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…

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Before rewiring: Rocky Mountain Juniper having grown for several years after its initial styling

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This live vein has died back a bit…

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…removing the dead area of the dieback. It is rather common after styling a juniper to have some reduction of the live vein.

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A thick jin…

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…and removing some of the uninteresting right side of the jin to make it less clunky.

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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.

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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’.

6 Comments

  1. 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.

    • crataegus says:

      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.

  2. Ray Norris says:

    Beautiful job Michael. the deadwood is fantastic, also where did you get that shari tool from??

  3. Conner says:

    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!

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