Mugo Pine Refinement

One of the trees I worked on last year was an informal upright Mugo Pine. I think that it was originally received by its owner as essentially a piece of topiary. He then worked it over a few years into a bonsai form.

I was asked to wire the tree and refine its image.

The tree had a few issues that this round of work has tried to iron out but it will certainly benefit from further refinement as it progresses.

The trees branching was incredibly dense in part due to its previous life as topiary which had lead to a large mass of ramification. It was also compounded by the tendency of Mugo pines to have multiple shoots at each branch tip which further compounded the dense look.

Multiple growing tips on a typical shoot.

My first action was to remove unnecessary sub-branches and take many of the branches back to a much simpler structure which in turn reduced the foliage density. I also reduced the remaining shoots on the tips to two shoots which further reduced the density and allowed for light and air to reach into the inner structure to aid back budding.

Some of the sub-branches removed from the first branch.

After the pruning work the aim of the styling was to break the large pads and masses of foliage into smaller pads to create a higher level of detail and structure.

The tree before the work.

I ended up removing close to 50% of the foliage which lead me to go a little bit easily on any heavy bending. Ultimately i would like to bend the thick first and second branches down a little more than they are currently and work on some of the dead stubs that were left long to die back slowly.