So I picked up this Bougainvillea at a local Bonsai nursery, and can’t wait to get it moving into a nice bonsai. However, I am still undecided. Thoughts?

I have been wanting to try my hand for a while at air layering, especially a nice upright from the sequoia/redwood world. I had picked up this sequoia a few weeks ago and repotted it as it was pretty well root bound. After a few weeks of letting it recover, I decided to take a few cutting from the point of where I was going to air layer. Funny enough, there was another post just made on another blog a few weeks ago, about air layering an older redwood.

I wanted to leave the other branches alone that are below the air layer so I wouldn’t shock the tree too much, although I will probably be air layering those later as well since they are thicker.

Found this gem recently in a local nursery. I was snooping around the nursery for some older material, and wasn’t finding much, then I happen to stumble upon this. I can’t quite determine the age, and believe it’s a California Juniper (maybe). However it had a great trunk, need some nebari work, but a lot of potential. I see a lot of deadwood-ing, potentially in my future.

First, it needed some serious cleaning, pretty messy as you can tell, and it must have been sitting on some sort of pine, probably a black pine, for years.

Lots of great wood to work with, first step is to remove all of the old bark, and expose the more red colored wood underneath.

A bit nicer of a cleaning around the trunk, but still tons of work to do, and not to mention to find the nice roots below, which are completely buried in hard clay, in later photos you can of course tell this juniper hadn’t been repotted/touched in years.

Some possible nebari beginning to peak out, it took me almost 30 minutes just to scrape
that little section away with a chopstick. I will more than likely do more work on this later, however, I did cut down the tree’s rootball to begin training towards a bonsai pot down the road, and didn’t want to shock the juniper too much more. Although it is late Spring here in Southern California, the sun here has a tendency to smack junipers pretty hard. Of course, as old as this one is, I would like it to survive

I cut down its original nursery pot, and broke down the rootball, however with the heavy main portion largely intact. Added some bonsai soil in the pot as well, and watered it well. As you can see there were 3 branches that just were not working. They had a ton of dry foliage, and the spacing of the good branches wouldn’t have been very pleasing to the eye. I decided to remove after them, and you will have to just wait to see my plans for them later. I left a lot of the good foliage on the other side however, that way, again the tree won’t go into too much shock, and it gets a haircut to at least look half way decent. This of course is a long term project and it will probably be a while until I start applying any wiring to it, as I am letting it recover in a shadier spot of our yard.

Currently sitting in our yard. Til next time!