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As is often the way, I planned to do some minor maintenance and ended up spending many hours over several days restyling one of my trees.
It’s 3 years since I last wired THIS tree. Its always been a strange one (which is part of the reason I enjoy working with it) and its a tree I have been working it over a long time frame now. Like many of my trees it wears the marks of bad decisions and mistakes, but now that it is showing some age in the bark, i feel most of that can be forgiven.
It all started with pulling needles. The tree had be de-wired a year or two prior and been left to grow. the foliage, particularly after last season, had become dense and the yearly task of pulling needles and pruning shoots was due in the lead up to winter.
As seems to be the way, as I plucked the first branch, I began to think about its positioning. I set about wiring a piece of reinforcing bar into the tree so I could pull the main branch back and to the side a little. From there I was doomed, now the foliage of the branch was not well aligned and I knew I would not be able to help myself from wiring that branch and from there, the rest of the tree.
As i pulled needles i also cut branches, removing a number from the upper 1/3rd of the tree. I also wired the first branch and one of the directional branches in the apex. By pulling the main branch back, it allowed for a slight change in front and these wired branches confirmed I could make it work.
You can probably also notice on the left side a few branches roughly tied down to test potential positions prior to fully wiring.
Wiring was split over 3 days, juggling family activities and work. This actually broke up what would otherwise be a fairly arduous task into manageable sessions. Post wiring, I am pretty happy with where the tree is at now. It’s another one that feels like its found it’s feet with this year’s work.
Cutting off the handful of branches I did has really exposed the upper trunk and shows off it’s movement well, and this contrasts with the bolt upright trunk below. This makes for a pretty strange combination but one that i think is interesting and a very unique tree in Australia, if not further a field.
It does remind me a fairly famous trident maple from the Aichi-En in Japan which I posted a pic of years ago in this post. If only this pine would develop over the years to that quality and standard! I can only hope.
THIS shimpaku is one I have had kicking around the benches for years. It’s been through numerous styling’s but has never really found its feet.
After a fair bit of growth post last time it was styled.
This tree has always been caught between an interesting trunk, shari and deadwood and an overpowering foliage mass. As you can see from the image above a lot of the great elements in the trunk are lost amongst the mass of green.
The easiest way to solve this issue was essentially to remove some foliage. After much staring and pondering while watering it on the benches I finally decided to make a drastic change.
I cut the top half of the foliage off. You can already see the difference it makes and how the best features of the tree (being the trunk and shari) are now much more prominent.
I set about stripping the bark from the upper areas and and set it back on the bench for the dead wood to dry.
After a month or so it got a high pressure wash via one of my favorite tools and a coat of lime sulphur which has really made everything pop.
Next steps from here is a re-pot and a re-styling to put all the foliage into its new places. I will likely do this over winter in the coming months. While it does need a wire, you can get a sense of the new style already in its roughly pruned state.
Pots are the next challenge, with the rectangle now being very much the wrong dimensions. I have a few options with a couple below (they both look a little big due to foreshortening in the picture but i think both could work). I am leaning toward the square as it is a little smaller but I also like the hexagonal pot.
I will make the final decision after i have fully wired things out in case that changes my thoughts.
All in all i am pretty happy with the change and finally feel this tree has found itself. Until the next post………..
Wow, looks like almost a year since the last post. Time flys!
I’ve been doing bits an pieces since the last post, in the shed, teaching at clubs and doing the odd demo but for the most part have not been documenting much of it. Life has been pretty busy and typing up blog post is often down the to do list.
That said, i did remember to take a few (bad) phone pics of the below tree.
The tree in question was one i was gifted and had owned for a while. It was then was passed onto another friend, and then several years later it found it’s way back into my yard.
It started life as a garden nursery tree complete with pretty lumpy graft, leggy growth and circling roots. It was originally given to me as the original owner lived by the ocean and the salt spray was leading to it suffering. I nursed it back to health and cut most of it off, leaving two branches essentially. One became the main branch and the other the head. I tipped it on an angle to make better use of the swollen lower root base and gave it a first styling.
It was shortly after this first styling that i gave it to a friend who grew it here in Ballarat for probably close to 4 or 5 years.
Cut to a few weeks ago when i was visiting him and his collection and the tree ended up coming home with me once more. It had really filled in well and provided a heap of new options to explore so i decided to give it it’s second re-styling.
The basic steps i took are shown above, I removed a number of un-needed branches and thinned old needles, then made the major adjustment by pulling the main branch down with the help of a branch bending jack. From there it was just a matter of wiring out the foliage to fit the new style.
The tree sat on the back deck for a couple of days where i made a few adjustments as i got used to the tree. It had a weak first branch on the right hand side so those shoots got minimal wire but they all got mostly into place.
There is now some filling out to go but i have been feeding to build up the energy over autumn to set up next springs buds and i am expecting i will get much of the filling out i need next season.
All in all i really like this tree, and given it original owner has since passed away i am glad to have this tree back in the yard as a little memento of some good times we spent styling bonsai together. It’s also nice it spend some time with my other friend in between, it’s one of the unique things with bonsai that a tree can travel between many hands, each leaving its mark.
I’ve had this red pine a while now and first worked on it back in 2016. In the 9 years I’ve been growing it it’s been through a few phases and has been displayed, grown out, brough back in, maintained and generally been in and out of the workshop a few times each of the years I’ve owned it.
It’s even had a couple of post about it POST 1, POST 2
More recently it has really outgrown its previous style.
It’s pretty clear from the above image that the foliage has well out grown the trunk size. It feels heavy and makes the trunk seem thin and essentially out of scale.
I’d been thinking a lot about this tree, staring at it each day i was watering, pondering options and playing out scenarios in my head.
I’d always wanted a decent bunjin tree and this tree always seemed half way there, so after much thinking and with a whole lot of needle plucking on the horizon i decided to make the jump. With branch cutters in hand, i began to cut.
I took off the first, second, third, fourth and a bunch more branches as i worked my way up from bottom to top.
After more cutting and some wire i got the tree into its new shape.
I’m pretty happy with the new style. Looking back to the original styling in 2016, i think that this revision fits the tree even more than that first styling. Back in 2016 i didn’t have the growth i would have needed to make the above image so I don’t think it was something i had even considered back then. It really was a case of having to go on a bit of a journey to end up at this style. It highlights how Bonsai change over time and evolve and you have to be open to that to maintain, reshape and move bonsai through time.
It’s really worth actively reassessing your trees and always looking for new ideas and solutions. It can be really rewarding and provide some refreshing change, and in the case of this tree i think that approach has resulted in a better tree!
Of course, now the hunt for an appropriate pot begins………..
Below is a pictorial post explaining the steps i went through when styling this tree. I had previously adjusted the planting angle in the last post and now had to adjust the foliage mass in reaction to this. I’ve done my best to explain the thinking process for each of the steps for each of the below images to give some insight into my thoughts and process. I hope it’s interesting.
Above: Where we got to in the last post. The trunk was tilted to the left but the foliage wasn’t pruned or adjusted to the new angle. From a balance perspective, i feel that there is too heavy a visual weight in proportion to the trunk.
Above: the tree’s branching was pruned a little and thinned with a major branch on the lower right removed to begin lightening the canopy. I fully wired the remaining branches and began to think about the styling. I felt that the foliage was too large and removed the focus from the trunk. Its mass dominated and reinforced a feeling that the trunk was thin.
I also didn’t like the direction the tree lead the eye and felt that combined with the trunk movement it drew the eye away from the tree. I decided that i wanted the tree to move back toward the base of the trunk creating kind of a circular composition. This decision kicked off the below responses.
Above: to facilitate the lower branch moving rightwards, i had to remove a couple of branches to create space for this key branch to occupy. I also began to compact the apex region slightly with the overall aim of creating a smaller and more compact foliage mass.
Above: As i moved the lower branch across i removed another branch to ease the congestion the shifting branch created. Having began to move this key low branch, I felt that the foliage was feeling a little stretched out again taking the eye away from the trunk-line.
Above: I pulled the lower branch across further and brought it upward to further compact the foliage mass and bring it all in closer to the trunk. This also helped fill in the gaps left by the removed branches from the previous image. This is essentially where i will leave this round of work. I will let it fill in this season and perhaps revisit the wiring in autumn.
Above: a quick scribble to give a sense of what a more fully filled in canopy might look like.
Above: A quick couple of images to give comparison of where the tree was when i started working on it and where it is now. I am very happy with where the tree is at now and look forward to continuing to develop it over the next few years.
This is a bit of a different post covering a tree that has found its way back into my collection lately.
I originally grew this as stock from a cutting and put some early bends into the trunk line. Soon after the wiring of the cutting i gave it to a friend who did the bulk of the work in forming it into a tree and growing it on.
As luck would have it, the tree recently found its way back into my collection.
Stupidly, i didn’t take any before pics, but when i received the tree i re-potted it, changing the angle a bit and fully wired the tree removing a branch or two in the process. All in all, building on my friends work, its forming into an interesting little tree!
Above: The tree post re-pot and styling.
But…….. it still has a while to go.
Normally a shimpaku of this thickness i would keep as stock and grow hard and fast to thicken the trunk and develop the shari’s and live veins. Luckily we cut shari’s into the trunk last year but i still need to focus on developing trunk thickness and continue to develop the sharis as things thicken.
This is somewhat difficult in a tree that i don’t really want to grow out of shape or get too much larger. What i want is to thicken the trunks and keep the tree’s foliage well managed.
The solution is………. Sacrifice branches.
Above: The two main trunk/branch lines.
The tree is built off two main trunk lines as per the diagram above and ideally i would like to thicken both of these lines. To do this i will likely grow two sacrifice branches.
Above: likely locations of sacrifice branching (shown in pink).
I will locate two sacrifice branches (one per trunk line) but in slightly different locations. The sacrifice branch in the apex will be toward the top of the trunk line as i want the entire upright trunk to thicken.
The second sacrifice will be on the first branches trunk line, It will be located back from the first branch tip though, to avoid the branch holding the foliage from thickening too much, keeping it in scale with the other branches.
Above: the image in my head i am aiming for.
I will likely also wire the sacrifice branches into interesting shapes reinforcing the tree’s movement so i can use them as future jins.
To further facilitate this thickening i will be making a shari on the opposite side of the trunk to the shari’s we have already made. I’ve covered this a bit more in THIS post. I am hoping this speeds up the whole process quite a bit. Also keeping the majority of the foliage trimmed and compact should direct a lot of energy into the sacrifice branches which will be left un-pruned. Hopefully allowing them to grow quickly and do their work.
That said however, i do expect this process to take a number of years to get to the thickness level i am after.
A very quick update post of THIS pine.
From where we last left off, the pine had been un-wired during the previous season and had grown out quite a bit, hence needing a little tidy up. Recently toward the end of this last winter, it made it into the work shop for a quick wiring before the candles got too fragile.
Above: de-wired and grown out of shape.
Above: The first step was bending the lower branch down further to try and separate the foliage masses a little more into individual zones.
Above: Post wiring.
I only wired what was needed which essentially meant only the main branches and sub branches were wired. I am pretty happy with the way it turned out and think it is evolving nicely.
For comparisons sake, below is how it was in 2021 vs. after the styling today.
the combination of a narrower apex area and a more separated lower branch all work together towards a solid slow improvement over the years.
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.
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.
Nichigo Bonsai 