Young Juniper Stock: Pt. I, Pre-Styling

What’s pre-styling? That was my sketch for a word I didn’t have. But maybe it’s what you do to a plant before you fully style it. 

And that’s what Carmen did last week, a partial styling.

We grew a bunch of Itoigawa from cuttings about 10 years back, and now, having reached that stage of semi-interesting, we put a couple up onto the work table. This specimen was one of them. 

Here’s one of our semi-interesting 10-year old junipers, from cutting. 11” tall. The branches were wired by students for some years, just to put information into the wood while small and supple. Some of those—like the one on the left—was turned into jin. Others will be cut off. And with the remaining we will make our bonsai.

This is the other side of semi-interesting. With swoops in the trunk and shari, this looks like the most appealing front.

And here we stopped to keep up tree momentum. The juniper has lost more than 50% of its foliage. We’ve left some leggy parts on, which won’t be part of the final bonsai, but which will help maintain momentum as it grows more of the closer-in parts we want.

We’ll return to this specimen next year with another blog post about the final styling.