It’s funny that you notice about the top. Tops of trees are often the hardest part to do convincingly in a naturalistic style. I’ve never liked the green helmet look of the Japanese aesthetic, and early in the hobby I paid a lot of attention to what the Chinese did, which was much more attractive and many times more convincing.
My time with Dan Robinson then took that to yet another level. Those who have pursued more than a cursory reading of
Gnarly Branches will know of the lifetime of study Dan has devoted to understanding how trees age. To travel with him all over the mountain West is to be exposed to an almost endless stream of examples of tops of dying trees. He knows where the ancient trees are on almost every stretch of road we traveled, and has memorized all the ones with great and illustrative tops. He’d explain about the classic White pine top off to the left in Stevens Pass, and then the Nobel fir a mile later, then the Engelmann spruce and the nearby Doug fir around the next hairpin turn, and on and on for hours - each dead top different, unique for that species, allowing identification miles away. He has even bugged me repeatedly to write and photograph a second book with him, all about dead tops on old growth survivors, and how trees age, but I cannot get into the idea enough to do it, and I sincerely doubt there are more than ten people in the entire country that would pay for such a tome.
Speaking of Dan, he also used to chide me for my fascination with overly long jins - as a shrink, I would kid him that it probably spoke to a deep-seated Freudian pathology on my part, and he’d let it go. But recently he’s actually complimented me a few times on some of them, and leaves me alone about the others. In addition, since most of my trees are up for sale these days, I figure - in my most conniving, capitalistic fashion - that the long jins disturb people who would otherwise find a tree beautiful, and that the ugly jin might just motivate them to purchase the tree to rescue it, out of some sense of moral and aesthetic duty.
