I just love Barberries for some reason despite the many thorns they have on them. They seem almost like a close cousin of prickly pear cactus plants. I actually quite a few of them, I am guessing around 10 or so from small shohin size to large two fisted clump trees. This post will be about finding a really large Berberis thunbergii ‘Crimson Pygmy’ tree at Nicks Garden Center in Aurora. Technically this is a nursery tree, but it is really an urban collected Yamadori tree. I was just walking around the Center looking for something to take home and stumbled across around 6-7 very large Crimson Pygmies growing 15 gallon pots. All of them had very large trunks and were full of weeds, so many weeds it made seeing the trunks very difficult. In addition to the weeds making it difficult to see, the trees had a lot of suckers growing up in the pot as well making it much worse to see the trunks. I careful considered each tree and went with the tree with the smallest trunks. That does not seem to be the smart move now does it. I thought the other trunks were bigger but they did not seem to have any logical way to style them into a great tree except chopping them way back to the ground and hope for the best. So the tree with the multiple trunks and different sized trunks at that was the one that went home with me. There were no price tags on any of these beauties so I found a helper bee who just happened to be managerial type for the nursery. He told all of the those trees came from the hedge that was out in front of the nursery! He told me he thought they should be $100 each and came back and said I could have one of them for $50. I said sold and showed him which one I wanted. He took it up the cash register area and I paid for it. I pushed it out to he car on a nice heavy push cart and went to pick it up to put in the car and just about had a hernia trying to do so. The darn thing was growing in clay soil for which I should have known better as most of the metro has clay soil! I finely got the thing in the car. Getting it out of the car was much easier as I put the wheel barrel directly behind the bush and pulled it out and it went right into the wheel barrel. Now getting it out of the wheel barrel was another story. I finally wrestled it out the wheel barrel and dropped right where it was and stayed there for the rest of the growing season. For the next couple of years I dragged it into and out of the garage. I did clean up the tree and remove dead branches and cut some others off. It lived about 2 1/2″ feet outside of the garage door. Last year in 2019 I decided it was time to do something with this monster. I drug it out to the street and washed all the soil off it, all of it. I could actually pick the tree up with one hand now. I have pretty good luck with bare rooting Barberries and thought it would be ok. I soon found out that this might be the case with this monster as I had to chop off a lot of the roots including one very large tap root. An immense tap root at that. I had no choice. I placed the tree in a shallow Sara Rayner pot and kept as many fine roots as I could. I wired the tree into the pot so it would not move and covered the soil with sphagnum moss held down with galvanized wire formed into brackets and pushed into the soil. The tree ended up being put under 30% shade cloth and seemed to be do well, some trunks were lost including one or two larger ones. I have left those dead trunks on the tree and they will be part of the design. I did add moss to the tree to keep soil from washing away. I will need to replace some of the moss next year. The tree was sitting in full sun this growing season (2020). It is now wintering on top of a plastic table under some fluorescent lights mainly for the moss! I will try next year (2021) to do something with foliage.
