Double Helix: Limber Pine Revisit

This fella got a new shoe this spring. For years—4 more than necessary—it lived in a wooden box simply because I couldn’t find a pot of the right shape that was still deep enough to hold a strange and unforgiving root system. Above the soil surface was another matter, as the twisting, sharied roots were a feature that we wanted to show off.

This spring we found a deep oval and now it’s out of the box and in its first bonsai pot.

End of the day at our initial styling of this Limber Pine in 2014, at a jaunty angle and just slightly off center in the box. For the full post of the styling of this pine: Helix Root Limber Styling

And today, May 2018, in its new pot. 33″ high. Many of the original wires are still on the tree. A few North American pines seem particularly amenable to back budding, either from needle buds or adventitious buds, and the Limber Pine is one of them. For a pine in the White Pine group, Limber Pine ramifies quite rapidly. (The ‘helix’ roots apparently externalizes its high rate of mitosis…)