We stumbled accross this garden yamadori juniper back in 2005 - the tree had been growing in front of an apartment house and as it was quite overgrown at that time, it wasn´t a big deal to get a permitt to collect it.
2015
The very first touches occured in summer 2007 when we worked the big dead stumps (using only hand tools) and defined a little live veins
2007 summer
It was quite obvious right from the beginning that we couldn´t make a decent bonsai out of the tree unless we choose one of two options - either we could try to compact very long branches with extreme bending, or we could proceed horticulturaly and graft new scions down on the trunk.
The second option was almost an instant winner for us, so in spring 2008 we grafted 3 branches on the live veins of the main trunk - for that purpose we used the branches of the same tree as the foliage seems to be quite good to work with. The following images shows the tree in summer 2009 once the grafting had been executed succesfully and the original long branches was removed.
2009 summer
2009 summer - detail of one graft
Subsequently, the tree had been repotted, fertilized and watered strongly and next summer we could make the first selection of branches.
2010 summer - this is how the tree looked like just after one growing season and before the selection of branches
In next years couple of more repotting and wiring sessions took place, however, somehow I didn´t take out the camera, so the last series of photos shows the current state of the tree after the last complete wiring and treating dead wood and live veins.
2015
The juniper is still in the beginning, regarding its maturity, but from very poor starting material we achieved to initiate a path of a decent, and hopefully some day, also nice juniper bonsai.
Dimensions: 90 x 100 cm (h x w)
Pot: Yixing
More photos can be found on a photogallery on my personal website.
