Proposal: Rebooting a tree contest

[Wood]

All of our contests right now are currently dedicated to using saplings or new starter material. There are a lot of (good!) reasons to do that, especially availability of material, but all of those contests focus on the same skill set. Would anyone be interested in a contest for re-imagining damaged trees? I'd love to see some creative solutions to big challenges. Time to show off peg grafts/branch relocation, wedge cuts, heavy bends and live vein separation!

Two inspiration threads off the top of my head:

• @MACH5's shohin Kiyohime lost the apex and directional branch, so he turned it into a cascade rock planting
• @MACH5's Japanese beech air layer lost the main trunk, so he repurposed the remaining branch

Proposed Rules:

• Starting material must be a mid-development, late-development or refined tree. Something that has a clearly defined vision or future
• The tree has sustained significant enough damage to reboot the tree differently. Maybe the apex died, a major/branch trunk was lost, rot or scarring somehow developed
• A four year timeframe for the contest? It seems like most of the transformation work is relatively quick, though I think a proper peg graft/branch relocation would take at least three years

Possible variation:
Nursing very unhealthy trees back to a vigorous state, like when @Adair M found an Itoigawa in bad shape due to pinching or sharing and slowly replaced all the foliage

Judging and prizes:
I've got very few ideas so far, gonna need some help here. Ideally we'd be trying to refine the rescued tree as much as possible. Possible criteria:

• Cohesiveness of the renewed artistic vision
• Bigger, more creative transformations are better
• Minimized/disguised scars and original damage

Anyone interested?

 

[Dav4]

It would appear that approximately half of my bonsai collection would be appropriate for this contest!


JK, but I definitely have a few that would be eligible .

 

[bwaynef]

You call it rebooting a tree. I call it budget constraints.