Your Backyard Garden

Bonsai Juniper Trees

Juniper Cascade (juniper procumbens nana)
Juniper “Karate Kid Tree” (juniper procumbens ‘nana’)
Juniper in a Water Pot (juniper procumbens “nana”)
Juniper Cascade (juniper procumbens nana)
San Jose Juniper (juniperus chinensis ’san jose’)
Juniper (juniper procumbens nana)
Juniper Tree - Medium Juniper Procumbens “nana”
Juniper - Trained (juniper procumbens nana)
Juniper (juniper procumbens nana)
Juniper Cascade (juniper procumbens nana)
Juniper “Karate Kid Tree” (juniper procumbens ‘nana’)
Juniper in a Water Pot (juniper procumbens “nana”)
Juniper - Trained (juniper procumbens nana)
Juniper (juniper procumbens nana)
Juniper Tree - Large (Juniper Procumbens “nana”)One day, while delivering a particularly intense sales pitch, I began to realize that I wasn’t lying. There really was some potential here. The more I studied the tree, the more it became apparent that I was not looking at a failure. The failure was mine—I had failed to see.I had been regarding the so-called faults as unacceptable and unforgivable. But I had been ignoring the tree’s assets: the sweep of the driftwood, the strategically positioned branches, the dense growth close to the trunk. I suddenly realized what the initial training followed by years of routine watering and the occasional feed had produced. Surely, any yamadori presenting that kind of potential would probably have equally serious faults that would require just as much work and ingenuity to resolve.

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Bonsai Accessories

Hanes Bonsai Tee Shirt
Decorative Landscape Pebbles
Humidity Tray Pebbles
Mini Pump
B. Drainage Hole Covers
Bonsai Turntable Indoor or Outdoor
B. Drainage Hole Covers
Watering Can
Mist Bottle
Fogger Indoor Water Fountain Fogger
Plastic House Label 1″x1″ writing surface

THE “WRAPAROUND” is arguably the most controversial of all bonsai techniques. The Japanese call the practice a tanuki, implying deception or a cheat. As you can imagine, this technique is frowned upon in Japanese bonsai. On the other hand, American bonsai artist Dan Robinson once coined the memorable phrase “Phoenix Graft,” which views the process from an entirely different perspective. The terms tanuki and phoenix graft clearly illustrate the difference in attitude that can and does exist—not only between East and West, but also between individual artists.

If you set out to make a tanuki—a deception—you will have no respect for your work, so you’ll take less care. But if you set out to create a phoenix graft, the implication is that you are embarking on a more noble quest. What could possibly be wrong with combining a magnificent piece of driftwood—nature’s art—with the living vigor and enthusiasm of a healthy young plant, to create an object of great dignity and beauty?

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Bonsai Accessories

• Bonsai Accessories (29)
• Bonsai Books (8)
• Bonsai Grow Lights (3)

Bonsai Trees

• Juniper Trees (57)

CHINESE JUNIPERS, with their scale foliage pressed tightly to the shoots, are the perfect species group for beginners and experienced artists alike.

Junipers have everything: flexibility, dense foliage, hardiness, resilience and a predictability that is matched by few other species. By carefully manipulating the branches and shoots on a dense juniper, you can create an almost complete bonsai image in a single session.

The most notable feature of Chinese junipers, however, is their natural method of economizing. They shut off water and nutrient supply to certain branches in times of environmental stress or even as a part of the natural aging process. These branches eventually become stripped and bleached by the elements to form bone-colored jins and sharis. Far from indicating that the plant is in poor condition, the appearance of natural jins means that it is behaving exactly as it should.

The opportunity to use the palette of colors offered by the orange-red underbark, the rich green foliage and the bleached deadwood—as well as their malleability cooperation—make Chinese junipers the most sculpturally obliging of all bonsai.

Bonsai Trees : Recommended by Your Backyard Garden

By now I realized that bonsai could be bigger than nine inches, so I decided to try something a little larger. I took a couple of dozen hardwood cuttings from local hedgerows. These are easy to root in open ground over winter, and the suc¬cess rate is around 80%. One cutting in particular seemed to be more ready to throw out lateral growth than the others, so I chose it for my next serious effort at a broom(ish) style. This time I decided to follow advice and let the cutting grow on in the ground for a few years to thicken the trunk and to train the main branches while in the ground.

1987—getting there.
There’s an awkward kink in the trunk where a new leader was wired in, and the inter-branch spacing is less than ideal. Fortunately, the latter problem was easily solved a couple of years later by simply removing the lower right branch.

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On day one of my love affair with bonsai I scooped up a tiny elm sucker from Holland Park in London. It was mid-June and the sucker had only sprouted that spring, so the stem was still green. It had four leaves and about nine inches (22cm) of parent root—thinner than a pencil. How it survived is anybody’s guess, but it did survive and is still thriving today.

In those days I knew absolutely nothing about bonsai. I had seen some small pine in Sears department store (sold for indoor growing!), so I thought all bonsai were that size. Then I bought my first book. The author was pictured holding a tiny twig with a few weak roots dangling from the bottom. The caption read something like: “An oak bonsai ready for root pruning.” Okay, I was convinced. I compared the picture with my one-year-old elm and thought: “Hmm, I’m not doing so badly…” My next bonsai reading matter was a photocopy of a Brooklyn Botanic Gardens publication. There was a photograph of what appeared to be a real deciduous tree in winter. The caption said it was a bonsai that had been cared for by the same family for many generations. This was fantastic—this was real bonsai! The bottom of the caption had been missed by the photocopier, so I didn’t read the line that gave the size and I naturally assumed that this was the same size as the cheap pines and the silly oak. “Wow! How can they make all those tiny twigs on something only nine inches (22cm) tall?” I thought about it and eventually decided that if they could do it, so could I.

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