Hey everyone!
Wanted to get a sense of what we all thought about last night’s Red Pine stream.
What did we learn, want to know more about, like, dislike, etc?
In this stream, Ryan focused on multi-flush pine refinement versus development, working on a Japanese Red Pine, Pinus densiflora.
I’ve attached before and after images of the tree for you to enjoy/compare.
This was an interesting stream.
One thing I wondered from before already actually, there is a stream about a literati ponderosa grafted with black pine.
Red pine having the thinner needles and being the more feminine kind, this seems more appropriate to literati.
Is there any reason why black pine was chosen over red pine for this tree?
I enjoyed the stream, especially the parts about setting branch structure and starting to establish ramification, but I was really looking forward to setting the structural design of the raw and unstyled JRP that was mentioned. It seems that this aspect of bonsai design and horticulture, as applied to pines, is one of the most difficult to find detailed instruction on. Creating a bonsai from youngish stock (initial styling, wiring, branch selection, should I just keep growing?, when to start/remove/transfer a sacrifice branch?, what time of year to perform this work?, do any of the answers change if I want to make a shohin/mame pine?, and how much do each of these aspects actually matter?) seems quite different from maintaining an already refined tree. The nursery stock series is helpful, but I don’t recall a nursery stock stream that deals with a multi-flush pine. A lot of the instruction from the nursery stock series transfers to other species, but it would’ve been great to address some of the nuances of developing a multi-flush pine. Many of my pines (and many of my fellow bonsai enthusiasts’) are raw and basically unstyled or had poor decision making early on that led to mediocre results—so addressing how to create a good foundation (from relatively humble/young beginnings) for the future success (health, quality) of a pine would be extremely valuable to me, and I think the community.
And just to be clear, I really find the stream very helpful as it is already 
