It occurs to me that I didn't talk about a tree.
A friend of mine that grows a lot of material in the ground wanted to try his hand at growing twisted junipers. He soon found out that it's not quite as easy as it seems. He grew about ten of them. He kept one, sold off the others and decided to give to me the worst one. He said "just see what you can do with it, I thinks it's hopeless". It may be this is what I have done so far. The tree was given to me in the winter of 2015. I started to work on it in the spring of 2016.This is how it looked in 2015.
The tree is procumbens juniper and is rather coarse. It may be full size, procumbens and not
nana. The trunk had a terrible reverse taper due to the first twist of wire and the trunk escaping above the wire. The first twist of wire almost needs to be below ground level to keep from having the tiny waist in the trunk at the soil line. In the last photo above is the front of the tree I chose due to the reverse being the least in this view. Not perfect but doable. I also decided that the trunk was never going to work as two trunks, in which the trunk bulked equally after the wire started to bite in.
The first styling of the tree was in spring of 2016 after root trimming and getting into a first pot. The root ball was very manageable and easy to fit into the bonsai pot. Steve shovel prunes the roots every other year. He had said these were in the field for three years. The entire right trunk was jinned and stripped of bark and lime sulphur applied.
In the Fall of 2016 it looked like this. The dead wood has now bleached out and not so noticable.
The tree grew on it's own for the next year as I was busy with my failing wife and no work was done in 2017.
In the spring of 2018, I decided to work on the tree and put it into a much better pot. This pot by Toshu. The tree had grown alot since the repot and was essentially a bush now.
During the spring of 2018. The tree was pruned and allowed to grow and fill in. By Dec. of 2018 it was starting to look pretty good.