Shimpaku Juniper Forest

[joshw]

Hi everyone,

This is a project I started yesterday, it will take some years before it takes shape but I got some of the early work out of the way.

I have been looking for an advanced Shimpaku Juniper starter for some time but haven't had much luck. I managed to come across a group lot of 10 Shimpaku Junipers that were less advanced, and I thought this was a good opportunity to start my first forest. The trees were all about 30cm tall, with widths varying from pencil thickness to around half an inch. While being pre bonsai and grown in starter pots, none of the tress had any work done on them in terms of styling.

All I did yesterday was re-pot them in slightly bigger pots, and then using bamboo and wire, straightened each tree.

Cheers,

Josh

[Ash]

Good to see you preparing the trees. They are very similar in size and you may need a bit more size variation to get a forest to look good. Keep an eye out for on tree that is upright and much larger/thicker than the others to dominate the composition. There should be pretty good picking between all the bonsai nurseries in the Sydney area. Forest are usually, but no always, made of an odd number of trees. It is said that the eye does not 'pair-up' the trees in odd-numbered composition making the forest look more random or natural. If you track down another larger tree this will give you 11, a very good number for a forest as it is a prime number and hard for the eye to split into even subgroups. all the best, Ash