AusBonsai

This is the Juniper that I'll be taking with me tomorrow afternoon to work on together with Hiro. Its a Gigantic beast of a thing that I can hardly lift, but shall be interesting to see what he thinks the possibilities might be for it.

It's a tree I have been looking at daily for the past year and a half since I dug it and have had a lot of trouble seeing anything in it until recently when I took one of the large trunks off of it.

The 2nd photo is what I envisage it to become but I am open to Hiro's suggestions.You can kinda see the trunk line I am considering in the bottom right hand photo.

nice stock mate!

i like your plan too, im sure hiro will either say thats the go or give you a different direction all together!

nice one could of saved ya money!

Been working on the tree for the past week and this is what I have come up with. A lot of work still to go but I might give the tree a little bit of a rest and recoup before I attack it some more. Promising start to a tree that I had no idea on where to go with it for nearly 2 years. Hiro's idea was very similar to mine and as you can see I've gone a little different to both his and my original ideas.

Let me know what you think and any new ideas are always welcome.

This is the picture that Hiro did

Great plan Webos, looks like it's coming along really well.

Thanks Anja, I'm looking forward to it's future already

And these two before pics I nicked from Gerrard. Well, comments guys..what do you think of the restyle? Goods? Bads?

Hi Webbos,
You should be well pleased, an awesome trunk and a clear plan. Now that it has been stood up I can see it much more clearly, will take some time but I am sure you will see great rewards for your effort.

Hello,

I agree that this is good material to work with and your plan is promising.

My suggestion is to do the repotting next (in Spring) before the tree is stressed out even more with carving. Getting it into a bonsai shaped container would be the goal. It would be a shame to lose the tree at repotting after doing hourse more work on it.

This is of course if you haven't reported recently.

Anyway, keep us posted on the progress.

AG

Thanks Gerard and Mr Garcia,
Yes, I do plan to repot into a wide, flat box in spring in the hope of getting some of the roots sorted out. The truth is that I really don't have a good idea of whats under the soil line. I dug it in Nov of 2008, threw it into this pot with the cheapest ordinary potting mix around, and left it in the yard until last week. One of the other goals of repotting it would be to get rid of some of the original soil from the dig site without compromising the health of the tree.

I'll definitely keep the Ausbonsai crowd updated on this one as the action happens

Repotted this tree today. It had slowly been losing vigor and after pulling away some of the soil, I think I have found the main reason why. 3 big curl grubs were in the pot feeding themselves fat. this tree has lost all of its shape from a year ago when it was wired out but I have new eyes for it especially after exposing a little more of the nebari and seeing its real potential. I'm confident that this tree will now bounce back quickly.

Is there a photo to keep us intrigued?

Photo tomorrow if this rain keeps itself away

I got to this tree the other day.. started picking and peeling away at dead bark. As I continued to peel away, I realised that I wasnt hitting any live tissue. the more I peeled, the more of this tree that seemed to be secretly dead under the bark.

Over the course of two days peeling, I found that the tree had one major live vein running up the side of the tree, being fed by three veins that come together down low on the trunk.

This tree seems to have been hiding some stunning deadwood work and now that I have denuded it, it has got me very excited about its future. The only downside is that the live vein seems to be running in a straight line up the trunk and not spiralling around... I suppose I cant ask for too much.

This tree might be a good candidate for the Mauro Stemberger or Ryan Neil workshops when they are here.

Thanks for looking

Adam