Accidents will happen

Hi, everyone!

I have a Shore Pine (Pinus Contorta Contorta) that I repotted from a nursery container about 6 weeks ago. Last night it blew over in a storm and shattered the pot… a nice Dave Giorgi pot! :sob:

I don’t currently have a pot to fit it, so we will build a box for it. My questions are these:

  1. Do I continue to use the 1:1:1 mix I originally potted it in, or use only pumice?
  2. How long will I need to keep it in the box before changing to a bonsai pot?
  3. Does it have a chance?

The candles have been elongating, but none have delineating needles.
It has been cool and rainy all day.

Thanks to all for any help!
DragonLady

I would use the same substrate, use a wooden box sized more or less as the broken pot and once the root ball is stable (1-2 years) , it will be easy to slip fit it into a proper pot.

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Wow! That was fast!

Thanks, Stavros!

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It really seems like Murphy’s Law was written with bonsai in mind; if something can go wrong, it will go wrong! But that’s where our skills are forged, in accidents just like this! I hope you’re tree recovers well. Going forward you can wire down your pots to your bench and that will keep them blowing away. We live and learn with these sort of incicidents. I think @Stavros ‘s advice is spot on, good luck!

What a bummer! - Why don’t you glue the pot together from the pieces with the same epoxy putty that was used by Peter Warren to fill in the holes in the maple? that two part epoxy putty is really strong and meant to glue rock. Give it then a sanding on the outside and that’s it. You can then use the same pot and in the future you can decide if it stays there forever or not. It would definitely be a great reminder to tie pots to the bench when the potential is there for it to blow in a storm… I’d bet you’d love the pot more as it has a history.

If you repair the pot as @rafi suggests, do it with gold, it’s called Kintsugi, and is an ancient Japanese artform in itself :wink: It is a means of analyzing the idea of loss, synthesis, and improvement through destruction and repair or rebirth image

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Yeah that’s what I had in mind… by all means but I would perhaps paint the ridge with gold paint but gold itself… a bit expensive isn’t it?

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Yes, I guess it depends on the original value of the pot. If you wanted to maintain the value you could probably do it with ground-up gold leaf mixed into resin, you can buy gold leaf by the sheet.
Or, if it was a cheap pot originally (I know this particular one wasn’t), then why not repair it and then go at it with gold paint, or a gold marker pen. I really like the idea of the break becoming part of the pot’s history, and celebrating it like you would a jin or shari :smile:

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Thanks everyone for the thoughts.

I’m not sure if repair is possible. There are a lot of pieces. My husband says the pot will not have enough structural integrity to ever hold an appropriate sized tree, as it was a larger sized pot.

On a side note. The day the pot broke was my birthday. My kids came from all over the county to surprise us. My son, who is in the Air Force, built a box for me. Deep respect to Dave Giorgi, but that box is the one that will always mean the most to me!

Deep Respect to this Community, too! If I get it back together, I will post a picture. Thanks, all!

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