Thank you all for the compliments !

OMC,

The boxwood group is very cheap. The plants cost me about 2 1/2 guilders (abt 1$) each. The stone was 60 eurocents (abt 1/2 $). I wired it with stripped installation wire which costs allmost nothing. The moss grows in my garden. That makes a total of less than $5 for the works. This is a real dutch planting (here in Europe Dutch people are supposed to be very miserly)

Al,

I picked up the pot at a local bonsai nursery. They produce these cookie-cutter bonsai by the thousands, and in the back there are racks full of used pots. I regurlary go there and browse these racks for nice ones. When I find a few I usually can buy them for a nice price. Great stuff for beginners ! When I showed my neigbours this planting they told me that it looked like I cut off the tops of a couple of conifers and sticked them in the ground.. I'm glad that at least some people like it...

gr. René

Hey Crow, You have a winner there. That boxwood is dandy. Do you think you will be able to develop layered branches in the future?

Regards, Bonsaial

Bonsaial:

In a few years, perhaps. As you know, Kingsville box is not a quickly styled species.

I bought this one from the good folks at Bonsai Northwest; it had been growing for some time in a 5-gallon can. I'll give it a year or so to get used to its new little pot, and then slowly start working on shaping tiers of foliage. The trick will be to avoid inducing that poodle look that I see all too often on the boxwoods of the impatient.

Cheers,
Old Mister

Beautiful work, Mr. Crow!
Both, the boxwood and the swamp-looking accent. I hope I'll have something like that in a few years. Maybe not a boxwood as they need a bit different growing conditions than we have here and I don't have an unheated garage. Have you tried birch? Do you even know what it is, because it may be that it only grows in Europe and Asia.


Thank you,
Zeb

Thanks, Zeb! Funny you should ask about birch - I just picked up a couple of two-year-old birch seedlings. It can be a tricky species to work with, I'm told - but the rewards are great. Namely, that gorgeous white bark once they reach ten or fifteen years in age.

It'll be a long long time before I have anything to speak of with respect to these two trees. They're in growing containers now, and will be for several years.

The accent planting probably isn't of so much interest, but that I put together a few months back. So there's not as much waiting to do, where those are concerned.

OMC,

I see that you are a shohin lover. I realy like your boxwood. Great work !

René

Rene,

You're right - for whatever reason, I am particularly fond of shohin size bonsai. It probably started when I was learning bonsai in California - I had a very small patio with new room to grow trees in the ground or even for reasonably-sized growing boxes. Also I guess I'm not really a fan of large-caliper or high-taper trees - I don't do tridents or black pine, for example. I want to start doing more literati style trees, but I don't feel that I have the eye for it yet.

-Old Mister

Mr. Crow,

Nice. My birches are of that caliper, too. Fortunately in here there are birches everywhere you look at (otherwise I'd be poor trying to get a bonsai out of them ).

Anyway, the thing is they are a bit hard to train as they tend to have a very strong leader which will be replaced immediately after the last one has been cut. The only way I've invented (for now) to produce branches on a tree less than a foot tall is to cut it back to a point that has lots of dormant buds below. Then the tree responds by putting out a branch from each of the buds. In the attached pic you can see this in real. I've jinned the top to prevent living tissue from drying.


Zeb


Zeb

Matt - your tree is glorious! Wow...I'm just in awe. The choice of accent planting is very nice, as well. I hadn't thought to do an accent planting in a nail-stud pot like that...but in this case, it works wonderfully. I could go on and on, but instead I'll just let the tree speak for itself.

Zeb,

I guess I don't understand how the jin keeps the living wood from drying out. Can you explain?

-Old Mister