grouper52
Masterpiece
Each January for the past 8 years I have gone for professional training conferences in sunny locations to escape the horrible Puget Sound gloom for a week. Many times I would go pre-bonsai shopping at various nurseries during my free time, and if I found something that interested me I would take it back to my hotel room, bare root it. throw it in a trash back with wet sphagnum moss around the roots, and transport it back home in my luggage. Kinda crazy that way, but it kept me off the streets and out of trouble. 
Brought trees back from Vegas, Phoenix and Palm Springs that way, some interesting species, and a few of them lived.
Here's one: an Atlas cedar from Palm Springs, IIRC. The owner of the nursery had cut the price down to $15 because, "No one here much wants them - they don't do well in this climate." Duh! It had an interesting root up high and a branch down low, so I got it, cut some off the top, and brought it home.
I planted it in a tall pot to make a cascade, but all I knew to do back then to bend a trunk was shear force, but the trunk was too thick. Then Dan Robinson taught me a technique he'd been perfecting of hollowing out the heartwood on conifers by making a longitudinal trench with a die grinder to weaken the branch. I did so on the trunk of this thing, put a right angle bend near the base, and kept the first branch only. It survived! That was about 3-4 years ago, and today I decided to transfer it into this great Sarah Rainer pot, and trim and wire for branch placement for the second year.
It's still a long way from where I'd like it to be, and this sort of refined styling is not my strong suit anyway, but I'll at least have the pleasure of some deadwood work on the remains of that trunk jutting down in the photo. And, since my wife, seeing the tree today, figured it was more her kind of tree than mine, and claimed it for herself, I'm absolved now of my compulsive need to butcher it into some sort of "Naturalistic" thing.
Brought trees back from Vegas, Phoenix and Palm Springs that way, some interesting species, and a few of them lived.Here's one: an Atlas cedar from Palm Springs, IIRC. The owner of the nursery had cut the price down to $15 because, "No one here much wants them - they don't do well in this climate." Duh! It had an interesting root up high and a branch down low, so I got it, cut some off the top, and brought it home.
I planted it in a tall pot to make a cascade, but all I knew to do back then to bend a trunk was shear force, but the trunk was too thick. Then Dan Robinson taught me a technique he'd been perfecting of hollowing out the heartwood on conifers by making a longitudinal trench with a die grinder to weaken the branch. I did so on the trunk of this thing, put a right angle bend near the base, and kept the first branch only. It survived! That was about 3-4 years ago, and today I decided to transfer it into this great Sarah Rainer pot, and trim and wire for branch placement for the second year.
It's still a long way from where I'd like it to be, and this sort of refined styling is not my strong suit anyway, but I'll at least have the pleasure of some deadwood work on the remains of that trunk jutting down in the photo. And, since my wife, seeing the tree today, figured it was more her kind of tree than mine, and claimed it for herself, I'm absolved now of my compulsive need to butcher it into some sort of "Naturalistic" thing.
