Yesterday I posted some work I did on a nice collected Water-elm, Planera aquatica, that couldn’t work as a single bonsai. I basically sliced through the connected root, producing a twin-trunk specimen and a three-trunk raft. Today I did an initial styling on both. Here are the before and after photos of each:
I like all of the trees I style, but from time to time one comes along that really grabs me. This is one of those trees. It’s certainly not a huge specimen, the trunk base is 2″ and it’ll finish at 16″, but it’s just got that special something (at least for me). The Byron Myrick oval really complements this tree nicely.
This one required a good trimming to get the design started. The largest trunk had suffered some dieback, so I wired up a new leader and will let it run without any trimming for the remainder of the growing season. By next year I’ll have a nice “Three Amigo” raft-style bonsai or maybe something bigger depending on what I run across.