last week i bought my first lonicera! i repotted it after purchase and cleaned out dead branches, now it looks like some kind of literati but the foilage isnt what i like.
any ideas on how/where to bend the branches? i know lonicera has very hard wood, so bending isnt easy as pinus. but like this it doesnt look like bonsai:p also believe that u don't style lonicera as juniperus or a common literati. (in pads i mean)

grts

I have 2 lonicera serotina recently removed from my garden, one is 20 years old, they will just acclimatise to pots for this year, but eventual styling is going to have to be informal at best as the established branches are pretty tough and as you say the growth pattern doesnt lend itself to foliage pads as such. I may use a trunk bender to give some seperation between the trunks but the rest will be 'grow & clip' as the thing progresses - I hope too that leaf reduction will be possible as this is really just a garden shrub, not one of the smaller leaf variety, sorry, not a great photo

Dave

Is it a lonicera?
It feels so much like a potentilla fruticosa

Edit - add:

And personally I think you should never style any deciduous tree with foliage pads. For pines and some junipers etc this may be a sort of naturaly way to grow. But most deciduous trees I know do not grow pads but an interconnected canopy

oops ur right leatherback, it is a potentilla. not sure if its fruticosa though

i think ill just wire the branches down en let the growing make the canopy.

THat stuff grows like crazy. Give it a couple of years and you may have something like this 40 year old in my collection: