Many years ago in my first year (2009) of trying to be a Bonsai artist I visited a nursery in Fort Collins, Co. I was wondering around just looking at stuff and stumbled across what looked like a very tall Holly tree. The leaves all looked just like Holly leaves which I have seen a lot of over the years. The tree itself was straight up and down and had a lot branches everywhere. The tree label said it was an Oak tree, I was absolutely sure this could not be true with leaves like it did. I hauled the tree into the sales office and asked about it being an Oak tree and the staff assured me it was an Oak. Now what I am to do? I decided to get it anyway and paid for the tree and stuffed it in my 4Runner. The tree was around 5 feet tall and I buried the tree in a gravel bunker for the winter. The tree stayed in the bunker for years growing up but not out to much. I had to remove the tree from bunker to make way for building display benches in that area. The tree was very tall now and the trunk had thicken up to. I managed to get the tree out of the gravel bunker by cutting off the roots sticking out the drainage holes in the bottom of the plastic pot. I had to chop the tree to, way to tall for the garage now, so off with its top and the tree back budded well below the chop mark. So I now had around 10″ of dead trunk sticking above the new branch buds. Well I let the tree grow where ever it wanted and have pruned the branches back several time. I did remove most of the dead top of the tree now and there is a small stump left which has been carved. I still might just go ahead and remove the whole thing. The leaves on the tree when I purchased it were around 3″ long. Right now the tree has so many branches and leaves the leaves have reduced on their own to around the size of your thumbnail. I decided to finally style the tree in a natural style. I repeatedly allowed suckers to grow from the base of the tree to enlarge it and give it some flare to it. They have all been removed now. Bending the branches proved to rather easy using the proper sized aluminum wire. The tree still needs more work on ramification and filling in some holes and maybe even removing some of the upper branches after more ramification. Time to start looking for a pot to!
Gallery 09-28-2020:
