"Crushed Juniper" Photos Wanted

malhomme

We are having a program next month using the "crushed juniper" technique. This is a technique where a juniper is thoroughly wrapped in raffia, and then crushed and compacted into bazaar twisted shapes. The wire is later removed and the tree has a wild, yamadori-like look.

Does anyone have photos of trees that have been "trained" this way?

Kind regards,
Jim

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FlyBri

Gday Jim!

I might be mistaken, but I believe that Jim Gremel is a major proponent of the "crushed" style. I'm in the process of doing a Google, but have had no luck as yet... I'll keep you posted.

Bri.

[EDIT]Ooooh - looky what I found in our very own Wiki!!! Squashed Juniper Technique [EDIT]

[DOUBLE EDIT] But wait! There's more!!! [DOUBLE EDIT]

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malhomme

Thanks, your the best! I never heard it called "squashed" juniper so maybe that was why I couldn't find it anywhere.

Does this only work with shohin?

Cheers,
Jim

gregb

Jim--I don't have any good photos of it yet, but I have a juniper that was clobbered by about 150# of cactus It happened two years ago to a tree I bought from a club member here that was originally styled by John Naka 20 years ago. We have these prickly pear cactus that become trees--often 20' tall and bark on the trunk. I was looking out at it from a window in the house one fine spring day just after re-potting and watched as a five foot chunk of cactus pads fell directly on top of the tree I ran outside horrified to find that the chunk had fallen from a height of 10' and the tree was totally crushed. I didn't have the luxury of having the branches all wrapped w/raffia and yet not a single branch was broken. They were all just sort of torqued and twisted and torn by the impact.

Crestfallen, I stuck the tree in a spot in the garden where this wouldn't happen again, but also a spot where I couldn't really see it slowly croak. I kept watering it in hope that it might possibly recover. To my surprise, it didn't croak like I thought it would. It just sat there through the summer, licking its wounds, then when fall came, I picked it up and started to face up to setting things right again.

I used chopsticks to help prop the main branches up and used a little wire to try to get it back to some semblance of what it was before the mishap...I have to say the tree now looks better for having been squashed than it did before. What's eerie about the whole thing is that the cactus crashed atop the tree just days after John Naka passed away What do you make of it