dk07
Seedling
My mom bought this pencil thin juniper for $50 a few years back when I first was starting out and stopped at a bonsai nursery. Here's the tree right when she got it in August of 2021:

Pencil thin, planted in a concrete container with glued on rubber feat and vaguely threaded onto some aquarium stone. I promised her I would help her at least keep it alive, and a month later I visited her and threw on some cheap wire I got on Amazon:

Honestly, it wasn't a terrible wire job considering I was brand new at the time! After about 6 months, she decided she didn't want to keep caring for it and sent it home with me. I left it largely untouched for a long time, when I decided to take another crack at it. Here it is in April of 2023:

Wired it up, added some more movement, and I had just got some lime sulfur and wanted to try my hand at a jin. Since then, the design got extremely heavy for how thin the tree still is. I wish I had one more in-between photo, but I ended up making an impulse decision amidst a repot to finally get it into a pot with a little more room and some proper soil. Anyway, here's the tree as of February 2024:

Guess we'll see where it goes from here. I think the design is quite a bit more balanced, and I've firmly attached the base to the stone to try to actually fuse them and keep true to the original design somewhat. I now plan to do nothing but maintain the pads and up-pot when appropriate to hopefully build a little bit of girth.

Pencil thin, planted in a concrete container with glued on rubber feat and vaguely threaded onto some aquarium stone. I promised her I would help her at least keep it alive, and a month later I visited her and threw on some cheap wire I got on Amazon:

Honestly, it wasn't a terrible wire job considering I was brand new at the time! After about 6 months, she decided she didn't want to keep caring for it and sent it home with me. I left it largely untouched for a long time, when I decided to take another crack at it. Here it is in April of 2023:

Wired it up, added some more movement, and I had just got some lime sulfur and wanted to try my hand at a jin. Since then, the design got extremely heavy for how thin the tree still is. I wish I had one more in-between photo, but I ended up making an impulse decision amidst a repot to finally get it into a pot with a little more room and some proper soil. Anyway, here's the tree as of February 2024:

Guess we'll see where it goes from here. I think the design is quite a bit more balanced, and I've firmly attached the base to the stone to try to actually fuse them and keep true to the original design somewhat. I now plan to do nothing but maintain the pads and up-pot when appropriate to hopefully build a little bit of girth.