The bright red, strap like flowers make this a unique and beautiful cultivar. However, as a hybrid cultivar, they have a few foibles. Do you see a flower that looks a bit out of place?
They tend to throw a sport, reverting to the “mother plant” with a full-petaled flower here and there, which will become the dominant flower if left unchecked.
See it now?
When the tree is in full bloom, it’s easy to find the big flowers…
And remove them back to the point where the thin petaled flowers grow.
The following year, the large flowers were fewer:
Next week we’ll look at cleanup after the show, two years in a row.
I have been studying bonsai since 1994, in an ever-increasing obsessive fashion. In our last 5 years prior to moving from Iowa to Alabama pursuing a career in the foodservice industry, my bonsai collection was limited to a few varieties that could survive brutal winters outside, or winters under dim light in the dank basement of our humble duplex...my wife puts up with a lot. Including the trailer hitch I put on our brown 1983 Chrysler New Yorker to pull a U-Haul full of trees to Nashville for a 3-month stop along the career path that led us to Alabama. 12 years later, we no longer have the New Yorker; and not a single one of those trees remain on my bench, having given the last holdout to a new club member this summer. I prefer collecting native trees and buying the classical species used in Japan, feeding organic, and reading everything I can get my hands on.
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Nebari Bonsai 
Reblogged this on Wolf's Birding and Bonsai Blog.