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I have re-potted most of my chojubai this year but this tree, i decided could go another season. That’s not to say it escaped the work bench…….
After another year of development it was again looking a bit ‘all over the place’ so i began by busting out the mini-pressure washer and removing the moss from the trunks and soil surface and pondered what to do next.
Above: Post clean up.
For anyone who grows small clumps, you will know just how difficult it can be to wire the individual trunk lines so in this case i Jerry-rigged a wire around the pot rim which i used to attach tie down wires to to lower and adjust the the various trunks and branches into positions i was more happy with.
Above: Post adjustments
The aim was to spread the clump out a little more and even out the density of branching more evenly across the canopy. I started with the outer most shoots and worked my way into the center of the group as i went. I think it’s shaping up well.
Chojubai are a great species to grow. They are fast to develop, grow easily from cutting and as the above tree shows, you can go from a handful of cuttings to a little clump setting in a fairly short period of time.
I’ve just about finished my re-potting for the next season’s growth. It has gone fairly easily this time around for some reason despite the collection growing in size a little. While I wont be posting every tree, this will be one of a few posts capturing the most interesting re-pots of the year.
The first tree is a new tree to the collection. It’s what we think is a Crabapple. It arrived to me in a very shallow pot, which while it suited the tree, i wasn’t sure it was the best choice in my garden with the often hot summers.
So as a starting point i got it into my mix and a deeper pot. By doing that I now know what baseline i am starting with and if any issues do come up over the growing season i will not be questioning the roots or a soil mix i do not usually use.
Above: The tree sans pot. The hook root on the right of the trunk annoyed me so i took it off. i planted the cut root in another pot to see if if will shoot from a root cutting or not.
Above: Post re-pot. I ended up going with this navy blue Reiho pot which i liked. It goes well with the fresh red growth but time will tell how it looks when the foliage matures (and maybe turns green?)
As far as i know, the tree has never flowered so i will be doing my best this year to feed it up with some high phosphorus and potassium fertiliser with the hope it sets flower buds next year.
Bonsai social media always seems to target the dramatic, the big restyles and the rapid changes, but for most of what we do in bonsai happens slowly over long time frames. Step by step making small adjustments and building on what was built prior to slowly but surely move toward a refined goal.
I have recently been doing such tasks and the below shimpaku is one such tree that ended up on my bench to be thinned in preparation for this season’s new growth.
It was styled in a demonstration back in 2021, taking rough stock and turning it into something that could easily be imagined as a bonsai. Here’s the last time it was on the blog.
The other day i brought the tree into the workshop and gave it another round of work to set it up for another year of development. Images below outline the recent work.
Above: The tree in 2023 after being re-potted from a nursery container into its first Bonsai container. Note the density of the foliage and the width of the live veins.
Above: The tree in 2024 prior to beginning the work. Since the 2023 photo, i have reduced the live vein width a little (5mm?) showing more of the shari. The tree has begun to fill out but the foliage is in need of a thin, reinforcing the branch structure by removing foliage and branches i don’t need and leaving that which i do.
Above: the tree after the work. All that was done was some weeding and a thinning of the foliage. I am trying to get the branches to have an up turned profile showing some of the branch structure below the foliage clouds which i think is starting to develop. I did also adjust some of the wire and branches to help with this but for the most part only thinned. I had left a lot of extra branches on in 2023 so that that the foliage mass would recover and strengthen more quickly. Now that the tips i wanted to keep had grown strongly i was able to remove the excess. This will also leave some room for more growth and some light and air to get to the inner shoots.
There is still some juvenile shoots toward the rear of the tree so this season i will work on growing them out into adult scale foliage. I will also keep an eye on the live vein with the idea to reduce its width further.
You cannot see from these images but there are two live veins. One on each side of the trunk. This should setup the trunk to grow in only one axis and begin to flatten out like a board. Ideally i would like these live veins half their current width. I will slowly narrow them over a couple of years as the tree develops. Its a longer term process but something i will be managing over the coming years. I go into the process a bit more here if you’re interested.
All in all i am pretty happy with how this tree is progressing, it has a way to go but seems to be heading in the right direction.
I finally got around to finishing the last round of work on the this tree.
Since i wrote the last update on this tree i have been slowly adjusting some of the deadwood and mulling over various adjustments and future plans.
It really needed an angle change and a better pot. As luck would have it I have just got back from a trip to Japan where I found a pot I thought might work well with this tree.
Upon arriving home, being at the beginning of re-potting season I got straight into getting this tree into its new container. I think it is a good fit. I like the colour, shape and size and it should leave a decent amount of soil available for the tree to grow strongly and fill in over the next season.
I messed around with fronts and planting angles a fair bit and landed on the above.
It’s so good to have the tree now potted at what is at least very close to the final angle and into a pot that is much nicer proportioned than it’s previous home.
I am glad i re-potted this tree this season as i found a lot of old garden soil in close to the trunk that i was able to remove and replace with bonsai mix. It should set things up for a bright future.
I have a number of other junipers i will be grafting in the next couple of months and will try to get pics as i do. It is a great way to produce bonsai material as you can see from the above tree.
What to do with boring stock? Good stock is out there but often hard to find or expensive. On the flip side, straight, untrained whips are available not only at bonsai nurseries but at almost every general nursery as well not to mention you probably have a number of neglected cuttings that you took years ago struggling along in the ‘ill get to it later’ area of your backyard.
Which gets me to today’s post. After going through the recent batch of stock that came into my garden these 3 plants were by far the least inspiring. Long, leggy, dead foliage and a general lack of interest in the trunks. Essentially material i would usually ignore if i was in the market for bonsai stock.
But material like this can be a good opportunity to begin something that ends up being interesting and potentially great, all at the work of your own hands.
The stock above is getting to the point where most people would give up on the idea of getting a tree with good movement out of the fairly stiff and straight trunk lines. But for certain species, and especially shimpaku juniper material like this can pose a good opportunity if found for the right price.
First you need to clean up the material.
I tend to remove dead shoots, competing trunk lines and thin the branching aiming for a general spread of branches at good intervals along the trunk. In the case of the trees above i also removed strong branches as well i want these to end up more on the Bunjin side of the style spectrum and therefore I only want short compact branches.
I then applied raffia to the trunks. I don’t often use rafia but due to the thickness of these whips and the tight bends i intended, applying the raffia was a worthwhile addition.
Wire goes on next, I ensure that the wire is coiled on in the same direction as the raffia beneath. This is done so that as i bend, i can also twist the wire in the same direction the rafia was applied in. Having the raffia and wire both tighten to the trunk hopefully provides support to the inner fibers, rather than these wrappings loosening off and allowing room for breakage.
I applied two wires up each trunk and spaced the wraps apart rather than doubled them up together. This provides more points of contact along the trunk and more support along the bends, hopefully further reducing the chances of breakage.
Now comes the fun part. The bending.
The trees were bent making sure to twist the trunks in the same direction that the wire and raffia had been applied, essentially tightening it all down against the trunk.
I also wanted to introduce this twisting for the next phase of the process that will happen after the bends have set, Shari.
As the bark on the tree also twists as the trunk and raffia and wire are twisted through the bends, the sap lines will twist and spiral around the trunkline. This means that removing bark along these sap lines will create sharis that also spiral around the trunk as it moves along its length. While you can on young stock force a twist in the live vein via cutting a spiral, the effect you get from twisting the trunk originally is far easier and i think a superior end result. A tree that has been twisted like this will also have the heart wood fibers twist and follow the twist of the shari making any carving via fiber pulling automatically follow the shari lines.
All in all a productive morning, turning some trees with no potential into material i am pretty excited to continue to develop into the future.
All the trees were bent pretty hard with some cracking and complaining heard from each one. I am not worried too much about their survival as they can tolerate this fairly easily and as this is the first time i have worked them i am not loosing much of a time investment if they fail. Nothing risked, nothing gained, and if you are going to do a high risk process on a bonsai it might as well be before it becomes valuable.
I hope the above inspires a few of you. The starting material for this technique can be found in most peoples backyards, most bonsai nurseries and every club sale day. You can grow these whips from cutting fairly quickly and easily also if you are struggling to find it in the wilds.
I would recommend everyone give it a go, its a very easy way to create good material at a very low cost. Why not make a heap and sell some on! People are always after twisty junipers and you will be helping to lift the average of quality stock in this country!
This post will likely be the first of many documenting this tree’s progress from stock through to ‘bonsai’ over the next few years.
I haven’t had a post like this for a long time because I have been actively reducing my collection to a more manageable size, which hasn’t seen much rough stock make it onto my benches. At the same time, the trees i have kept continue to develop and become refined which hasn’t really seen much rough development type work, until………..
Recently myself and a friend came across a large amount of stock which you will likely start to see show up on the blog as we develop it and progress it towards a higher level of refinement.
It’s actually a bit of a funny story really how we ended up with all this material.
A good mate Dave, (well his name is not Dave, i am using Dave to give him some anonymity, his name is actually Jeff) did a drastic cut back of his collection at the recent Bonsai Northwest show. He sold somewhere in the vicinity of 25 trees leaving his collection compact and manageable. Now Jeff didn’t want to expand his collection much beyond this level but he did want to add a single Juniper to the mix, something a little less refined than what he had previously sold so he had a project to work on and develop.
I respect Jeff’s general approach to bonsai. He has had previously a huge collection and has cut it back savagely on several occasions. I have asked him about this and he essentially came to realise that what he really enjoyed about the bonsai process was taking stock and refining it, styling it and making it into what would be accepted as a bonsai. From this point forward however, he got little enjoyment from the often mundane ongoing refinement and maintenance, so he now builds a collection, then sells of components of it and starts the process a fresh with new owners enjoying taking his creations deeper into the refinement phase. It takes a fair amount of self reflection and self honesty i think to come to such a realisation and then decide that its ok to select a component of the bonsai process that you enjoy and are good at to focus on, essentially being somewhat unique in your bonsai practice compared to the general community.
Anyway, i digress.
So Jeff had told me he wanted just one new juniper, and as fate would have it i had just visited another good friend Kris’s new garden where he had just put aside a bunch of junipers and pines he wanted to get rid of.
Kris is another grower I really respect. He is pretty humble and wouldn’t admit the following but he produces some really great stock and trees, all of which he has produced by reverse engineering Japanese photos of shohin bonsai and rough material. The stock he passed on to us was in the throw out pile so don’t use the below as examples of his work, but just know he has produced some amazingly good material over the years.
So to cut a long story short, after taking Jeff to get a single tree, we ended up leaving with 30 pieces of material and left a pile of pines to be picked up at a later stage.
Essentially that is how Jeff set out to get one tree and came back with 30.
Needless to say, you will be seeing a lot of this stock on the blog being worked and developed over the coming years.
Below is is one of the first I have worked, and have named ‘The Octopus’.
Like most of the stock, this is its first real styling since being wired for movement during its early creation. The material need to develop its foliage and trunk further so it will be grown as styled stock in development rather than go into a bonsai pot. As a result the ‘final’ image below looks scrappy and messy. This is somewhat intentional as all I want to achieve this styling is to establish some branch positioning and trunk lines. As they are setting in place, i will also work to tighten up and get back budding on the areas that will become future branch pads. During this process it can look unruly as health, vigor and growth are what i am targeting over neatness.
Typical of most stock that has been grown uninterrupted for a number of years, this tree was full of dead shoots, old pruning stubs and leggy foliage. Cleaning up that was the first priority which gave me a better understanding of the branches and trunk movement. For anyone overwhelmed or stuck on a piece of material i cannot recommend doing a basic foliage and trunk clean up enough. Doing this clean is how you get to know the material and you often discover features within the tree and get ideas for the styling moving forward.
Post cleanup, i began to introduce some shari into the two main trunk lines.
Above: The beginning of shari’s trying to follow the trunk movement.
The incorporation of shari into juniper bonsai are beneficial on a few levels.
Firstly from a design sense, the shari adds a great white contrast to the green foliage and orange trunk line acting almost as a highlight to draw your eye into the movement.
Secondly, by reducing the area of live trunk but maintaining a similar amount of foliage above forces the trunk to thicken the existing live areas at a rate faster than if the whole trunk was growing. You see this in live vein creating where the vein ‘muscles up’ and bulges as a large amount of sap and resources is channeled through a reduced area. This can be manipulated further by leaving the live areas of bark in spots you want to thicken, ie. a live vein either side of a trunk will only see the trunk expand in those directions, creating more side to side thickening than if a similar amount of growth was to occur on a fully live trunk. But i digress again……
At this point i hadn’t really thought about angles, fronts or trunk-lines so after some pondering and some wiring i shaped the tree into a strange composition that i quite liked. I aimed to continue the movement that Kris had formed early on and also establish some flow within the composition which in turn directed branching and the likes. As i said above i was really just looking to set main lines so the end result is a bit messy. Neatness and refinement will come in future years.
It’s certainly going to be an unusual one. you can see why i have decided to call it ‘The Octupus’ with its twisted limbs going out in all directions.
I think i have set a good base building on the early movement in the lower trunks. I have also done a bit of a bad rough sketch which is below to mostly remind me of the direction it is heading.
From here a lot of growing needs to happen which will likely see this tree staying in larger grow containers for at least a few more years. I really want to thicken the trunk lines while also developing shari’s and the live veins. This is something that simply takes time but i think i will be able to simultaneously work on the foliage pad as i go, hopefully minimising the overall development timeline.
Anyway, that’s all for today, keep an eye out for the other trees from this batch which i will post as i get them worked on.
It’s been a while since i have grown Radiata pine. Early on in my collection i had a number but as i moved houses and the collection was scaled back each time the Radiata’s found alternative accommodation in other people’s gardens.
A couple of years ago i found myself in a pine forest, shovel in hand and figured it was time to get a few back into my own garden. I dug a couple of saplings with the intention of testing grafting white pine onto them (so far with no success. If you have had any success yourself grafting red, black, white or other pine species onto them let me know in the comments) but also freed from the shackles of the wild forest this tree that had a funny first bend and the beginnings of some nice bark.
Since digging it it has taken a couple of seasons to get it out of the terrible site soil and into a good mix. I also gave it a first styling last year sometime which for some reason i cant find any pictures of.
Recently, as i have been working through my other trees this radiata found it’s way back onto the bench to be de-wired and the secondary branching re-wired.
As you can see from the above it is still very early days but i do enjoy the unusual branch setting of this tree combined with the strange lazy first bend.
I am still experimenting with how i go about managing the foliage which i might post about when i work things out a little more.
As far as the future of this tree i think i could get it looking pretty close to the below sketch in a few more growing seasons.
Not sure if it will every be a truly excellent tree but for now i enjoy playing around with it and i do find it interesting to look at which will likely see it stay on my benches.
Radiata make great bonsai and as they are an invasive weed in our native forests they are an excellent candidate to dig up, gaining good material for yourself and ridding some native forest of a weed. Everybody wins!
They grow fast and strongly, take a lot of bending and other abuse, have great bark that develops fairly quickly, bud back and make good bonsai, get out there and grab yourself one!
Today’s post is a quick update on a tree that has been in the works for a number of years. I am not sure when I dug this originally but it was certainly a while ago, five years ago perhaps?
The juniper was originally a Sabina Juniper that came from a local school that was removing the garden bed in which it was planted. A good friend put me onto it and we both dug this and a couple of other similar trunks.
Once I had brought it back to some health from the original dig I set about grafting the foliage over to Itoigawa. While Sabina foliage is fine, after many years persevering and working on trees with sub par foliage i now look to grown trees with the best characteristics. With the amount of time you put into your bonsai i don’t want to be investing that time into a foliage characteristic that will always have down sides. Hence the grafting.
I ended up with two grafts that took and have been growing them out and strengthening them over the last couple of seasons prior to thinking about styling.
I finally got around to doing a rough first styling last night.
Obviously the tree has a long way to go, judging by the timelines with THIS tree, it will be another 2-3 years before this bonsai starts to properly take shape.
That said, it was good to get into this styling and set some structure that the future of the tree will grow upon.
As I worked my way through the basic pruning of the tree i decided to move the direction of the tree back towards the right hand side. As part of this re-directing of the movement of the trunk over to the right, i also began modifying the deadwood to reinforce this movement. I will also need to grow the top of the tree further over toward the right as the tree progresses.
The dead wood still needs a lot of work, i need to spend a bit more time going over the bark and finding the live veins and cleaning dead bark from the deadwood sections as well as continuing to carve the shari and jins.
For carving I very much prefer hand tools for this carving. Chisels, large slip-joint pliers, branch splitters and various other tools all get a good work out. It’s a much slower way of carving but I think it creates a much more natural end result.
The one electric tool I do use is a wire brush on either an angle grinder or drill to strip hard to remove bark and smooth out the fibers from the hand carving………. But carving techniques are probably a topic for another post.
I am looking forward to finishing stripping the old bark so I can get some lime sulphur onto the wood and begin to get the contrast between all the colours to develop. This winter i plan on spending some more time on the dead wood so will post an update when it is further refined.
I also need to start thinking about what pot to put it in. I have a trip to Japan later this year to visit family and will keep an eye out while I am there but I’m still not entirely sure what style to use. If you have any ideas or good examples I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
With a new year upon us it marks a good time to change things up a little.
At the start of spring, Evan Marsh put me onto a cheap dosing attachment available from our friendly, faceless multinational hardware chain.
It has been a good addition to the garden so far as it’s ease of use has really upped the regularity of my feeding and all my trees are showing excellent health and growth as a result.
I always liked to think that i fed regularly but when i though back to when my last weekly feed was it was often months ago……. This new dosing attachment makes the process so simple and convenient i have been able to feed as i water and it has kept me to my intended schedules much more easily.
For those interested, THIS is the product in question, the Holman ‘Quickmix’ spray gun.
After the Quickmix discovery, then came the task of deciding what fertiliser to use. I tried some of my usual go to liquid feeds but their paste like consistency clogged some of the jets and just generally didn’t feed out very well in the Quickmix.
So after very little experimentation I have landed on the below system:
The fertiliser itself is intended for Hydroponics so has a good spectrum of nutrients and minerals but requires some preparation prior to use. It is a 2 part system where you need to mix a ratio of the crystals and water into 2 parts prior to combining the two into the Qickmix before you feed. It is my understanding that some of the minerals will re-crystalise if you leave the 2 parts mixed for any period of time so best to mix the two prior to feeding.
To use the Quick mix i add about 5mm of each 2 part solution tot he Quickmix and top up the bottle with water. Then i simply water using the gun. The gun has some adjustment for the dosing rate but as i have lower pressure from my water tank’s pump i just use the maximum rate. (more details about the dosing rates on the Holman website)
I have made my pre-mixed solutions in 2x 500mm bottles. I have been feeding each week and have so far used less than a 1/4 from each bottle. This stuff goes a long way! For $25 i think i will get several years worth of feeding done so i cant complain on the value side of things. All in all i am very happy with the system thus far. This combined with a slow release seems to be covering all the feed needs i have for now.
Just a quick update on how this tree is developing. It was in the workshop recently for a cleanup (mainly as an excuse to play with THIS).
It is proving to be both a really useful and fun tool to use around the collection. It’s an amazingly quick way to clean up deadwood, remove built up muck, staining and compact dirt from trunks and roots and even stones. Ive had trident maples with dark staining on their lower trunks for years, this is the first season they are clean!! Its a tool that is well worth the investment if you have similar tasks in your own trees.
The above comparison shows what 2 minutes can do with one of these tools. You can probably also see that it has removed a lot of the rotten, punky deadwood in the process leaving behind the harder heartwood which has saved another task. All i will need to do is a final hand clean and we are ready for a new coat of lime sulphur.
I am going to also give this ‘Alchohol & Resin’ wood hardener a go this year and see how that works in some of the more prone to rot areas.
As for the tree itself, it is building momentum and developing quickly now and i am contemplating on displaying it at a local show mid next year if it continues to go from strength to strength and i can get all the foliage as developed as the lower first branches pads are.
Its an interesting tree to look at over time as per the images below:
So back to the work, after a good cleaning the shari and deadwood was re-limesulphured and the bark somewhat cleaned up. Its growing into a nice tree.
While I had the tree on the bench i also thinned and shaped the live veins a little on the rear of the tree to further define them and ideally encourage them to ‘plump up’. Afterwards I gave the shari areas and jins a good fresh coat of lime sulphur and added some moss while I waited for things to dry. As I was applying the moss i also pulled and tied down the root on the left side that was hovering above the soil surface which I think was an easy improvement to make.
Next time this tree is on the bench I need to remove and likely re-wire the foliage and branching, but I am going to wait for things to fill in a little more before I do that, maybe next month’s task.
Nichigo Bonsai 