0soyoung
Imperial Masterpiece
A friend (Arlene) gave this juniper to me in the fall of 2012. I believe it is a juniper chinensis ‘Blue Point’. Certainly not the best thing I’ve seen for bonsai, but I figured, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”. The following spring, March 2013, I transplanted it from the box store ‘decorative’, cubic foot, molded white plastic pot she had it in, to a ceramic training pot. It turned out that it was planted atop a sizeable rock inside the pot, so the root reduction was not as severe as it might seem on first blush.
I let it just sit in its new pot for a year, occasionally giving some thought to what to what I might try to make of it. The left side (in the above photo) was a collection of more than a dozen long vertical stems. The secondary trunk, to the right, split into three main stems. In my estimation, removing it would remove all possibility of it being anything other than the image of a mushroom or hut stone, so I decided to head down a twin-trunkish path – chopped it to a fraction of what it was and did what I could to wire those 3 right branches to a horizontal position.
By November 2014 I realized that the tree stems on the minor trunk needed to be guyed down. My wiring simply wasn’t going to hold. I wired a pair of bamboo sticks to the pot and then guyed the three stems to those ‘poles’ (I also had a tie-down from the main trunk group to the bamboo to ease pressure on the roots on the opposite side of the pot). I also did a bit of wiring to position the foliage for sun exposure and to place some foliage into the middle of the ring of remaining stems on the ‘main branch’ side.
It stayed in this ‘Kon Tiki’ configuration until the end of this past February when I removed the mess and left it to grow until a few days ago. Then, in a fit of ennui, I found that there may be some hope. Right now I wish the secondary’s foliage was lower and closer to the main group; regardless of which of these two views is the future front.
I’ve yet to show it to Arlene.
I let it just sit in its new pot for a year, occasionally giving some thought to what to what I might try to make of it. The left side (in the above photo) was a collection of more than a dozen long vertical stems. The secondary trunk, to the right, split into three main stems. In my estimation, removing it would remove all possibility of it being anything other than the image of a mushroom or hut stone, so I decided to head down a twin-trunkish path – chopped it to a fraction of what it was and did what I could to wire those 3 right branches to a horizontal position.
By November 2014 I realized that the tree stems on the minor trunk needed to be guyed down. My wiring simply wasn’t going to hold. I wired a pair of bamboo sticks to the pot and then guyed the three stems to those ‘poles’ (I also had a tie-down from the main trunk group to the bamboo to ease pressure on the roots on the opposite side of the pot). I also did a bit of wiring to position the foliage for sun exposure and to place some foliage into the middle of the ring of remaining stems on the ‘main branch’ side.
It stayed in this ‘Kon Tiki’ configuration until the end of this past February when I removed the mess and left it to grow until a few days ago. Then, in a fit of ennui, I found that there may be some hope. Right now I wish the secondary’s foliage was lower and closer to the main group; regardless of which of these two views is the future front.
I’ve yet to show it to Arlene.
