This small juniper was purchased for a specific purpose. The purpose was to use this in a Tanuki project. The trunk it was to be affixed to had some very sharp coil bends in it. While wrapping the whip into the groove, I was able to wire the whip as I went. All went well until at the very top I had to get the top third of the whip thru part of the coil. This amounted to bending the whip pretty hard ...and snap! Right in half it went. It broke just at the point on the trunk where I had removed all the foliage to facilitate getting the whip in the groove with no branches.
Oh well move on to something else with the thing. In looking at the whip, I found that it looked rather cool and might make a pretty good stand-alone tree. People use procumbens for beginner bonsai classes for a reason. You got to be a pretty bad artist to not get "something" out of a one-gallon shrub.
I made my dead wood first. I always begin with what I'm not going to use and decide if I can make jin out of it. If I can I also determine if it fits the design and will it add something to the design or detract. If they detract, they are kept very short and close to the trunk, if they fit the design and can help tell a story, I can leave them a little longer.
At this point I have started the wire. Now I don't know about you, but I wire trees. I mean wire trees, every little branch, even on big trees. People always tell me, "Man I wish I could make trees like you do, I mean you always get a good tree out of nothing." Well, that is achieved with wire. If you do bonsai, and you ain't doing styling till a tree is 100% wired, then you are just lazy. All bonsai should be wired. Even the trees in Gafu, Kokufu, Shuga, Taikan, and Omiya shows are wired. You can see it in the multitude of videos on you tube. When I say lazy, I don't mean you are a lazy person, I just mean you are rather lazy in your thinking on what bonsai is all about. It is about art, and you can't make art till "you" have control of the tree. That can only be achieved thru the judicious use of wire on "every" twig. People do clip and grow, and that is the tree being in control, not the artist. Thru clip and grow one can achieve an outline, but there is no artistry in that.
OK, I've said my peace. Thank you for listening.
Once I had the tree wired, I had to figure out how I was going to get the root ball from a one-gallon nursery container into a 4"x3"x1.25" pot. That's not much of a pot.
So, I started cutting...and cutting.
Make sure you cut away all the roots that grow above the bole of the tree. The bole is the transition zone between the part above and below the dirt. Soil line if you will. Nursery plants are always planted deep in a nursery container because they are mass produced and care is not taken in how they are planted; there is no root pruning or decisions made. Just pull it out of one container and plant it up in the next size up mashing in a big wad of potting soil. Sometimes the tree will be planted two or three inches deeper than it needs to be.
Typically, these junipers are propagated by cuttings. Of course, the cutting gets started too deep, then it up pots for a few years and then we get this one big root which was the original cutting and now it looks like a tap root. Now people that propagate tell me that cuttings don't have a tap root because they are not started from seed. You only get a tap root due to genetics of the seed sending down a tap root to anchor the seedling. So, if that's the case, what do we call the long root on the cutting that is pushed into the soil three plus inches, ensuring it stays anchored and not blow over in the wind, and gets in my way when I decide to repot and have to cut it off like a tap root. I still call it a tap root, because it served the same purpose as God grown trees.
OK I said my peace again. Thanks for listening.
So now I get the beauty shot. Nice basketweave Bigei pot and it fits perfectly.
The tree finished out at just a smidge over four inches from the soil.
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