Nursery Stock

[Haydz]

Walking around my area in spring is the best time to hunt for some nursery trees for cheep… snagged this juniper Nana as well as this black pine for around 35$ all in! Looking for any advice or inspo for styling!!


Also if you grabbed any new trees I would love to see them!!!

 

[bast]

I'm kind of a bonsai newb, but there's a really informative video here by Jonas Dupuich that I keep coming back to, about developing black pines from seed. If you haven't seen it, I think it will be really useful for you when thinking about what to do with that pine. If I could guess, I think he would suggest that you wire the trunk and give it some good curves, maybe repot it at more of an angle, and probably keep that really long branch up top to grow freely as much as it can, as a sacrifice branch to thicken the trunk. And keep at it for 15 years until it's mostly developed into a proper-looking bonsai pine.

It seems to me that pines have a very specific and unique way of developing into bonsai. There are a lot of pine species that have different needs - some can only do one flush per year and don't tolerate a full decandling, while others can do a good second flush with shorter needles if you decandle at the right time. Black pine is supposedly one of the ones people fully decandle for a second flush. I have some one-year-old seedlings myself, but I'm only just starting on the journey and don't really have much personal experience. Anyway you've got many good years ahead of you to look forward to for development of that pine. No idea about the juniper...

 

[Shibui]

I'd suggest the pine is probably 2 years old and still way too small and too young to consider styling as there's very little to actually style yet. We typically don't start styling very young trees because that simply slows growth so it takes many more years to develop a good bonsai. Most advanced bonsai are styled from more advanced stock.

You may be able to do something with the juniper as it does have some branches, however the pictures don't really show enough of the tree's structure for me to be able to offer meaningful suggestions.