Updated: This Post

Back on 1st October I wrote about this little Si-Hong:

I mentioned how it had just one branch, a single fruiting mother branch, circled below:

Yes, that knobbly protrusion is a branch! It grows just a few millimetres a year and resembles a pine cone more and more with maturity, as seen here on a much older Ta-Jan:

Since that post our little Si-Hong has blossomed into this:

with three fruiting branchlets produced by the fruiting mother branch. The presence of flowers tells us immediately that these are fruiting branchlets, as this jujube branch type is the only one to produce flowers, and flowers of course produce fruit.

Mother fruiting branches also contain the buds which produce extension branches — the branch type which adds height and width to a tree — but as none broke dormancy this year, this tree will end the season the exact same shape as it began. The increased height and width given by the fruiting branchlets now is temporary, as the branchlets are deciduous and will fall off in winter.

When those branchlets fall off, this tree will look once more like this:

with nothing to show for itself bar perhaps a slightly larger fruiting mother branch and a mass of miserable-looking branchlet twigs on the ground.

It is easy to see why people not used to these trees think their tree is a dud — and a dead dud at that!  — that first winter. But come the following spring, with their tree now settled in, there is every chance an extension branch bud will shoot and cause that tree to double and sometimes even triple in height in just weeks.

I’ll conclude this post by repeating what I concluded the previous one with:

This unusual growth habit is also another reason I strongly recommend anyone who asks, to not prune their trees in the first year or two, until they understand and become familiar with this unusualness. It is too easy to set growth back by years otherwise.