More Progress-Part 3 of 3

As fall arrived, it was time to continue the work on the tree. This was my first Colorado blue spruce, so I was indebted to the folks at BonsaiNut for some advice and turning me in the right direction. In fact, I found this article at Bonsai4me.com to be invaluable. I'm happy to say there are no real surprises, and my idea that the tree shouldn't be worked on when it's too hot proved to ring true.

Here is the tree from the back after simply removing the rest of the apex foliage. Some friends came over to work on trees with me, and we had a great time.

Here it is from the front at the same stage. At this time I had put up my backdrop and set up for better photos.

Since I wanted to avoid wiring over the beautiful bark as much as possible, I used the upper trunk to anchor, since it will eventually be greatly reduced to jin at any rate. At this point I had the cascading branch fully wired, and the first wire on the crown.

After moving the crown up somewhat.

The following four photos show the four sides, beginning with the back of the tree.





And finally, here is a virtual representation of where Hans VanMeer (www.karamotto.org) thinks the tree should be headed. After seeing several ideas similar, this was the best of the lot, and I realized that this is a much better tree than the semi-cascade I had envisioned. The pot size is very optimistic, since I barely got the tree in the big one it's in now! But in time, I think this is eminently possible for this tree.