Work around the nursery

Today it's hot!! About 100f at noon probably going to 104f a little later.
 Today was just about watering most of the morning but I did manage to do some maintenance work on a California Juniper. These junipers are in my opinion one of the best native subjects for bonsai. The ones that have been collected and made into bonsai are usually several hundred years old, most having natural jins and sharis and some even have wild twisted, flattened trunks.  They are often made into very large bonsai, and can be found in the high desert mountains throughout central and southern California. The one featured today is one of my favorites. It was collected with the owners permission from private property in Tehacapi, CA in February of 2001. It's initial styling was done in January of 2006. Since then it has been coming along nicely. This year most of the work will go into developing the crown and maintaining the rest of the tree. It is smaller than most Ca. Juniper bonsai but has all the elements so sought after, plenty of natural deadwood. A good nebari and well defined lifelines. Everything is in good proportion, trunk size to height, branches to trunk - all very believable. Todays work consisted of a thinning of the foliage and wiring some of the secondary branching.
Here is what it looked like before starting work

After cleaning out a lot of growth in the crotches and down ward growing or otherwise unnecessary foliage and wiring of most of the secondary branches it looks like this.

It still needs another year or so to develop the crown.
Here's a close-up of the deadwood and the life line

I hope you enjoyed today's entry. Please feel free to leave any comments or to suggest subjects for the future.