gregb

Al--I remember the thread you're talking about and the juniper was potted in a wooden grow box; the trunk was butted up against one side of the box and the box was long and narrow. The root system of the tree was collected from a crack in rock, thus the awkward look to the potting. Walter was referring to the challenge it is sometimes to get the trunk of such an awkward situation to be more centered in the final bonsai pot. It would probably take a gradual whittling away of the long root over a span of years to properly pot the thing. I think that's where the "professional" thing came in. But I agree that if a beginner took such a project on and they really cared about the tree, they would research about how to do it while they waited for the tree to regain its vigor.

When I started bonsai, I lived in the middle of nowhere in the Ozarks of Missouri. One of the guys in the cabinet shop where I worked turned me on to it by showing me the article the Smithsonian magazine ran on bonsai in the U.S. that featured Dan Robinson. That article caught my imagination and I just dove in--no clubs, no internet, no books yet, just Kenny Green's advice to open the tree up so you could see the trunk. I really had fun even though I didn't know what the hell I was doing. All my first trees were collected and I still have two of them--a winged elm and a pig-nut hickory. That was 18 years ago and if I had to do it over, don't think I'd change a thing. I collected my first manzanitas totally ignorant of the problems others had had trying it. My approach to digging them, acclimating them was not the way everyone else was doing it and may have lead to my success with this species. I doubt I would have ever tried it if I knew what the "collective" experience had been.