Decided to spend time coming up with a plan for my maple this weekend after letting it sit around getting unruly with new growth shoots that were reaching 2-3 feet. Wired up the bottom 4 branches and MSPainted out my intention for what I want to do.



The dark red line branch comes out from behind, and the dark blue branch comes forward from the front-left of the trunk. The purple one branches off from there. I kind of want to leave the blue one with leaves on it so that there can be a slight breakup of the trunk line as it goes up so it's not just a really long stretch from the roots to the first branch. I can always pluck those later.

I thought about having the orange branch come off to the left and making another air gapped pad but decided it might look nicer coming up into the apex and helping to fill out the apex. I don't have a branch plan yet for the actual apex right now aside from just "bushy and tree shaped", so I'm mostly going to leave it as is and just prune it to shape for now.

I obviously intend to thicken up all the branches as much as I can so they'll be a whole thing of letting them grow out far and then cutting them back as usual. They are still fairly small for now

After some critique from another forum mentioning the gap in the middle, I decided I can use one of the extra rear branches to create a pad behind the tree so the trunk passes in front. This should help fill the gap and provide a nice backdrop for the trunk itself. I'm going to spend some time creating the virtual but with the branch thickness I would like but for now I quick mocked it up here to show the intended back piece.



Also it was noted that some of the branches look very straight and could use more branching... the orange and purple one in my image actually have couple of branching points early on:


The wired branch in the middle and going up is orange in my virtual, and the wired branch under that is the dark blue/purple one. I think it just doesnt show that well due to some of the leaves and lighting, but I will always be further creating corners in these branches as they go out. Especially the dark red one going to the right in the virtual

I'm not an expert in wiring but it seems to me that your wiring isn't doing much? Straight sections keep straight, no bends made, no changes in direction?

The wiring mostly brought things down to where I want. I've heard tridents don't take to hard wiring well so I didnt want to do any major changes but it still has quite a bit of change from the original shape. Here's the tree when I first bought it back in may



If you compare it to the wired image, it's much wider and more full. The maroon branch has come forward and way down, the orange and purple were parallel so I brought the purple down and the orange a bit further up into the canopy. Light blue was brought up and curved a bit

I never wire any Tridents, there is no need. I prune to shape by pruning to the bud in the direction I want. Wire marks take a very long time to go if at all.They grow so fast that it is difficult to avoid marks

m5eaygeoff wrote:

I never wire any Tridents, there is no need. I prune to shape by pruning to the bud in the direction I want. Wire marks take a very long time to go if at all.They grow so fast that it is difficult to avoid marks

So I would just prune it all the way back to near where I want the curve to start, just a bit ahead of the nearest node there? It would die back to that node and then those two leaves there would start getting longer? I guess I haven't quite understood how to prune these to shape instead of wiring. What time of year do you prune tridents as well? Early spring before new growth starts?