The following is a series of pictures of the chinese elm that I aquired last year in early spring. It had been originally trained to live indoors, given my new living arrangements, I was able to put it outside in the summer and keep it there since.
not the best lighting for a picture and not really indicative of the lighting it got here, but this is what it looked like when I got it.

here is a picture from last summer shortly after it was moved outside.. ok it needed a trim, but you can see the foliage really getting thick.

Here is a winter photo from october... the tree never really lost all of it's leaves, but it did stop growing.

As you may be able to see, I did a bit of a prune in the winter, to one of the branches that had grown, giving the tree a bit more of a rectagular feel this picture was take yesterday.

This also was taken yesterday, with a slightly different color feel.


While we could discuss form and shape for a long time, you can definitely see that this tree is far more healthy, and vigourous than it was a year ago. Moving outside and having a winter, even with some protection has really helped the tree explode.
If you have any form or pruning suggestions, I am willing to listen.

Looks healthy. Good work.

If you look atthe first picture. You can see that the branches are just homogenous sticks, without taper.

I would start working on that. Consider each branch as a separate tree: Taper, shape, side-branches. And build them like that. This will help develop that aged character.

Is creating branch taper similar to creating trunk taper? from this stage a cut and grow approach? I will definitely be looking for materials myself, but I wanted to know if my initial thoughts are correct.

Yup. Let it grow, cut back to a side-branch. Wire. Grow. Cut. Sisyphus work.

where do youguys get these trees

My wife found this tree on ebay, where most of my trees came from. You do have to know what to look for, and what kind of trees you want. I wanted to get trees in a few different development stages, so that I wasn't temped to do all kinds of stuff to one or two trees.. but so that there was always something to do.. not sure if that's the best strategy, but it seems to be working.

This is an old topic, but I thought I would post an update... as this Chinese elm is now even more "Outdoor" My wife and I moved from our apartment with balconies to a house with a garden. This spring this tree has just exploded with new growth.

I thinned our the front of the tree significantly this winter to try and get some new leaders for some of the branches, which do lack taper. I may turn the tree around in a week or so to get some more light to the front. but I set it up as well as a few others so that you get to see the front of different trees from different sides of our pond.

Looks happy and healthy. It is in for a haircut, I presume?

Nice, thx for the update!

I will give it a trim the next few days... I was going to wait until it stopped raining, but it looks like that might take a while.

I thought I would update this topic, as this little elm has really done well.

These are the before and after shots of last weeks trim. I'm going to need to do two things in the future.. 1 a repot next year and 2 a strong hard prune.. I've been thinking about doing the second in stages.. but not sure.
the main reason is branch taper.. too many of them have little or no taper.