I’m long past due for a new post here, I’ve been busy putting things away for winter, building a sun-porch for my tropicals and dealing with an apprentice who took off, leaving me short handed when he discovered there is work involved with respect to bonsai. He is now at large somewhere in Portland, Oregon and will have illegal alien status December 6th. If any of you out there in blog-land know of his whereabouts, please report him to immigration authorities. On to the trees…

The first tree up is a common juniper, Juniperus communis, I collected in November of 2007 in Washington state; it was three-trees-in-one as it spent most of its existence sprawled out over rock and where a branch touched a pocket in the rock, it rooted and formed a separate tree. I’ve featured one of these trees on this blog before–some of you might know it as ‘CJ’. I held back on the mother tree for so long–8 years–because of how much work CJ had been for me. The mother tree is large, 29 1/2″ from the rim of the pot after styling, and I figured I better prepare myself for the work. The task took me three full days to complete and a nasty little rash on my hands (those needles are sharp!) but wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined it would be. And there is still a little yet to do as I didn’t want to stress the tree too much just before winter set in. The tree as it is today:

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A detail of the drop branch on the right:

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A detail of the mid-trunk shari:

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Detail of the upper trunk, near the apex:

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Detail of first branch:

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And last, a detail of the bend in the trunk in the upper right side of the tree:

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Here’s a shot of ‘CJ’, the daughter ground layer from the tree above…recognize it?

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A detail of pad development:

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I’ve got more to post but am having some issues now with my internet connection, so will publish this and pick up again when I have a better connection. Thanks for reading!