Have you tried pushing the tree with fertilizer and water? It looks like it is lacking both; just my observation no offense intended. There are some people in bonsai that have this kind of convoluted opinion that conifers should be kept on the dry side and denied fertilizer except at a minimum.
Oh sure! I took the fertilizer tea bags off for the photo.
When that picture was taken, last November, it had only been in that pot since July. The story: the tree was collected 20 to 25 years ago by the owner of Lone Pine nursery in California. It got boxed in a box of pumice. Sat in the back of the nursery.
Around 21 years ago, they had Boon graft on some roots, and two approach grafts if Kishu. Only one of the Kishu grafts took, there was no aftercare. Still I. The same box.
Every year, Boon goes there to buy raw material to work on. Every year, he’d see the old Utah, and asked if they wanted to sell it. Every year, the same response, “No thanks, we’ve been meaning to start working it up.”
Year after year after year...
Until last summer! They said, “yeah, we’ve been meaning to, just haven’t gotten around to it, so yeah, we’ll sell it!”
So, Boon told them, while eyeing the rotten wooden box, that if they could deliver it to his place, he’d buy it. Well, they did! Sorta. The box fell apart as they were trying to get it out of the back of the pickup truck.
Emergency potting into whatever pot was handy, and what was handy was my old pot my olive used to be in. So, all that happened a year ago last summer.
Last November, I was at Boon’s looking at all the raw stock he had gotten in, and noticed the tree sitting in my old pot. So, I teased Boon with, “You know, if a tree is in someone’s pot, it’s their tree!” So, he says, “Good tree! Bad pot! You want to buy it?” Lol!!!
And I took a closer look at the trunk, the incredible deadwood, and made a snap decision to buy it. I have a much smaller Western juniper that I grafted Kishu onto, but nothing of this scale. So, I figured this would be my one big (huge!) yamadori juniper.