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Intensive is such an accurate name for this process. Every day Boon picks us up at the Executive Inn Embarcadero (if you go, always get a room on the water side, it's quiet and beautiful. The city side is very noisy and, well, ugly.) We drive to his home and immediately go out to the trees, where we take advantage of the early light for photography.
The two final days were spent in candling pines, cleaning, pruning, and wiring azaleas, and wiring a large California juniper. June is a great Intensive to attend because so much has to be done right now on both pines and azaleas. However, if you have a number of pines and a number of azaleas, well, you should have an assistant or assistants!
When working with azaleas, the first task after flowering is to remove all the spend flowers, including the seed head that is forming. This is really quite easily done by simply grasping the seed head between thumb and forefinger and giving a little twist.
Once the tree is cleaned, we will start at the top and reduce the foliage by cutting back to two shoots, all the places where there are more than two. This will make your azalea look very sparse, and the foliage pads will be very flat by this time. We also want to reduce the leaves on each shoot to three at the top of the tree and two toward the bottom of the tree. Since azaleas are shrubby bottom-growers, we have to be careful not to weaken the top of the tree. Always hold back growth at the bottom in order to strengthen the top of the tree.
Next, another student and I shared wiring duties on this large, collected California Juniper. It's an honor to be allowed to work on trees like this one. It was collected in 2000 and has had good root work done on it since, so it is in peak health. This is the second wiring. The first set the direction of the main branches, and the tree has since put on a great deal of growth.
Wiring technique is absolutely crucial on trees like this. The hardest part of wiring collected trees, is figuring out the best way to anchor the wire so that it holds properly without covering the branches with too much wire. What a puzzle this tree was! If you know how to do it properly, sometimes crossing a wire is your best bet. Notice, too, the length of the coils. 45 degrees is a good wiring angle for deciduous trees, but a longer coil is better for conifers. We are using only copper wire on this tree because the wires stay on a long time and copper holds much better, enabling a much smaller wire diameter than aluminum.
And here is the final image. The tree has many years ahead of it as a show-stopping bonsai. It will be shown in January at the Bay Island Bonsai show. I hope if some people get their way, my name will be required to be mentioned as a contributor to this tree. (Just kidding...masterpiece trees take care of themselves, and if a tree is not a masterpiece, who cares who worked on it or styled it?)
