Design Options For A Bunjin
This bunjin featured in a recent post. Like many bonsai, it has several design options.
Shore Pine after a couple years of free growth. Though it has been styled once, each reset is an opportunity to disagree with the earlier one. What other design might work?
With some branch bends, we could go in any direction with the foliage.
Let’s see how each of those would look.
The first option—up. We could place the foliage on top of the highest point of the trunk.
I’m not a fan of this option, because it tends to mitigate the strong bend in the trunk up there, one of the most dynamic features of this tree. Better to show that off.
Another option: go down. Here the foliage would dangle.
The big bend up top is highlighted, that is nice. It’s not a bad option. But it does lose a lot of the tension built up in the first few inches of the lower trunk, the foliage dangling like a fly fishing line, waiting to be cast.
Here all the foliage is to the right. I ran out of room in the image, but the foliage would continue a bit more to the right.
The problem with this design is it lacks counterbalance. The tree feels like it’s falling over.
This one introduces the dynamic of the crown to the upper left down to the key branch on the lower right—an energy like an X moving in the opposite direction from the trunk.
This one is not bad. It builds on the energy of the lower trunk. But like the others, it arguably exposes the main weakness of this tree…which we’ll talk about in the next option.
This option pulls the foliage mass to the left.
This design does three things. It serves as a counterweight to the strong flow of the trunk to the right. It activates the least interesting part of the trunk, the middle area. And it does another thing the others don’t do, it compacts the design. So, we went with the original design for this tree.
For other design exercises, try these:
Coin Toss Forest Design Exercise
Design Exercise: Seeing Into The Future
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