by Randy Davis

[Ed’s Note: this article was begun a year ago] It is now the December 2007, and I’ve got all of my trees put away for the winter.  They are safely put away into the greenhouse and sitting there, waiting for the spring activities to come in a few months to begin a new year.  Some will need to be repotted, and some will need a good pruning.  There are 15 trees also there, again seeing the inside of the greenhouse for the first time in 6 years when they were just mere cuttings, working so hard to produce roots in the cutting bench. These 15 trees are special to me!  They were selected some 7 years ago, long before they were even cuttings to begin a journey as one of those long term bonsai projects that I often undertake. I don’t exactly remember when, but I was at one of the Evansville Indiana bonsai club meetings talking with my good friend Dave Bogan, when he produced some pictures of bonsai at the National Bonsai Foundation collection that he took on a recent trip to Washington D.C.  Of particular note was a picture that he took of John Naka's "Goshen" which just knocked my sox off.  It was one of those moments that we all feel when we see a bonsai of superior unique quality made by an American Master.  I didn’t think much about it after that meeting for a long time until I happened upon a large ceramic container 2 feet wide and 4 feet long that Dave had in his collection that he said he wasn’t going to probably use because of its size. I managed to procure the container from Dave and stored it in my greenhouse thinking that someday I would make a forest for it, if I could find the plant material. For the longest time I just had a brain exercise thinking about it, going back and forth on the possible plant material.  Should it be a deciduous tree forest of Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostrobodies) , an evergreen forest of Foemina Juniper (Juniperus chinensis “Foemina” )which is what “Goshen” was made of? Hmm, such a quandary!  As always, it comes down to practicality. Of all the considerations, size was probably the largest driving force.  Moving the container when filled was always going to be a problem, so having plant material that could take both winter and summer conditions was paramount as we do get down to -5 degrees F. during the winter. Additionally, one does not want to have to repot it very often either.  With those considerations in mind, one was always led back to conifers as the most practical choice. At the time, I was working for the local school district and found at one of the schools a planting of an upright columnar growing Juniper that would be perfect for my application.  It took some time to really identify this juniper, but with some digging and a process of elimination determined that it was a cultivar of Juniperus Chinensis called “Heitz columnaris” that has lovely dark green braided foliage. I liked the fact that this cultivar’s mature foliage was braided.  Juniperus Chinensis cultivar foliage varies widely from one cultivar to another.  Fomenia, for example, has the juvenile needle foliage, where Heitz columnaris has a combination of juvenile needle foliage but matures into braided foliage. 

Once the plant material was selected, the journey could begin. During the winter of 2001, I could take cuttings from the parent tree.  As with most conifers, cuttings should be taken after the parent tree has had 2 or 3 killing frosts.  I took 6-8 inch terminal cuttings from the current season’s growth with   just a small piece of 1 year old growth at the base of the cutting.  Wounding of the cutting is essential for this species so I cut the older wood at the base of the cutting with a sharp knife to expose the cambium tissue and dipped it into a strong root hormone and placed it into the cutting media (50% perlite and 50% sharp sand) and then placed them into the cutting bench.  My cutting bench for winter cuttings is essentially a bed of sand with heating cable buried in the sand to keep the bottom of the cuttings at 70 degrees F while the top part of the cutting is exposed to the colder night time winter temperatures of 38 degrees F. The cuttings were sprinkled once every morning all winter and were rooted sometime around March of 2002.

Now that I had rooted cuttings, I spent the next year growing them into gallon can size before planting them out into the ground to get larger, both in height, but more importantly in trunk girth. Sometime in the spring or summer of 2003, I planted out 20 1 gallon cans in a space in my vegetable garden and let them go.  During 2003, they got watered and fertilized on a regular basis to make sure they got their roots established in the ground.  During the subsequent years, I occasionally fertilized them but not on a regular basis, as I wanted them to grow slow and fill out which Junipers will do quite well on their own.  Finally, after 4 years of growing in the ground, they ranged from 3 ½ - 4 ½ feet in height and had trunks from 2 - 2 ½ inches in diameter, and it was time to get them out of the ground.  In November 2007 I started the removal process. The trees were planted on 2 foot centers, so getting a good root-ball was rather easy.  It did help to soften the soil by deeply rototilling around them first.  I waited for a couple of days after a good rain so the soil was moderately moist and would hold together well as I dug them out.  I was actually surprised by how flat and fibrous the root system was as I had never done any root pruning on them at all.  The only tool I used to dig them was a regular pointed shovel, and I only had to dig about 8 inches into the ground to get the root ball out.  I must say, however, that it did take me a week to finish getting them all out of the ground.  

After removing them from the ground, the next task was to prepare them for their first containers.  Only a minimal amount of root pruning was necessary, limited to the removal or shortening of the larger roots so they would fit into the 15x21x 9 inch plastic containers I selected for them.  The soil preparation that I used was rather austere and consisted of 70% structural material in the form of either granite or high fired clay granules and 30% ground pine bark. The clay in the original root ball was retained.

As you can tell, the branches on this juniper are very upright and long which necessitated that they be trimmed back to a reasonable length.  The trees were trimmed back so that the branches low on the tree were left rather long and then got shorter the higher on the tree they went, so as to make a nice pyramidal shape to the overall tree.  Now was the time to do the initial trimming of the tree to remove unwanted branches, remove dead interior branches, and generally clean the tree into its initial bonsai structure.  It is at this time one should take their time and select only those branches that are known to be unnecessary for the final design but not remove so much that it affects the growth of the tree in the next few years.  I trimmed the lower branches off of the tree to form the trunk.  I removed all growth over 3 feet but left the naked trunk and larger branches which would be jined later on. Well, the trees are beginning to look better, but there is one additional task to be done at this phase. That is to lower the branches’ angle to more reflect the branches of an older tree.  Rather than use the typical wiring technique which would take hours to do, not to mention that it would take many rolls of wire, it’s more practical to use the guy wire technique, since all we’re doing is changing the angle. After the guy wires have been applied and the branches lowered it is finally beginning to look more tree-like with layers.

Now that this phase is complete, we are done till spring when we can move the trees outside into the sun and get them growing again to develop the secondary branches.  There’s lots of additional work to be done, but at least we’re able to do some real bonsai work over the coming years.  We started with 20 trees, 15 of which we have worked on in this phase.  5 trees were dug, moved to a new growing field, given their initial trimming and will be guy wired in the spring.  These will get all the same training as the trees in the greenhouse, but still be allowed to grow in the field to develop larger trunk girth for the next year or two.  We have yet to determine the total number of trees in the final design; but, for sure, we will need varying sizes of trunks and heights to make it work properly. 

The easy part of this project has been completed, and now we start into the more difficult and time-consuming activities of detail work and design considerations.  First and most important is to decide the overall style of the design which will take some time drawing different configurations and tree placements.  Should it be an old grouping of trees on a hillside somewhere, a view of a forest in middle age with lots of green foliage and internal dead branches? Only time will tell.  It will take at least another 3 years before these trees will be together in that pot, making this project somewhere close to a 10 year exercise.  That seems like a long time but in bonsai, time is our friend.  Over the next few years, I’ll continue this article as we get closer to the finish line!    If you don’t have a long term project in the works, get to it!  You need not start with cuttings like I did, but having that initial inspiration, finding the plant material and watching the progress will draw you into the hobby even deeper than you already are.