San Jose Juniper Bonsai owned and created by Simon Temblett
Simon Temblett gave an evening talk to Swindon Bonsai Club and during his talk he ran through some of his bonsai creations. One stood out, his San Jose Juniper (Juniperus chinensis) which he bought 25 years ago as a tiny plant from a garden centre.
He found that it took a few years to get rid of the juvenile foliage and he ended up with 60/40 so he cut off all the remaining needle foliage and this is the end result after 25 years work. It has now become very dense and he will need to cut it back as it is very dense and starting to loose the proportions. He has tried to avoid the traditional bonsai formal branch arrangement and also to make more of a feature of the trunk. In order to do this he created a whole series of jins and sharis from the branches and took 3 strips of bark off the main trunk leaving only one strong branch.
You need to examine the trunk in more detail to see the end result but during the process Simon observed that the sap flow was disproportionate due to some of the very narrow bark areas he had created initially so this resulted in lumpy bark. He therefore had to redo this process to make it more even and he also did this a 3rd time and started to get curtains forming.
He continues each year to take a few slices off one of the 3 sap lines to improve effect and this has aided as part of the process to correcting inverse taper that had developed. In addition he worked on the spiral formation also being developed on bark on trunk.
During these processes he used hand tools only with the exception of the original carving of the branch tips. He prefers to take time to develop features like this and allow the trees time to recover and seal wounds before exposing them again and this has been 15 years of a deliberate process following the initial very experimental approach.
San Jose Juniper in November 2014
San Jose Juniper @ Capel Manor Bonsai Show October 2013
San Jose Juniper @ Bonsai World in 2011
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