Graham, Walter, Vic, Judy, Brian - thanks all. High praise indeed!
Brian - when you mention that this tree's progress "appears effortless," you touched upon something that I think sets some of my works apart. I started out in bonsai buying a number of very nice trees from Brussels nursery in northern Mississippi when we lived near Memphis. Many of the trees were semi-tropicals. When we moved to Taos, New Mexico for three years, with its 7500 ft. high desert climate, a large number of my trees died despite all my efforts. However, some survived, but with large segments of the trees having died.
At first I was in despair, but I brought these partially dead trees with me when we moved here to bonsai-heaven in the Northwest ten years ago. After some time here, I noticed that these partially dead trees were developing into some of my most natural-looking trees. Nature had killed off the weakest, most expendable parts of the trees, like nature always does, but what remained was priceless. The trees were teaching me something, and I was fortunate enough to pay attention.
Over the years, this was confirmed with other trees: if I decided to kill and jin a branch, the design never looked all that convincing. But if I was just a bit too neglectful or too rough with the care or pruning, and the tree got stressed out, such that it had to sacrifice a branch to send the energy elsewhere - as it would in the natural scheme of things in the wild - it would chose more wisely than I ever would have which branch to sacrifice, and the design would look very convincingly natural.
That is exactly what has happened with this tree. Up here, I have learned to prune pines a bit differently than the usual method, resulting in very short needles after two years, but putting great stress on the tree to do so. If not careful, the tree can die. With this tree, however, the tree did not die, but it sacrificed certain branches. The ones it sacrificed, although worrisome to me at first, created a much more natural look than if I had controlled the design. By giving up that control, and employing a little courage, the tree has progressed to a far more natural state than I could ever have brought it to.
The pine technique I mention is peculiar to pines, but my generally low-maintenance, benign-neglect attitude towards all my trees has often resulted in similar serendipitous cataclysms and set-backs on a number of my other trees. The natural-looking top on the Threadbranch False cypress is one example, the evolving deadwood on the old Chinese elm is another, and so on.
The beauty of old survivors in nature stems largely from such cataclysms, as well as the slow attrition of vegetative areas as the ever-lengthening roots outgrow their ability to supply distal foliage with water and nutrients. Frequent root pruning and meticulous, obsessive watering and fertilizing in bonsai will result in lush juvenile growth if that's what one is after, but will never mimic the natural look that I prefer in bonsai.
