New Acquisitions in the Bonsai World

Over the Christmas Break, I got a chance to work for my new buddy Dave and help him trim his hundreds of trees that he’s been propagating for quite a few years now. He’s got a great collection of “real” bonsai in addition to his many starter trees. I got to work on a little bit of everything. For my efforts, Dave hooked me up with some real nice material to augment my collection. The olives are in 1-gallon containers, while the pomegranate and and the big juniper are 5-gallon containers. Click for enlarged pics!

Check out the gnarly base!

This olive tree has a really cool base on it. We trimmed him back pretty hard, but he’ll be fine. I’m pretty sure the base gets all giant and gnarly like that from letting some of the suckers grow wild from the bottom, and then chopping them off after they’ve been growing for a while. I still have to do some wiring of the branches and stuff like that, but there’s no big hurry.

This has some cool movement!

 

This olive doesn’t have as cool of a base, but its shape is totally awesome and twisty. It’s a little closer than the previous one to actually deserving a bonsai pot, and I’ve pulled the top left branches down a little further so that they’re actually horizontal now. Dave picked this one out for me and wanted to see what I could do with it. I’m tempted to allow any suckers to grow out of the bottom in the spring and thicken up the base over a couple years. We’ll see. Both of the olives are about 6-8 inches tall with maybe like 3/4-inch trunks.

Wait till spring!

 

This pomegranate (I hope it’s a pomegranate… I can’t tell that well with no leaves!) has a trunk width of about 2 inches, and I’m working it into a nice-ish broom style bonsai. Pretty much all of the branches were growing straight up before we pulled them down to resemble an actual tree. This one has quite a bit more development of secondary and tertiary branching on the branches that come directly off the trunk. Dave said this one doesn’t produce a lot of fruit, but it does produce quite a flower show each year. Sweet!

This is a big one!

This big juniper is awesome. Dave wanted me to find something in the growing yard that could be showable within a couple years. This guy is very cool. There is a big shari or deadwood strip going from the base up to about that first branch on the left. The vein of living wood runs up the back most of all. The trunk on this guy is about 3.5-4 inches at the base. I’ve cleaned it up a little bit and will make some more jin or deadwood branches on some of the smaller branches on the right side. This is a very cool tree! Check out the detailed pic of the trunk below.

Soooo cool!

Anywho, thanks again to Dave for all his help and guidance. I helped him a tiny bit, but he’s been more than generous with his knowledge and material. I think the best thing in working all those trees is that I’ve gained like 10 or 20 years worth of tactile experience under my eyes and hands. If I only had one or two olive trees, it would take me forever to muster the experience in number of trimmings that I enjoyed in these past two weeks!