Hi Everyone,
I’ve been growing a handful of bonsai trees for over 20 years. Growing would be a generous interpretation. The reality is I never really knew what I was doing, having gotten some pretty bad advice early on and not investing to learn more. I could repot and water well enough. But I’d bare root every couple of years and didn’t really know how to wire a full tree. Some years I would care more, some less. A vacation or two I put them under sprinklers with their own zone control but was ten too lazy to go back to hand watering. With all that, I never fully let them go and nothing ever died, miraculously.
This precumbens was the first bonsai I ever owned. It was initially ‘mallsai’ styled when I bought it, with an S-curve into a big floppy wave-like branch. 6-inches tall. It was in a bonsai container most of its life.
Last Spring something clicked in me and I’ve been going all-in on Bonsai ever since. None of the trees were doing well, so my focus the first year was on rehabilitation. Some, like this one, Im going to experiment with keeping in nursery pot for another few years even as I style it.
Please crit my design! Don’t hold back. I thrive in critical feedback and would really love your input.
Design plans:
- I’ll compress the left side even more over time.
- Some branches are longer on purpose, to build taper
- I went for a dynamic design because the base isn’t that thick and I felt it couldn’t support everything over on the right along with the cascade just yet. As the base thickens over the years I will move the apex over to the right with the cascade branch.
- There’s actually a much better base with a different front, but it wouldnt work with the cascading branch.
- Im expecting it to backbud profusely, giving me a lot of options to cut back to more refined growth for the apex and right-side ‘body’ of the tree
- I’ll expand the deadwood in the center of the tree to connect with the live vein that is already splitting towards the base, next season.
Design Questions:
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What do you think about the decision not to put into a bonsai pot, and beginning structural setting? It’s a major faux pas in the Mirai training, but as a cascade, Which will have a tall pot not all that different than the nursery pot dimensionts, I thought I could get away with it.
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I have fanned out a lot of the pads, but I didn’t go crazy with it. The tree is still growing a lot, fast, and working 12-14 gauge on every little branchlet seemed excesive. But, now I have some photosynthetically inefficient tufts. What would you have done?
• For the cascade branch, I thought about turning it back towards the trunk, but didn’t like the monotony of a more up-down orientation to the whole cascade. What do you think? Also, What about the length of the cascade branch?
