Black Hills Spruce Raft - Initial Design and Progression

[Deep Sea Diver]

Greetings!

Received a Black Hills Spruce raft 9/22/2022 from Andy Smith at Golden Arrow Bonsai.

It has four trunks and a somewhat eclectic layout, with great promise as a practice project. Here’s a suite of screen grabs from Andy‘s preview movie taken just before it was sent here. Andy had wired the trunks at least once. The present layout shows a tree strongly influenced by the local winds in the Deadwood South Dakota area.



…and here the raft is in early April, just after repotting. As one can see, the tree did well over the winter. Also, the layout is getting clogged up by foliage, becoming an untidy mop.



Next - The Initial Design

Cheers
DSD sends

 

[Deep Sea Diver]

Initial Design

Spent the past year looking at this raft while circling around and watering trees. My inclination was to create a more craggy, wind influenced, beat up appearance. Felt this would move the original design to a different level.

Doing this entails a good deal of risk. A good deal of foliage needed to be removed. Also some definate bending would need to be done to move towards the desired effect.

Initial pruning was done, getting ready for the wire. All needles were stripped off. Branches without new terminal buds were pruned back to an inner bud. If no bud was found the branch was removed.

Next, structural wire was hung on the tree. Then, each trunk was twisted and bent to their desired positions.

Detail wire followed, profiles checked, trunks and branches adjusted.

Here’s what the BHS Raft ended up to look like. A bit more edgy and all that.



Knowing a lot of foliage would be removed, coupled with a good deal of twisting, it seems best this tree should either go in the cold frame this winter, or the greenhouse.

Once budding occurs next year, we’ll know more one how these little spruces react to all this abuse.

cheers
DSD sends

 

[Deep Sea Diver]

Last years design work really put this raft through its paces! Yet it responded really well after wintering over in the cold frame.

The composition seemed to be missing something, so added an ultra magic rock from the Cascades.



Best
DSD sends