Styling a Corkbark Black Pine, ‘Taihei’ part 3

Corkbark Black Pines 1 Minute

The previous installment is here: https://nebaribonsai.wordpress.com/2019/08/24/styling-a-corkbark-black-pine-taihei-part-2/

This year, the Taihei was left to grow unchecked until mid-September. Here is the starting point, and in fact, the first photo I took of the tree this year…remember the plan of neglect? Here is the neglected specimen after removing the dead needles.

Dense first branch
Apex

After the dead needles were removed, I began pulling some of the new needles to balance out the tree.

Since I don’t summer candle-cut this tree, balance comes in the fall through needle pulling and pruning of the strong branches back to smaller buds so that most of the tips have similar numbers of needles and similar-sized buds for next spring. Below is a shot of the first left branch. I continued this throughout the tree, wiring a bit as necessary, but trying to not wire every branch.

Lower portion complete, compared to the apex which hasn’t been worked yet:

Pruning, thinning, and wiring complete, and now ready for finishing adjustments:

And a night shot after finishing touches…ready for another year of neglect.

Published by Brian VF

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.

Published

2 thoughts on “Styling a Corkbark Black Pine, ‘Taihei’ part 3”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s