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Old 04-01-2013, 11:58 AM
echinosum echinosum is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Feb 2006
Location: Chalfont St Giles
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Quote:
Originally Posted by zuhayr-123 View Post
first off... can anyone name me this plant (attached) ?

second. i have a small pine tree (7ft or so) and it in a large pot (atleast 4ft high) i just want to ask, how much taller will it grow if i keep it in the pot because it seems to have slowed down in growing, or was that purely due to the winter ? and if i wanted to re'compost it when i do everything else, is there any specefic kind of compost to use ?
What you need to do is post your picture to a picture sharing site like Flickr, and then give us a link to it, so we can see it.

Pines don't really like being in pots. They do need maintenance for long term survival. You have a choice between forever increasing the size of the container to satisfy their demand to grow, or else taking steps deliberately to restrict their growth. If you do neither, they will start to look sickly and eventually die. See discussion, for example, here Growing Evergreens in Pots | Dirt Simple In addition to pruning the above ground plant, she mentions root pruning -that is a bonsai technique to discourage the pine from wanting to be bigger, which is a way of trying to keep the plant alive without increasing the size of the container to supply its increased demand for water a nutrients. The other thing you will need to do is replace the potting soil from time to time. Google will doubtless find you other discussions of container cultivation of pines.

Pinus mugo, the dwarf pine, is one of the most successful pines for growing in a pot, for obvious reasons - they grow slowly and stay small. Though in the wild they grow high up mountains where the mountain weather discourages them from growing much taller than 6 feet (I've walked through P mugo forests in the Tatras in Slovakia), and they will grow a bit bigger than that in Berkshire. Their natural form is multistemmed and they spread out to interlock form impenetrable forests. I have a 25-yr old P mugo in my garden in Bucks which is about 9 feet tall, is very multistemmed, and mainly expands sideways rather than upwards. There are also dwarfed forms of normally larger pines available: for example I used to have a very pretty dwarfed Scots pine that grew only to only 4 feet after 10 years (in the ground), until it failed to survive being moved during building works. I also have a 13-yr old P koraiensis in a slow-growing form called "Silver Linings" that's grown to only 6 feet so far, though that will eventually, after a long time, become large. My neighbour has an even smaller dwarfed pine, I don't know what, that's been there much longer.