Hi Walter. To my eye, this is a more traditionally styled tree than the many of the more informal broom type trees that you often share here. But the caliper of the branches on this one top to bottom is very similar. In fact, some of the upper branches are quite a bit thicker than some of the lower ones. I know you’re not wedded to traditional styling, but to me it visually imparts a sameness to the branch structure that takes away some of the impact it might have if there was simply more girth on the lower branches and more of a difference in branch caliper top to bottom. So my questions are these - do you see this as an issue? If so, do you plan to correct it? If you did want to address this issue, how would you go about it using the techniques that you teach?
Thanks
Scott
Sure this is an issue, and I addressed it from day one. Trees like this one are made by letting a tree grow in the field and cutting back all branches to just leave a nice trunk with some taper hopefully. Then there will be buds all over the trunk and eventually many shoots. Then comes the selection of the shoots that are useful and the rest are discarded. With these remaining shoots a bonsai is built then.
The big problem is that these shoots are all of the same age and the upper ones due to apical dominance grow much stronger than the lower ones. If you don't work hard against this natural tendency right away you get a tree that has thicker branches on top than on the lower parts. This is a big fault in my eyes . But extremely hard to correct.
This kind of tree looks good with foliage but you see the faults without foliage. Therefore these are affordable while looking impressive. So I got it in full knowledge of the faults. Now I am working on correcting them for more than five years already. Unfortunately this is the variety Benichidori, I believe. It is extremely difficult to get to be dense .
The trick is to let the lower branches grow as long as they want to go over summer. The upper branches you cut back rather soon. Over summer this tree looks very strange. Eventually the lower branches will get thicker while the upper branches stay as they are. This can be done in a few years with many varieties. This variety , while it is lovely otherwise, makes the correction very difficult.
I will accept the challenge and continue working on this and hopefully you can see the progress over the next years.
I believe that this fault is more visible if you style a conventional bonsai looking tree. In fact very old natural trees quite often do have rather thin branches everywhere also in the lower parts. So in the Naturalistic Style this is not that much of a fault if at all.