Fusing Trunks, Sexy Tree Trunk blah, blah, blah...

I have here a couple of young ficus microcarpa
or Chinese banyans
that I have grown from cuttings. 

It is not only the flowers and the leaves that make a plant especially a tree interesting, there is also the trunk.

Tree trunks are wonderful work of art. It just require a little bit of training the eye to see their beauty.

The mind is the real organ of seeing. And for the eye to see better, it is necessary to educate the mind. Did I just say that above? redundancy again! Anyway...all I'm saying is this. The mind seeks pattern and in this manner it fills in the blank of what we see to form patterns. This is intuitive thinking or heuristics whatever the professionals calls this. 

As you can see, I bundled them together
and tied with a plastic straw. The idea is to
strangle them into fusing. Ficuses
are ideal for fusing, it happens to them all the 
time in the wild. As to other species, caveat,
do research or you may kill the trees.
Ordinary ropes or threads will not do for
the trunks will grow on them
embedding them and creating ugly grooves.
You can fuse them at the bottom, upper,
 or middle part. Here I fused them
at the bottom part to give it the tapered
"sexy" form that I aim for.

For example, a deeply religious person may see the face of Jesus or Mary in a splotch of mold, fungi or urine, but a normal and sane person may see something else, like a splotch of mold, fungi or urine. 

This is the same with backward masking in music: the religious might hear satanic messages in music being played backward while the normal, sane human being may hear a sound like that of a , well, music being played backward. 

It would be cool if they could backward mask farts...hmmm...what could be the hidden messages...anyway.. .I'm saying is that you don't need to backward mask anything at all, it's all out there blatantly being broadcast and played.  

So, the meaning of the object as perceived by the mind is determined by the hmmm...sanity and the training, prejudices,DNA, diet...of the subject (or the one seeing the stuffs).

Anyway, all I'm saying is tree trunks are interesting if you think about it.

Anyway, again, lets talk sexy...

Sexy! This is not my tree.
This is achieved by reduction plus
decades of training.

Sexy form. Of course for men a sexy female form is one that is wide on the hips, tapered waistline, and a little wide (not as wide as the hips) upper body. Chest depends on preferences but generally a straight and flat chested body is not as attractive as the one I have described.

I fused this Ficus Benjamina
(weeping fig)  about six
 months ago. The trunks are
already biting into the plastic
straw,so I removed it and
retied again. Of course
the idea is really to strangle them
 into fusing, but I was a little
 worried about wounding or
disfiguring them. As can be
 seen, the fusion has begun
and it will take a year or
 two before
it is completed.

Generally a sexy male body form has a small waistline tapering to broad chest and shoulders with no stomach fats. This is the ideal for men. 

There is also such thing as a sexy tree. A sexy tree has a tapering trunk. The tree can have a straight trunk, meandering trunk, cascading trunk, bent trunk, the shape doesn't matter what is important is that they tapered. Proportion and age are emphasized. 

There are methods in creating tapered trunks for bonsai and also in landscaping and the fastest and easiest is fusing.

Another ficus, a red goliath or balete.
 I am fusing this at the and then
 I will spread the upper branches to
 create an umbrella structure.
Will take years...

It will take years for a plant to have a thick and tapered trunk. A normal tree planted on the ground averages about six to twelve inches of vertical growth but in terms of trunk 
diameter this would be from half an inch to an inch depending on the species and environmental factors like nutrients, moisture and sunlight. 

Early Filipinos have great respects for nature and
especially trees.  They believed that old ones (nuno) lived in
them and that they deserve as much respect as any
visible human neighbor hence they asked permission
when passing through it, or if they would do
anything that could disturb the residents of the tree.
But with the introduction of western religion and the
doctrine that humanity is the center of creation
and that all of nature is there for humanity to lord over and
to use, things changed. But of course, lesson has
been learned...

And this growth rate is slowed further if the plant or tree is potted. This is rough estimate but it does give an idea of the growth rate of trees. That is why we should not kill or cut trees; the rate they are destroyed is not equal to the rate they multiply and grow.                                                                                            

Fusing trunks is one way of cheating time. Remember it's not all about "actual age"  its all about the "appearance of age." 

What's interesting about tree trunks?

If you have read Harper Lees' "To Kill a Mocking Bird" one of the interesting scenes was Scout finding stuffs inside a tree. She didn't know who was putting it there. It was one of the mysteries that reveals itself quite surprisingly in the story. The tree became integral part of the novel. Anyway...

Better take an aspirin for that head ache....