NEWS

🌲 News from Otsu Shorakuen — A Look at Our Summer Pruning: Bud Pinching 🌿

Our summer pruning — bud pinching — has wrapped up for the year 🌱

Here is a look at the work through some photos ✨

✂️ A Craft Done by Hand, One Snip at a Time

Bud pinching is the process of cutting back each vigorously growing bud, one by one, with a pair of shears.

When you cut a single bud partway along its length, new buds — three or four of them — sprout from the sides 🌱

Within just two weeks, they grow in thick and lush, and the foliage becomes denser and denser 🌿

🌱  "Thicken" and "Thin Out"

Summer pruning — bud pinching — thickens the foliage by increasing the number of buds. Winter pruning (December through about April) is the opposite — thinning things out by removing excess buds and old needles 🍃

Thicken it up, then thin it back out. By repeating this cycle year after year, the needles grow short and even, and the tree takes on a dense yet refined form 🌲

This twice-a-year rhythm is the hallmark of Mizuma's black pine ✨

🌲 This Is "Mizuma's Black Pine"

The beauty of tight buds and graceful branches — born only from twice the care.

The branch-tip technique handed down from those before us, and the spirit of "never forcing the tree."

We put that into every single pine we raise, and we will keep on doing so 🌿😊

For inquiries about pruning, care, or purchasing black pines, please feel free to reach out.

Contact us here📩 https://japanese-black-pine.com/ask/