0soyoung
Imperial Masterpiece
I purchased Mugo #2 at a local nursery’s ‘lemon sale’ for $18 in 2009. It is a mugo ‘pumilo’ and was never a particularly attractive tree. Like most pumilos I’ve seen, it is basically a stick with a whorl from a knob on top. Over time since 2009, I learned about growing pines and tried to apply them to this tree. But it didn’t get any better. In fact, it got worse because of my numerous mistakes. I really had no idea of what to do with it until 2011, when I saw “Raised Root White Pine Styling …” pine on Crataegus Bonsai. Consequently I wired it, trying to paste the “Konnor’s Raised Root” image on it. It never quite worked out (an understatement).
When I repotted it in 2012, reality was beginning to sink in. Needless to say, I went back to square one (clueless). Meanwhile, I removed the wire in 2013 because it was biting in. After finding some success with other trees in my collection (and feeling, therefore, that I’d made some progress artistically) I put this on the bench, studied it, and started re-wiring, thinking I’d discovered a new image from/for the tree. I removed a long branch and after about half an hour I came to the realization that I was just recreating my previous disaster, just without the elephant trunk I had resisted cutting off before.
So, I conceded defeat and asked my best advisor for help. She starts talking about how ‘this line is interesting’, ‘remove those branches', 'cut those too' (branches that to me were the apex) , 'tip it like this', and blah, blah, blah ... I am reeling (you want to cut the top off and then tip the trunk to show it off???), but decide to follow her lead. What the hell, I say to myself, I’m ready to throw it away anyway.
Within an hour, I was done with it and I liked it. I found what I thought was a good pot for it (but because of how much I had to tip it, I wish the pot was about half and inch deeper – so it goes). Nevertheless, I do like the end result; getting to it has been revelatory.
Indeed, it is not mandatory to twirl a branch over a trunk chop to be an apex. The apex, in fact, doesn’t even need to really be there. One can make an attractive tree by chopping off the apex just above a whorl, tilting the trunk, and then arranging the whorl so that the foliage forms a triangle that implies the expected form. I’ve since been noticing this being done by real bonsai artists (see Nicola Crivelli’s blog, for example).
This isn’t great art, but it represents a breakthrough for me – a passage from just growing trees in pots to ‘doing bonsai’ or
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