A Huge Juniper Transformed

Last Saturday I decided to attend a meeting at Midway Bonsai Society after hearing that a young member of Eastern Bonsai Society (EBS)  - the club I've been a member of for 12 years - would be doing a demonstration on a huge juniper.

Shaundre Craukamp may only be 19, but he already has a lot of bonsai experience, having joined his first club at the age of 10. After that club closed, he moved to EBS when he was 14. A year later he won the EBS and regional new talent competitions. Later that year he went on to win the national competition, becoming the youngest South African to do so.

The trees used for those competitions were nursery stock- Juniper Procumbens Nana, a little smaller than the one he's seen working on in an earlier post (he's the guy in black). Unlike the one in that post, however, competition trees have had no previous styling.

The tree he worked on this time was a collected tree - Juniper Chinensis - belonging to Jonathan Cain, a member of Midway.

Shaundre started by doing a little carving on some of the dead wood at the bottom. (There was far too much to be done in one session.)

He chose to do the carving by hand.

Then he moved on to the apex.

As everything up there was long and straight, and growing away from the trunk, a lot of bending was required - too much to be done at once without putting excessive strain on the tree, but enough to show the direction in which the tree will be developed.

First he split the area he wanted to bend, then he applied tape to prevent the branch breaking when he bent it.

After wiring the branch and adding some guy wires, he was able to pull it down in the direction he wants it to grow. I believe it will be brought closer to the trunk when it's had time to heal.

This was already a big improvement, but the branch coming up from the bend looked out of place, so he removed it, leaving a stub which will be used as a jin.

He then bent one of the lower branches up to create a new apex.

He marked a few areas that will need carving, including the marked branch, which is currently far too long and thick.

After all the small branches had been wired (with help from Jonathan and his wife Denise) and re-positioned the tree looked like this.

Shaundre will be paying Midway another visit next spring to do further work on this tree.

My First Carving Attempt

When I bought my crab apple a few years ago it was about seven foot tall with no low branches, so it's taken a bit of effort to get it to where it is now.

January 2019 - before pruning

A lot of the tree had to be discarded at the time because repotting was a matter of urgency when I bought it, but there was enough left to allow me to do an air layer before I started developing this, the parent tree.

I'm ashamed to admit that since the air layer was removed, however, I've largely ignored both trees. That created a problem with this one because the top branch on the left was thicker than the lower branches and apex. I had to change something.

Two options presented themselves :

1. change the planting angle and turn the thick branch into the new leader
2. remove that branch

I opted for the latter.

January 2019 - after pruning

After the branch was removed I was left with an ugly bulge where it had been.

In the past I'd have asked for help with that bulge, but I recently bought a Dremel carving tool, so I decided this was the perfect opportunity to try it out.

Janurary 2019 -  after carving

Not a perfect job by any means, but for a first attempt, I'm reasonably happy. When I've got a bit more carving experience, I can still come back and improve on it.

For now I want the two side branches to thicken a little more before I shorten them, and the new leader and back branch need a lot of fattening up.

Carving a Big Olive Tree

The topic of our club's last meeting was carving trees. The demonstrator was Kathy Steyn of Bonsai Magic. Although Kathy isn't a member of our club I've often seen her and her trees at the meetings where members of the various clubs in my area get together and she always has the top trees in several categories.

Here are two which she brought to our meeting.

First an olive tree:

Kathy Steyn's olive tree

I'd love to have one like this in my collection but it would have to be a lot smaller than Kathy's tree as I only buy trees I can manage on my own. Maybe one day...

Her second tree was this Buddleja Salinga:

Kathy Steyn's Buddleja Salinga

Dave Wilson, a long time member of our club (Eastern Bonsai Society), brought this large, untrained olive tree for Kathy to work on.

The first step was to get rid of the excess branches.

Kathy and Dave removing unwanted branches

If this was Kathy's own tree she'd have removed all the thin branches as olives bud back well after pruning. However she respected Dave's wishes and left the best options, though it's possible that some of those will be removed later if better options present themselves.

The next step was removing a thicker branch that looked out of place.

With an electric saw that didn't take too long.

Then it was time for some serious carving:

Creating a natural look with some areas hollowed out:

Here the tree is starting to take shape. What remains of the sawed off branch now looks like natural damage rather than the result of pruning.

The side view of that branch shows a hollow:

An old cut has been turned into a jin.

Dave's tree proved to require more work than could be done in the allotted time, so Kathy took it home to finish the work. Dave has promised to bring it to another meeting so we can see the finished job. When he does I'll get some more photos so that I can write an update.

Meanwhile you can see more of Kathy's work on her Facebook Page.

If you're in Gauteng (South Africa), Kathy offers carving lessons. You can find the details on her website.

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I took my own olive tree along to the meeting and Kathy gave me some advice on how to proceed. As I don't do my own carving I took it to a workshop last week and was really pleased with the work that was done there. But I'll save that for another post.