Vance Wood

Here is the problem as I have seen it from my point of view and a number of years of experience. When purchasing nursery material there are two things to consider. One; did you purchase the tree because of a shape you thought you could see in the tree in the first place? If the answer is yes then you should have no need to ask anyone what to do with the tree, you should already be doing it. Two; did you buy the tree because you liked the material and thought some day you could make something of it? If the answer is yes then you should never think that you are going to be able to make a twenty-four-inch tall bonsai out of a twenty-four-inch tall nursery tree. If this was going to work the tree would have been in the first category.

The difference is between styling, which essentially is the first category, and development of raw material, which is the second category. If the tree falls into the second category, which I believe your tree belongs, you should then be learning about things like trunk chops where you basically reduce down the tree in order to obtain a good trunk to top mathematical relationship and regrow the rest of the tree to fit the size and nature of the trunk.

At this point with this tree all of the virtuals in the world, and many years in a bonsai pot will not give you a really good bonsai because the trunk is too small in relation to height of the tree. This cannot be drastically improved in a bonsai pot, at least not with a Juniper. So anything you style revolving around the nature of the tree you are now trying to style will never satisfy you five to ten years down the road. Junipers trunks do not thicken much once they are placed in a bonsai container.

One of my fundamental rules of bonsai is this: You do not grow a tree up into a bonsai. You must be willing and able to reduce larger tree down into a bonsai. The standard guideline for top to trunk ratios is from three to one up to six to one. These ratios will give you the visual impact of thickness of trunk to height of tree where the tree is three to six times taller than the width of the tree at the base diameter.

So----if you have a tree like the one you have displayed that you have to make into a believable bonsai, or you were given a tree like this and you are expected to make a believable bonsai out of it the first thing you should do is examine the width of the trunk at the base and figure how tall the tree should be with this trunk and proceed from there.

I hope you don't think I am being hard on you, I have given you the formula for developing raw material from nursery stock. At present you may not be able to see the future with the branching that is located at the positions you think you have to cut using the above guidelines. You should however endeavor to learn how to do this as soon as possible because it is in this process you will find most success.

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The only finished bonsai is a dead one; me 1992 MABA Des Moines Iowa