I picked up this tree from a nursery that had it in a 45 gallon pot for years. $50.00, I couldn’t pass it up. It was about 10’ -12’ tall and pretty root bound. I chopped the trunk to a height of 27” above the soil line and took a sawzall to the root mass about 6” below the soil line of the pot it was in. It has a 3 1/2” diameter trunk at the chop and a base of about 7” wide 7’ up from the soil line.
My question is do you think that the trunk is too large of a diameter to ever do a flat top style with some carving or is it destined for the traditional Christmas tree shape?
Thanks,
Dave
$50??? Maybe I'm just massively-misunderstanding the retail-game as I've never bought or sold a bonsai before but half that girth sells for like $500 easy (or is that only if it's via Z.Smith? No way it's a 2X "stock-price markup" simply because it's going through pro-hands (am referring to the just-collected ones he sells, not stuff that's gotten real work/time spent on it)
So....
- Re Flat-topping: No way you 'can't do it', BC's usually lend themselves to both styles quite well **but** I'd say it's far easier to turn "generic material"(or random materials) into flat tops than into xmas trees,
- That big wound at the base: how is the vascular-tissue
beneath that wound? I ask because, let's say you end up doing a vertical shari up the trunk in the process of styling it to a "flat top" style (quotes applied because 'flat top' encompasses such a range of canopy-configs., uncertain how your area is but if anything like mine then you must see them everywhere & know that, sure, of course there's norms to their growth habits but their morphology/shaping isn't
that "written in stone" (like, say, a Sequoia ;D ) If new to BC's, know that that wound's edging will swell like crazy, I'd choose what I wanted done with that wound for 'my final design' right now & do the carving/etc so its healing, its calloused-edge, can begin growing
consistently asap! Also, Re wounds, you can 'nick' them with a razor to take advantage of their "over-compensating" scarring/callousing, for instance I go around my nursery with a box-cutter and put lil wounds all around the spots on trunk-chop-wounds, on branch-removal wounds, sometimes even on branch-collars I want to thicken-up, because the resultant healed tissue is just so much larger!
With something that sized I can't urge you enough to get some paper and pen/pencil and sit there drawing-out what you want until you've chosen its design. Then, it's all about growing it fast-as-possible so that you can get your new branch-collars to finally cover-up ("roll-/callous-over") your trunk's woundings while simultaneously building your new canopy atop your stump, some would say
"just let it grow right now, you don't need to know what your plans for it are right now you simply need to grow it" and while there's some merit to that I think it's very sub-optimal if for no other reason than it simply stopping you from doing some
very easy things in the beginning to help, for instance if you wanted 'xmas tree style' then, as you let all your primaries grow from the trunk, you'd be served by angling them sideways & radiating-outwards from the trunk, this is very simple and lets you set(*grow*!) the branch-collars properly right from the start in a way you could not go-back and change later on (once a 1" branch collar is grown, its shape is pretty non-negotiable!)
Would also advise you to rethink your container, these guys grow like weeds here in FL if you treat them well in fact they're some of my best growers but I'm now dealing with some that are in containers like yours (ie not grow-bag type containers) and I'm just stumped on dealing with their incredibly-intermingled roots, total mess, would never put a BC into a regular container again the roots just get messy & lignified too-quick, Maples are similar but they don't stress too hard if I just cut it all off, BC's do mind!!
Good luck (and thanks again for that pic of Adam Lavigne's BC that specimen is just stunning!! Hadn't seen it in a while, makes me remember how wrong I was, initially, to view bonsai'd-BC's as "needing to be a
'real'/traditional flat-top or xmas tree" format, not in-betweens.....have seen enough gorgeous-yet-unusual BC bonsai, and so many crazily non-conforming BC's in the swamps, that I'm now open to any canopy-design that is aesthetically pleasing, hell I've still got a big jin on the tops of 2 of my bigger BC's and do fully expect I'll use one/both when finally getting 'into refinement'!)
[PS- if you check my username you'll see my thread on my biggest bc that I made recently, that thing is just a 2yr BC and if I didn't have to set it back with a re-pot then I expect I could've
fully closed its chop-wound in another 1yr, now expecting 1.5-->2yrs since I've gotta tear its roots apart after letting it root-bind itself for far too long inside regular container!]
