A bit under the weather here, so I thought I'd start a thread on yet another of my Tridents "in progress". This one came from Sertel's Nursery in Doreen in mid-2008, and cost me the princely sum of $20. I chose this over their many other stock Tridents as it had a little bit of taper and the slight possibility of basal flare.
I had always intended to create at least two trees by layering the top and chopping the bottom. Of course, time ran out on me, and all I did was to savagely chop the roots and pot into a tub, where it would sit, neglected for two years. (Of course it suffered from my trademark lower-trunk-sunburn-dieback...
) As this seems to be the time for working Tridents, I thought I'd dig it up the other day to see what was going on under the soil...As you can see, there was really very little nebari present before the initial root-prune, especially on the side which was dominated by a single, massively thick root. Even chopping that root hard had done very little to improve its appearance. You can see from the underside exactly how much root mass was removed back in 2008 (the lighter circle indicates roughly where there is another chop present):
So, the first thing to address is the improvement of the roots. This would begin by further cutting back the thick tap roots:
That done, it still has done little to actively improve the root flare or the tree generally:
More to follow...
Thanks.
Fly.
I wasn't saying anything until I saw the next lot of pictures 
You always find a way to make the job so intricate.
