On a trip to NC I finally found some nursery stock pines. Grabbed a couple mugo pines. Probably not the best buy, but I couldn’t pass it up. Looking forward to tending these.
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Hello,
These are mugo var pumillo, a dwarf cultivar. These are very slow growing.
Please keep us updated!
Max
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Lol, of course they are. 
It’s all good though, just happy to have some conifers to go with my 3 year old JBP seedling. I’ll be looking for more material while I’m up here…
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Cleaned out what little I could with my hands since I’m away. I noticed that both mugos have a double trunk. Think I could separate them without too much damage. I really only care about one trunk on each, but it would be cool to get 4 plants out of it.
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I don’t have a lot of experience with pines due to my zone. I would think that splitting the trunks and roots would be tough on the tree though. I would say clean them up, see what the trees are giving you too work with, and go from there. Look up some mother/daughter trunk designs to get some inspiration. Best of luck and keep us posted!
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I considered a mother/daughter design as well. In my initial cleaning of spent needles it looked like both trunks were the same size, so I didn’t know if that would work or not. Guess I’ll see. Hopefully I can get to it this week. I bought 4 plants this weekend, so I’ve got some work to do. 
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Here are the other two trees I got on my trip to NC. I was in a bit of a rush when looking through the nursery for these. I’m going to need a couple of hours and a trailer when I visit again. The blue spruce and pine tree I wanted were too big to fit into the SUV. Got a dwarf Alberta spruce (again, probably not a good buy) and a crape myrtle that had a base that I couldn’t pass up. $20 and $50 respectively.
The CM was super neglected. No soil in the top 20% of the pot. I added the potting soil that you see in the pic to at least get the roots covered, but they look like they’ve been uncovered for quite some time and have hardened. I’ve been looking for a CM since they’re the unofficial landscape tree of the area lol. I’m hoping to get this strong enough over the next few months for it to handle a major chop this coming spring. Ppl commit crape murder around here and chop their landscape trees like crazy. It’s kind of disturbing, but I’m about to do the same 
The base of the spruce looked good. I didn’t really have time to sift through the 30+ of these that they had. Decided on this one after having looked at 6-7 of them. Decided on this one because it had the widest base that I could see and no inverse taper. Looking forward to cleaning up this one.
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So, I’m just going to use this thread to track progress lol. I apologize in advance for my rambling. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep, so I worked on cleaning the spruce from 1am to 2:30am. Got as far as cleaning the lowest branches around the tree.
My current plan is to do a formal upright design. The base is huge. I have a small bit of inverse taper, but I should be able to hide it with some branching. I’m trying very hard to be disciplined and only clean out the dead, vertical and downward growing branches. Naturally I couldn’t resist to reduce some nodes of 3+ down to 2. I shouldn’t though as I don’t know the shape of the tree yet and I’ll need the foliage mass to build back buds along the branches.
I meant to take pics this morning, but I woke up a bit late and had to get to work. 
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Crepes and Boxwoods are very common landscape plants in Texas as well. Be on the lookout and you can usually find some on the curb being pulled out of landscapes that are being redone, homes being flipped, etc. They are tough as nails and if thrown in a bucket of soil with a few roots intact they have a good shot of pulling through. Free plants are always good practice. Good luck.
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