In this blog post I wanted to show the styling of a rather peculiar shimpaku I bought in '23. Below you can see the tree as I bought it. It only had three branches, one of which (the on on the right) was rather unhealthy and weak. They were very far apart, so I decided to cut the top one and make it into a deadwood feature (ten-jin in Japanese).
The most interesting part of this tree, is the twisted trunk. There is some very nice weathered deadwood on the trunk (shari) and the live vein and shari have a lot of movement.
However, in this angle, the tree is growing straight up. I knew I'd have to tilt the tree to make a more dynamic composition.
This was how the tree looked after I repotted it in March of '24. You can also see I removed all of the foliage in the top part of the tree.
After one year, the tree responded well to repotting. It had put on some foliage mass and was ready for the next step. the only thing I did last year, after repotting, was adding some details in the shari. This was all done by hand, without power tools!
Since I only had two branches left, I had to be very careful to not damage them while wiring and bending. One branch was pulled down to create a cascading branch, drawing your eye to the shari. The other one was bent back and up to create the apex. I also removed part of the ten-jin. It was a bit too high up for my taste and distracted from the main composition.
This is the end result for now! I'd like to remove some more foliage next time I work on it, and I still have to refine the deadwood in the ten-jin. This is - of course - only the beginning of this bonsai tree. As time progresses, I'll keep wiring and refining it, 'till it's ready for exhibition one day!
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