I am not sure at this point if this is more of an observation that a tip. I bought this tree from Hoka-En, NL. The shohin sized semi-cascade style with a nicely rounded canopy appealed to me enough to make me want buy it with it’s many (three) flower pots.
I got quite a surprise when I repotted the tree between the middle and ‘inner’ pot which were wired together – the roots were growing out the bottom of the inner pot and back up the inside of the next pot. These were very well developed, despite not having any soil to grow in they seemed perfectly healthy and able to cope, even thriving. I am putting this down to the properties of the clay material of its terracotta pot.
This got me thinking, was this accidental or done on purpose? This could have been done to create a bit of extra vigour and improve the health of the tree. I am a great fan of these sorts of pot anyway and like to keep a good number of my trees in them when not in a show-pot, or when the tree is being developed. Also it isn’t such a big deal if one of these gets broken. My thoughts led me to think maybe the grower had done this on purpose – allowing the roots to grow inside the air gaps of another pot allows the tree to take up extra humidity and water when it needs to on its own terms. The clay made pot would certainly seem to promote this growth and there was still plenty of root growing within in the inner pot in the soil. To extract the tree from the pot it was simply a case of just cutting off the surplus root exiting the drainage hole.. The roots were not growing in the third pot, it seemed a bit like a russian doll method.
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