grouper52
Masterpiece
Here’s a post that might be of interest to both bonsai enthusiasts and to Right Wing gun nuts - didn’t know whether to post this in the Karaoke Bar or on a more general forum. 
The story's setting is the Right Wing extremist part: My wife and I, both lifetime members, decided to drive down to the Las Vegas area to attend again the Four Day Defensive Handgun Course offered at Front Sight, out in the Nevada desert. We attended with our neighbors and one of their sons, who flew down and met us there.
OK - on to bonsai, for those not already turned off by that sort of extremist talk. We drove down on a meandering route that took us far from the usual Interstates and main roads. I’m a desert rat by nature, and I get really affected about early January by the gloom and wet here in the Northwest winters, so every year I take a week or so off at this time of year and go somewhere in the desert. This was my yearly drying out vacation, so a leisurely drive through the beauty of the winter desert was a great source of recuperation and restoration for me. It was also a chance to scope out, just for fun, available collecting sites, though I expected to find none down in Nevada.
Parts of the rural areas we drove through on the smaller roads, however, were chock full of Rocky Mountain junipers of great age and beauty. None, however, were in sites where the conditions would allow successful collecting. I had collected RMJs and Ponderosa pines from such areas on three occasions before with Dan Robinson, and had been taught well the signs to look for to insure good trees with decent chances of survival. In those sorts of dry areas, typically, the roots would run many yards deep into the soil, and there would be no small feeder roots close to the surface to sustain the tree after collecting it by severing the main, deep roots. However, in the winter, there might be such small feeders roots in close to the trunk if the junipers were growing in pockets in the right sort of rocks, where the soil in the pocket would allow the tree to form a little root pad to collect the precious winter moisture. Against our expectations, we did see one such area on our off-the-beaten-path drive south to Las Vegas.
So on the morning we left Las Vegas we stopped at a Home Depot and picked up the few simple collecting tools we might need. By the afternoon we were back in that location, and got out of our truck to reconnoiter the area to see if there were any good trees there situated in conditions that would give a decent chance of survival. There were at least a few that showed promise, so we went and got permission to collect, and came back. By now it was clear that we would have only an hour and a half of sunlight left, so we set out from a nearer area, through some snow, and then up a muddy scree slope to some limestone rocks that looked promising.
In that particular location, within easy walking/climbing distance from the road, the pickings actually turned out to be smaller than we had thought, but we did find this beauty sitting in a small pocket in a cleft in a small exposed limestone cliff. There was a small set of roots in the soil in the pocket - enough, I thought, to give the tree a decent chance of survival. Following the techniques Dan perfected over a lifetime of collecting, I set about collecting this beauty, while my wife went elsewhere to look further. The tree collected fairly easily.
It’s a big tree, standing exactly four feet above the soil line. The pictures show some of the gorgeous nebari and deadwood features. It will sit as it is for at least several years recovering and growing new roots in its little “papoose wrap” before I do anything more with it. Shorter term, it may show signs of death in the next few months, but I won’t really know whether or not it survived the transplant until June. We’ll see. They're hard to predict.
The story's setting is the Right Wing extremist part: My wife and I, both lifetime members, decided to drive down to the Las Vegas area to attend again the Four Day Defensive Handgun Course offered at Front Sight, out in the Nevada desert. We attended with our neighbors and one of their sons, who flew down and met us there.
OK - on to bonsai, for those not already turned off by that sort of extremist talk. We drove down on a meandering route that took us far from the usual Interstates and main roads. I’m a desert rat by nature, and I get really affected about early January by the gloom and wet here in the Northwest winters, so every year I take a week or so off at this time of year and go somewhere in the desert. This was my yearly drying out vacation, so a leisurely drive through the beauty of the winter desert was a great source of recuperation and restoration for me. It was also a chance to scope out, just for fun, available collecting sites, though I expected to find none down in Nevada.
Parts of the rural areas we drove through on the smaller roads, however, were chock full of Rocky Mountain junipers of great age and beauty. None, however, were in sites where the conditions would allow successful collecting. I had collected RMJs and Ponderosa pines from such areas on three occasions before with Dan Robinson, and had been taught well the signs to look for to insure good trees with decent chances of survival. In those sorts of dry areas, typically, the roots would run many yards deep into the soil, and there would be no small feeder roots close to the surface to sustain the tree after collecting it by severing the main, deep roots. However, in the winter, there might be such small feeders roots in close to the trunk if the junipers were growing in pockets in the right sort of rocks, where the soil in the pocket would allow the tree to form a little root pad to collect the precious winter moisture. Against our expectations, we did see one such area on our off-the-beaten-path drive south to Las Vegas.
So on the morning we left Las Vegas we stopped at a Home Depot and picked up the few simple collecting tools we might need. By the afternoon we were back in that location, and got out of our truck to reconnoiter the area to see if there were any good trees there situated in conditions that would give a decent chance of survival. There were at least a few that showed promise, so we went and got permission to collect, and came back. By now it was clear that we would have only an hour and a half of sunlight left, so we set out from a nearer area, through some snow, and then up a muddy scree slope to some limestone rocks that looked promising.
In that particular location, within easy walking/climbing distance from the road, the pickings actually turned out to be smaller than we had thought, but we did find this beauty sitting in a small pocket in a cleft in a small exposed limestone cliff. There was a small set of roots in the soil in the pocket - enough, I thought, to give the tree a decent chance of survival. Following the techniques Dan perfected over a lifetime of collecting, I set about collecting this beauty, while my wife went elsewhere to look further. The tree collected fairly easily.
It’s a big tree, standing exactly four feet above the soil line. The pictures show some of the gorgeous nebari and deadwood features. It will sit as it is for at least several years recovering and growing new roots in its little “papoose wrap” before I do anything more with it. Shorter term, it may show signs of death in the next few months, but I won’t really know whether or not it survived the transplant until June. We’ll see. They're hard to predict.
WOW I am honored! I will say if there is any possible way, I would love to meet you all. 
