Years ago I purchased a Cercis canadensis – Redbud Bonsai sapling from a large nursery going out of business. The tree was very tall and thin and not much to look at. But I bought it anyway. I took it home and for some unknown reason decided to make it into a cascade or semi-cascade whether it wanted to be one or not. I selected a medium sized tall blue cascade made by Chuck Iker and planted her. The tree did have a nice trunk coming out of the soil with some movement in it. So cascade was the design of the day for the tree. Sometime latter I did design the tree into a semi-cascade and left it alone. For the next several years the tree struggled to live. The main branches would die back quit a bit and I would have to start over growing them. In 2019 I installed shade cloth and placed the tree under it around July. The tree was again placed under shade cloth this spring and what a difference that made. Growth everywhere, nice big healthy branches with nice big leaves. I do mean big around the size of a large orange. I was sitting looking at last night and decided to work on it. By the end of the night it was re-designed still in a semi-cascade design. I was now able to form and apex on the tree using a large branch that seemed to grow out of know where. I finished the tree up when I was just about to run out of wire. All I could say was it had really large leaves on it. It may never be loved by the majority of the Bonsai artists. But I don’t care as I fell in love with it just as it is, big, beautiful and gorgeous. It looks really great from about 10 feet away from it when you can take in the whole tree. I am keeping it. I do not know what variety of Red Bud it is. It does have magenta flowers in the spring.
Gallery 08-29-2020:
