Junipers can be dangerous, especially if you can be somewhat allergic to their prickly ways. I was smart enough to wear along shirt and gloves, however I didn’t keep my sleeves rolled down. Smart move. This past weekend my parents wanted to remove their old Junipers that they have had planted in their garden for about 15 years. Of course, my dad and I being bonsai enthusiasts saw this as a cool opportunity to get some practice in with some older material.

Before we dug out these black widow infested plants, we paid a visit to the San Gabriel Nursery to have a look around. I ended picking up a flowering almond, a nice white Japanese wisteria my dad found, and small Sweet Gum, which is getting stuck into a bonsai training pot.

This nursery is pretty nice, it has been around for a while and has a pretty nice selection. It also carries the very hard to find Yoshino Cherry tree, and will be a target of mine soon.

They also have a pretty large amount of your normal nursery materials from veggies, to azaleas, to some pretty nice orchids. However, the elder age of their bonsai are pretty nice. Some are even not for sale, and only on display, and look pretty well aged.

A few favorites were the rafts, and multiple forest displays that they had, from maples, foeminas, and shimpaku’s, they were nicely well done, and prices on them weren’t that bad. I was also trying to peak at their maples to see if I can find the ever elusive (to me at least) fireglow maple around, as they had mentioned in a newsletter that it was. Unfortunately, we were unable to find it, and will have to wait another day.

A quick stop was taken at the House Of Bonsai, mostly to pick up soil material and a quick peek at their pre bonsai material as well. I ended up picking up a 1 year old Katsura maple, as it was fairly priced. They have a huge selection of Japanese Plum Trees that have been reduced to bonsai size (drool), although no longer flowering, you can picture how nice these look when in bloom.

They have a pretty wide selection of bonsai, especially pines and junipers, and I don’t really mean just the junipers that are just a few years old. The owners are super knowledgeable, and they even give classes on certain nights. Check their Facebook page to find out their calendar of events, and explanations of what to do if you are interested in attending.

Back to digging up junipers. We ended up pulling up 5 junipers in all, with humongous roots that stretched a few feet across, and looked liked (and felt like) rebar poles when removing. My forearms took a beating, but it was exciting enough to ignore the pricks and itches that were being inflicted.

Thankfully, although we didn’t see them at first, I wasn’t attacked by any of the black widows that began to crawl out (at least I don’t think I did, perhaps I will be lucky enough to gain super powers from it if so?)

There were a couple that were super nice, and just needed a lot of clean up work to begin with, others that would have to be trained even longer.  A particular one that I really can’t wait to see what my dad does with, has a trunk that is at least 2.5 inches thick, and super heavy.

He will have fun. The potted ones in the photos are the ones that I brought home, and will be left to recover their root systems before I do anything with them.

Happy that it looks like there will be a few that will turn out to be pretty nice bonsai later. I also posted more photos of the random material, etc around the house, as well as the Green Maple seeds I planted, and are now sprouting their second set of leaves.

It will be nice to see the black pine seeds begin to sprout, as they were planted this weekend, and the last batch that I had were burned pretty badly last Summer. Fortunately, out of 40 of them, 3 survived, and are now beginning to sprout more needles.