Turning a 500-Year-Old Yamadori CA Juniper into a Bonsai

Hi, I'm Milton Chang of Bonsai Heirloom. I'll do this California juniper I bought at an auction about 10 months ago. It really has never been trained. I think most of the branches are natural, at least I haven't trained it yet. I did show it a couple times about the needles to thicken to make a pad, but today I'll work on it. You can see the only thing I did after I bought it was to put it in this pot and use my conventional soil mix, one part peat moss, one part topsoil, and one part perlite, and you can see it's growing like crazy. This is very much, I think the old folks would cringe. That's what I did using, you know, instead of using the akadama and all that good stuff, but the tree does fine. And I will try not to do so drastic cutting as I used to because I think I have plenty of time, if I found the pads, to remove them and retain the shape of the pads to make it look nice, sort of to look nice, natural, and still conform a little bit to the bonsai rules because people do like to see the orderliness. And you can see I anchored this tree down with the copper wire, with the electric wire, and only about, I don't think it's more than two months ago. Now I will remove it. You can see it may bounce back a little bit, but that's fine. I can redo at a different location. You don't really want to leave wiring on too long, but you see it bounced back just a little bit. I push it down quite a bit, and I can certainly do it again as part of my design. So looking at this tree, I was a little bit afraid to reorient it because I want to utilize all the roots that's on this tree. Now that the roots are established, I have more opportunity to reshape the tree, in a sense, reorient it to see what is optimized. So with that in mind, then, let me take it out of this pot. Actually, this pot is already cracked for some reason. I must have something bump into it. I did anchor it a little bit, and actually this pot is already cracked quite a bit. I'll just break it off. You can see this pot is all cracked, because once it's cracked, it tends to get cracked even more. So I would just break the pot, so not to damage any of the roots. Oh, look at that. In nine months, how much roots have grown. And I did not use the root pruning technique. I thought I had, but I didn't, and therefore the roots are very curled. If I had the root pruning, this actually would not occur. So again, I really strongly advocate that you do the root pruning technique, or putting a mosquito mesh underneath of it. So let me take this out, and see a lot of moss. With my soil mix, you also get the bonus moss will grow quite well. Well, I don't like to spend time combing the root bound around the pot, so I'm going to just use a reciprocal saw and cut it all off. All five sides are cut, and now I have a more tidy root ball that I can maneuver a little bit better. And take a look at how do I optimize the, look at the moss. It's just really beautiful. And look at the orientation that maximizes the tree for its nature, for its beauty. So for example, I never quite noticed how beautiful this part is. These are very natural, how it grew in the Mojave Desert. And the root ball, this is roots quite, that's part of the trunk. So I think the this part has to be kept whole, where this part can be a little bit more flexible. So let me orient this tree with you to see what may be a good design. One design is, of course, to kind of a cascade, where this tree will be coming up. But I think it's, maybe there's some other angle that may look nice. So for example, if I make this the top, this I can deal with somehow. Can you imagine this tree comes up like this and going like this and coming down like that? It's just like incredible. But I think that's a little too drastic. This would be another angle, where the tree comes to the front. Yeah, so this would be a pretty good angle. Now I remembered, this is actually the original part the tree came in at. And I was afraid to disturb it too much. So the bottom part were all the original soil. And then I added my part to it on top. That's why you see the root bound. I really was a little bit afraid to work on it to damage, to not keep the tree alive. But looking at the amount of roots, I think this tree will be just fine. Quite different. But I always like to keep something in the middle more or less straight. But this really, essentially, maybe this part should be more straight. So maybe I lower a little bit. See, so this tree will be like straight, this thing coming out. I think that would be, that would look nice. This is the angle I decided. So let me do a little bit of cutting now to form the paths. And then after three times of re-modification, I think this tree would be quite interesting. So let me look, do the design of this part too. There's plenty growth on the top to do the apex. I usually should be doing the apex first. But you can see this is the branch coming down. And then this branch, you can see if I let it grow like this, that would be the path here. So with that in mind, let me just do a little bit of clipping to form the shape of the path. And I will probably pull this one down to give it more of an interesting angle. In fact, why don't I just do it now? So this is just a regular aluminum wire for wiring. And then I'll just pull it down to about the angle I want it to be. And so it's just very informal. Just do it, right? Instead of take a while to... And I really should be cutting this one off. But on the other hand, let's leave it a while to make it look full. And so that the tree is not be totally bare and you accuse me of cutting off too much. And this part, there's plenty so I can cut this off. And I'm not cutting it real carefully because next few times I can easily clean off all the redundant growth where I did not cut off thoroughly. Because these little stuff will all grow out. I think you can probably accuse me of feeding too much nitrogen, which may not really the case because the growth is so overabundance. But I use the fish and kelp fertilizer, which I've been advocating. I want to encourage the branches to go that way. So I'm cutting off anything in the in the wrong direction. So if you come to the front, these two branches, one is going to be full here. And this one is coming down like this. It's really nice. Now, let me work on the apex first. This one and this one are almost the same height. Before I try to remove it, I will maybe try to make it two apex. So that I can always remove one that doesn't hurt anything. On the other hand, if two apex works out, that could be interesting. So let's do that. So here's a big branch. I'll cut off a little bit to have a little bit of a chin. And I can make probably three or four cuttings out of this. I have found this is the apex. I will cut off the back to reduce it to have pads in the back. I'm not going to do too careful a job because when it fills out, then I can see plenty well. This is too overgrown for me to see. So I'm cutting them off and wait for it to grow out for me to see more clearly what to do next. So you can see this is a nice apex. And I just keep clipping. We can fast forward to create the pads at roughly the right position. Then I can work on the details of the pads in the future. Let's say in March or April. You will see plenty growth for me to rework it again. So this branch is actually problematic. Not much to work on. So I better save this branch. So I cut it off here. Save this branch to work on someday. So this branch wants to come down. And so with this branch. And then this one has to be a little bit of a pad. Now that I cleaned out the top a little bit, it's clearly this is the apex. And then this one can be a slightly lower branch. So that's what I'll keep in mind to do. In fact, I don't even need this branch here because this could be the branch going down. But I'll leave it for now and maybe make it into gin a later day. And then as it grows, you see how now it became a scale kind of a leaf. So that's how they grow. But if you keep your trees in the shade, most of the new growth will be more needle type. So you want to keep the juniper in the full sun to display its whole natural beauty. You can't build room in one day. So I'm doing a really rough pruning today. This is the first time I work on it. I think it may in fact be the first time anybody work on this tree, aside from cutting off a few main branches. So it will take several sittings to make it nice. So I will wait for the next flush of growth to decide the ultimate design. But today will be a rough shape and try not to preclude any options in a sense of deprive me any options to prune it some other way. The tree is basically done. I did all the cuttings I roughly wanted to do. Some of it has remained a little bit long, but I have plenty of time to cut them off. But you can see this actually answers the question of one of the audience wrote. That's how you begin to create a path by keeping the leaves there. So when it fills out, you can then clip it again and clip it again until it's the path. And also you can do some wiring towards the end design stage. So for example, this branch I really think should rhyme with this one. So if I pull it down or twist a little bit, if I pull this down this way, you see they are quite simple actually. Now there's a little bit more of a rhyme going this way. So what I'll do is I'll take a wire to pull it down as well. And for you to see what I mean, you can see if I cut this off and this one starts to grow, it'll be coming down this way to rhyme with this branch. So these are little fine tuning I can do. Oh, in fact, I can even do this, but I think this is a little too long. And maybe some other branch can do the same. I think this branch can come down some. Why not? I can always put it back depending on how the leaves shape up to complement the design. Because this is slanting down, then this can be coming down horizontally. I really don't think much else needs to be done. So I have found this pot that I have on hand that reasonably fits this tree. So I'll put it in temporary at least until I have a better pot. Because I think this tree tends to be going up. The other pot is too flat. The older pot is too flat. So today what I've done is taken this old California juniper, probably 300 to 500 years old California juniper dug from the Mojave Desert. And it was growing this pot. I got it from an auction about nine, ten months ago. And I took it off the pot, which is quite root-bound. And then I tried to shape it to create a path. And then I worked on it again in March, April, May, June to make it into real paths. And I reoriented the tree. And I found this pot is a little bit more compatible to the pot, to this particular tree. And it's actually quite beautiful all around. You can see even the back side is looking pretty good. I think it's essential that you present your tree at its best at the front. But try as much as you can to shape it so that it's good at all angles. So this is the tree. And I think this pot is more appropriate. It will end here. So I will wash off and try to remove as much of the soil as possible to put in the pot. And I will use my regular soil mix, which is one part sandy loam or topsoil and one part peat moss and one part perlite. I reoriented and potted into my regular soil mix. You can see on the top that there's a lot of perlite. I don't particularly like that to show. So what I would do is I brush off the perlite and put it elsewhere so that the top is really more of the soil and the peat moss mix. And then what I'll do is I have already put on some moss powder so that it will be nice mossy in a month or two. But you can see I didn't do the detail work yet. I want these to fill it up so that I can make them into pads quite readily. I may even do a wiring to speed up the final process. But this tree again has no wiring, but it's all natural. I cut off the redundant branches to shape the tree. So that's California juniper done. And I think it will be a nice show tree in two years. So with that in mind, I want to thank you very much for watching this video. I hope you'll give me feedback to improve what I do. And also click like to give me some encouragement to keep going. Click our subscription so that we'll keep you notified of future posting. So thank you very much and see you next week.