Revisiting a Cascade Juniper-
Here’s a Rocky Mountain Juniper some of you might recognize…collected by Randy Knight, and styled about three years ago into a cascade.
The tree has been repotted since the initial styling, and it was rewired last week. This post is a photo essay of that rewiring…
Before rewiring: Rocky Mountain Juniper having grown for several years after its initial styling
This live vein has died back a bit…
…removing the dead area of the dieback. It is rather common after styling a juniper to have some reduction of the live vein.
A thick jin…
…and removing some of the uninteresting right side of the jin to make it less clunky.
The first potting left us with a larger mound than we really wanted, so we brought down the mound a bit. And we’ll likely take it back a bit more in the future.
Front. Needs a better pot, but the size is about right. The upper right jin has been thinned down a touch. There are a lot of swoopy jins, and we used that same roundish/enclosing feeling in the placement of the foliage pads, rather than making a stable triangle out of them. Which isn’t exactly textbook, but I enjoy giving cascades a less stable feeling, so we did it anyhow. It was a fun tree to work with and quite unusual for its intricate, twisting, and very old ‘bones’.
Michael Hagedorn 
6 Comments
Can’t help but feel this would look better with the tree mounted on a slab of rock set at an angle. All that dirt sticking up, and that pot just doesn’t look right to me.
The soil will be reduced yet again, and moss and other plants will grow over it. It’s still a young composition. As for a slab or rock of some sort, that is certainly another way one could go with it.
Beautiful job Michael. the deadwood is fantastic, also where did you get that shari tool from??
I bought it in Japan…although it may be available online. It’s much like many tools for making pots, curiously. Just a lot sharper.
Reblogged this on Wolf's Birding and Bonsai Blog.
I don’t know if this is tasteful or not but I am inagining a mini rocky waterfall cascading into a mini pond/reservoir in the pot and pumped back up. Might be hard to conceal the pump/wires though…just a thought!