Getting Something From Nothing? (JBP)

[Thomas J.]

A few years ago I had a friend give me four JBPs that he had started from seed. Three of them were already three years old and were not root layered so as to get those low branches as needed for good shohin material. The fourth one was but I will not include that one here, that will be for another time down the road.

These first two pics show what I had to work with. I'm not sure what my friend had in mind design wise for these two, but I always like a challenge so I took them and studied them for about nine months. After pulling most of my hair out trying to come up with something, I did what every good bonsai person does, CHOP.

I decided from the start that these would be very small JBPs without the fat trunks, that would be left for the fourth one. All the same, I still needed to come up with something that would look halfway decent a few years from now.

 

[Thomas J.]

So after doing the chop and letting the candles grow through spring and into summer, here's what the first one looked like. (pic 1)

After decandeling I got an enormous amount of new buds.(pic 2)

Tree #1 with selected branches and needle plucked. (pics 3 & 4)

 

[Thomas J.]

Tree # 2 in the same order as tree #1.

 

[Thomas J.]

As for tree #3, I don't have a pic from right after getting the tree as the other two, so I'll start from the chop up until today.

 

[Thomas J.]

Tree # 4 was root layered and because of that I will work it for a fat trunk shohin. The following two pics are from last spring and today. As soon as I got the tree I began the wiring of the trunk to get movement, but the tree was already one year old. I moved it as much as I could and within a few months the wire was already beginning to be eaten up by the trunk. I removed it and re wired it again for another year. this really helped fatten the trunk up.