experience with this type of material and I'm not sure how it will react so I will let it recover from this and see where we stand.

Before:

 

After:

(With a 2ltr Coke bottle as a size reference)

Chinese Pistachio Plans

This is how the tree looks as of 24/07/11

Still not good I know.

I have a plan to drastically shorten the height of the tree. I'm going to cut it back down to the red line shown below.

I would like to eventually shorten it even further but we will see how this goes first

Chinese Pistachio Cleanup

All Chinese Pistachio posts.

A short time later it was all cleaned up

Still has a long way to go though. I am also worried about the large pinnate leaves and if they will ever reduce down to the size required for a convincing bonsai.

I also re-potted it into something bigger to help its growth and took off the dead leader sticking out the top.

Chinese Pistachio 2010

This Chinese Pistachio (Pistacia Chinensis) was given to me by a very generous person in 2010 but I have no clue how old it is.

As you can see it had been left to its own devices for a bit and had gone a bit wild