Current at 1 years progress. I’m still learning how to photograph bonsai so forgive me if the distance between the front and back branches really doesn’t come through.
I decided it would be fun to take pictures of my favorite WRC branches in Stanley Park and put all my favorites in 1 tree.
Maybe it was a little ambitious to think I could get all these weird gnarly branches to fit together into a coherent design, but in the end it turned out better than it probably should have. Plus it was a lot of fun and I got to spend hours walking in nature checking out trees too 
Some branches already look similar to the originals I took pics of but some required young branches fusing together that will take years to develop.
I also tried out a lot of cutting techniques to ease bending but I think it was unnecessary for most of these branches because WRC can bend and recover like crazy. I think I should save it for much larger branches in the future.
Have any of you tried this before with using only real primary branches from nature? If so I’d really love to see the results! Doing it this way was really fun and taught me a lot about the species. (Although for all I know some of the trees are Eastern White but whatever close enough).
The secondaries are based on this pattern I see repeating all the time. It will obviously take time for the secondaries to lignify and the branches to divide, but I’m not really sure if the foliage can be significantly shrunk so if anyone knows please let me know!
Fun fact, while searching on how to prune this guy I ran across Ryan Neils video on YouTube which is how I found out Mirai existed. I’ve only been doing bonsai a year so it was cool to find such a detailed tutorial, just what I was looking for!
Let me know your thoughts and hope you guys try this for yourself, it’s really fun!