I found a rather tall 36 inch Juniperus horizontalis – Blue Rug Juniper at Nicks Garden Center in Aurora, Co. one summer day. It was completed covered in branches from the soil line all the way to the top which was arched over and growing back towards the pot about half way down to the soil. The tree was very expensive and I decided I would have to wait until fall when the nursery puts everything on sale. Hopefully the tree would still be there? I kept going back to check on the tree and finally the fall sale was under way. I paid the for tree and brought her home, yes its a her. This particular tree has a lot of movement in the trunk which I liked. I promptly cut off the section of tree that was growing down towards the soil and left a small jin on top. I have had this tree for an unknown number of years and at some point I did remove most of the branches on the bottom have of the trunk. At some point I did try an initial styling of the tree but did not really do a good job because of inexperience, but at least I tried. The copper wire stayed on this tree for a long time and the tree pretty much grew where ever it wanted. I left new branches alone and let them grow and with smaller newer branches starting about midway of the trunk graduating to larger branches developing higher up on the tree. The crown of the tree has numerous branches of all sizes. I did remove the old copper wire in an upstairs bedroom and that took a lot of time. After removing all of the old wire. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning out dead branches, cutting off of downward growing branches, cutting growth in crotches of the branches, thinning out each branch on the tree, cutting off insignificant small branches. After all of that I followed normal tradition and started to style the tree from the bottom up. I don’t always do that, sometimes I start from the top down! I started wiring branches and fanning them out into pads and kept going up the trunk and adding another layer on top of one another. Finally (days latter) I had worked my way up that trunk to the top of the tree. The top looked like it had 10 octopuses all growing out the top and all going in different directions. What a mess, but was there a great tree in this mess? The answer was yes, but it was slow to show itself. I started working on the branches that were the longest and wired them all the way down to the smallest branches. One of the keys was to thin out the foliage, small tiny new branches were mostly cut off and other branches were thinned out to provide alternating branches. This juniper species produces a lot of bar branches or almost bar branches. It is hard to try to wire these type of branches so best to cut one of them off. As soon as I finished wiring one larger branch I would move those branches into proper placement subject to change latter. I kept doing this working my around the tree trying to feather out the branches into an attractive design. I did use aluminum wire on the tree as copper wire is getting to be difficult for me to use now. It took days to wire all of these branches and placing them in proper position and filling in holes in the design. Finally I had to pick out some branches at the top of the tree to use for an apex. But which ones to pick? There were no branches on the very top of the tree, just she jin where I cut the tree back. I picked out 6 branches and wired them all and then the fun started. Watching the returning Japanese masters is a must for learning how to create an apex! You can do this by taking workshops with a master or watching videos produced by the masters themselves. I did both. A good idea is to be a silent observer during workshops being run by professional Bonsai master. Our club charges $10 to following the master around for 8 hours. That is pretty cheap to learn a lot from great Bonsai artists. Back to the apex branches, its seems I did good job of picking branches. I did up size the wire on these branches to something larger so the heavier wire would the apex branches in the proper position. After all of this I got to play with all of the branches and spend some quality time moving them all around and spacing them out. The more I did this the better the tree became with the crowning jewel being the apex. This is a slanting style Literati tree and the upper foliage was designed to flow to the right side of the tree on purpose. I am going to have to find a pot for this tree. It will be important to let this tree send out runners and then clip them back with Scissors to encourage the foliage to thicken up. Spider mites did attack the tree last year and will have to be watched for in 2021.
My camera is absolutely the worst camera in the world and the memory card on it died last night and the flash died a couple of years ago. My apologies for the poor photo. The angle of the photo is not good either, but I think you can get that some great trees can come from nursery stock, not that I am saying my tree is great.
