by Randy Davis

[Part 1 of this article can be found in the January issue of this newsletter - ED]

It's now the beginning of October 2008, and it's the time of season to think about putting trees slowly away for the winter as it approaches. The night time temperatures have been dipping into the high 40's, putting a chill in the morning air, and that has stirred me to put a few of the more sensitive trees into the greenhouse - just as a precaution. Being the end of the bonsai season I have been going through my normal ritual of reviewing the progress for the year and thinking about what should be done in the forthcoming year.

What a difference a year makes! I have spent this year primarily working on the junipers, focusing on pad development and getting rid of unnecessary branches and that long stringy foliage to encourage the budding of new growth. At the beginning of the growing season, my expectations were rather minimal and that all season would be dedicated to pinching and plucking the foliage.  In late February or early March I moved the 15 trees with guy wires attached out of the greenhouse to a bench in the nursery where they would get full sun for most of the day.  The plan for this year was to just let them grow freely and fertilize them regularly, to get as much new growth as possible.  For the first month or so outside, the trees really didn’t do much but sit there and absorb the abundant sunshine and warming temperatures.  As with most trees in the early stages of being worked on, the inner foliage was rather spindly.  By the middle of April or early May, they started to put on the first growth of the season; and, like all of the Juniperus Chinensis cultivars, the new growth was tip growth at the ends of the branches. To focus the growth further back on the branches, this tip growth was constantly pinched back.  Each day for the next 2 months, I would have my morning coffee looking at them as a group, spending an hour or more pinching growth and monitoring what sometimes appeared to be a slow motion puppet show with all that guy wire on them. By the time the hot weather of July rolled around, the trees went into overdrive growth forcing me to spend more time pinching each day. This particular cultivar of Juniperus chinensis has strong tip growth and it is essential to pluck the tips back constantly to force tighter ramification of the pads. The inner growth of the branches closer to the trunks of the trees started to fill out and I soon realized that I might get further this year than I had realized at the beginning of the growing season.

It seems that all summer long I spent each morning and every evening sitting on a bench looking at the trees’ progress. I soon began to spend more time thinking of the forest composition and tree placement. Sometime in late August, I began to start working the composition in my head more seriously and started moving trees around the bench in different positions, seeing how they might fit together. Looking back now, it seems like I spent a couple of weeks figuring out how the branches of one tree would fit into and against another tree and getting into some detail on which branches would stay and which would be jined. The experience is somewhat like a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle that takes time but in the end comes together and makes a picture. This is a slow process and one should take his time in making decisions on which branch should live and which should die. Once a tree configuration has been established, some branches becomes more obvious which should be killed.  Large branches which are out of balance are the first candidates to kill off, which I did, and I even guy wired them into position after removing the bark to let them dry and harden off. Other branches not so obvious were left to grow knowing that when the composition is actually made and fitted into the bonsai container those decisions could be made then. The constant grind of pinching and plucking went on with a couple of breaks to lime sulphur the branches that I had jined earlier in the season once I knew that they were completely dried out.

Nearing the end of August and knowing that I might be able to speed up this project by a whole year, I was soon chomping at the bit to really work on the container layout.  As is my habit when making a forest composition, I spend time with the bonsai container filling it with soil and playing with stone to get a natural and pleasing to the eye composition. Finally, I could get out that huge bonsai container that had been in the greenhouse for 5 years collecting dust and put it on a bench in the greenhouse where it was convenient to work with. I filled it with some plain nursery mix that I had in the greenhouse and, over the next week or so, I would look at it every morning when I arrived at the greenhouse and often watering the soil to see the differences in color and texture. To me, this is the exciting time of making a forest composition. With all the pieces reasonably close to completion, now begins the mind game that you play with yourself in developing the “story” of the composition. For me, the necessity of a story is particularly important on a multi-tree or forest composition. I always find myself going back in my mind to a place that I’ve been or something that I’ve seen that inspired me. In this case, I was drawn back to my experiences in the high elevations of the Sierra Mountains of California, trekking through the forests of Ebbets Pass where I had a cabin, and Tioga Pass in Yosemite. While most of that forest landscape is Pine (Pinus jefferyi, ponderosa and contorta latifolia), there are sections at the medium and higher elevations of Incense Cedar (Calocedrus decurens), White fir (Abies concolor), and California Juniper (Juniperus californica) growing out of vast hills and valleys of granite boulders. There is something about tall stately trees growing straight to the sky dotted throughout the granite landscape that is definitely inspiring to me and something every bonsai enthusiast should experience if they have the chance.

With that basic concept chosen, I spent a week or two off and on playing with stone. Granite was the required stone but I didn’t have any of that California granite that is white with small black spots and dotted with sparkles of clear quartz. Well, as in any endeavor when you don’t have what, you want you make do with what you have! I knew I had some granite around the nursery somewhere, the trick was just finding it. I made a trip out to New Mexico a few years ago and picked up some Pink granite that would work well, but did I have enough was the question. I rummaged through the countless buckets of rocks that I have looking for it and I even found some of it at Dave and Barbara Bogan’s greenhouse that we had used for a workshop earlier in the year. While it was not perfect, I managed to find enough, and it would work nicely. Finally after a month or more of "futzing" with rock placement, I think it is done, but you never know. There are still 4 months to go to make the forest, and I have found additional stones making their way to that container one or two at a time.

After the rock placement was done, I used some bamboo sticks to start playing with tree location. Originally I was planning on using 15 trees but soon came to the realization that I probably couldn’t fit all 15 of them into that container, so I decided that a 9 tree composition would work better for what I had in mind. Nine trees would allow me to space the trees a bit further apart than normal, to more reflect the landscape that you see when you’re hiking through the woods. The feel I’m looking for is the transition zone from middle to higher elevations where the trees are further apart and give you a wider view of the landscape and individual trees; what I think of as an "American landscape", wide in scope and a unique depth of character, something that you’d like to jump into and take a walk or pitch a tent and camp for the night.
With the story line established to guide me now, and a clear image in my mind, I can sit back for the next few months waiting for February to get here to put it all together.  In the meantime, I have been amazed at the difference in the trees in just one growing season. While I know it will be at least 2 or 3 years for the trees to take on an old appearance, they at least now look more like trained trees with a future. The pictures on page 7 are the same tree taken 11 months apart.

The trees have gone from a tangled mess to something more stately.  As you can see, the pads have developed nicely and thickened up from all that summer pinching.  I have also noticed in the last few days that the growth has started to take on that mature braided foliage, instead of the pointed juvenile foliage. 

I should also mention here that sometime in September I did remove the guy wires and do a more traditional wiring job on the trees.  This was quite an undertaking with each tree taking about 4 hours or more to wire.  Along with wiring I did do some foliage cleaning by removing all of the growth under the branches to flatten the pads and focus the growth and some additional removal of that ugly spindly growth.
With the cold weather rapidly approaching, the trees are beginning to slow down their growth for the season and we now embark upon the waiting game.  All that could be done has been done, and we now let old man winter take care of firming the branches in place.

Well, it's now the end of November and I’ve been sitting on my hands for what seems to be an interminable amount of time, even though it’s only been 5 weeks.  Winter has given some cold killing frosts and the trees have been fast asleep now for at least a month.  I have kept myself busy building a special table in the greenhouse to construct the forest on when the time comes, and I have readied the container with the tie down wires.

I was going to wait until February 2009 to put the forest together, but since I have a greenhouse and can keep the trees in relative safety over the rest of the winter I decided to do it now!  Part of the reasoning for doing it now is that it was almost exactly a year ago that I pulled the trees out of the ground and did the initial wiring and had them in the greenhouse all winter and they did superbly.  With baited breath, not knowing what to expect, I started the process of putting the forest together.  I made some permanent soil and put about 2 inches of it in the bottom of the container.  During the summer I had already decided the placement of each individual tree in the composition and numbered them 1-9 as to the order in which they would be worked on.  The number 1 tree, being the largest diameter trunk and around which all of the other trees would be placed, was pulled out of the container. I did some minimal root hook work to loosen up the original clay soil from the root ball and preserved it for later use.  Not surprisingly, I did not have to remove many roots at all, as they were naturally flat and I had cut them back last year when I removed them from the field to a size that would work for the composition.  It was evident that during this last summer they produced lots of new feeder roots which was a good sight to see.  The next task was to use a water hose with a good stream of water to wash off all of the remaining soil and get the roots into what is called a “bare root” condition. Once the tree was bare rooted, it was ready for placement into the container and loosely tied down into place with the wire ties that I had previously put in the container, so it would stand in position on  its own while I worked on preparing tree number 2.  Now I must say here that because I was working by myself, I knew that it was going to be a long process getting all of these trees done. I did have on hand some wet sphagnum moss to temporarily place over the roots so they would not dry out while I was working on them. In addition I did not have the luxury of taking many pictures of the process as I don’t like having roots exposed very long to the air.  Time is always more important when I’m working on this kind of project.  So, with that in mind, tree number 2 was ready for placement into the container.  Each time a tree was placed into the container, both the roots and branches were folded into the tree or trees around it to best position it for the overall composition.  The roots folded together nicely without having to remove any at all, so the emphasis was to get the tree best positioned for branches.  As I added each tree to the composition, I actually spent most of my time looking at branches, folding them in, making decisions on which ones would have to be shortened or removed.  I did not spend the time to work on the branches while I was putting each tree into the container, that could wait.  So went the process for all 9 trees.  Once all of the trees were placed and wired into position in the container, I could make more of the permanent soil.

The permanent soil that I decided to use for this forest consists of 40% granite, 30% humus and 30% clay.  The granite which forms the structural material was a mix of particle sizes to emulate a natural high elevation soil common to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The humus was a 60/40 mixture of ground pine bark and ground peat moss.  The clay component was the natural clay that was part of the root ball of the trees that was removed during the potting process.  I also added a few handfuls of a product called “green sand” that is a natural product from Texas which is high in available phosphorus.  With the soil now ready, I removed the wet sphagnum moss which was covering the roots and started to add the permanent soil in layers working it in and around the roots to remove large air pockets.  Layer by layer I continued to add soil poking with my fingers and using a chop stick to make a tight mass of soil around the roots.  Next thing to do was "water in" the soil.  Using a spray nozzle attached to my watering hose that gives a nice light spray of water at low pressure, I watered in the soil many times until it freely drained out of the bottom of the container.  The initial "watering in" allows the soil to compact around the roots, which makes for divots at the surface of soil.  I added additional soil to fill in the divots and watered it in again.  Good gosh, I was done and could take a small break!

Now that the hard work was done and the composition was put together, I spent the next 2 hours removing crossing branches, some were jined, some were completely removed and others just repositioned.  
Next was to insert the stone into the composition.  I had previously done a preliminary design of the stone, so I knew what I was looking for; but, as always when you get to placing it in the final composition, you sort of have to redo it so it fits nicely with the trees in their final positions. After spending an hour or so placing, moving and refining the stone placement, the last job to be done was applying moss.  All in all, the day was one of great pleasure and joy at the final results. The total amount of time that I spent putting the composition together was 7 hours.

I have spent the last few days looking at the composition and, as always, there are lots of minor things that required some attention, but for all practical purposes this project has been completed.  It’s been a total of 7 years since I took the cuttings of these trees to get them to the finish line.  It will require another 2 or 3 years of work to get all of the detail work completed, but all that time has been worth it.  I am very satisfied with the final results.

The finished composition is quite large with the container measuring 48" length x 26" wide x 5" deep.  The height of the tallest tree, not including the Jin at the top of the tree, is 47".