So I just bought an amazing slab from Joe Day (thanks Julie Trigg) however I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. It has got to be over two feet long by a foot deep. Certainly some sort of forest planting but what?
Right now my tendency is towards bald cypress or trident maples.
In bonsai the treasured type of material that we look for it the type no one in their right mind would want as landscaping material. We are always looking for the trees that have had the hardest lives, and have truly struggled to stay alive. So as I’m looking over my Simpson’s Stopper I am reminded about the hard life of this tree.
The center of the tree had been cut (during collecting) and has died back a bit. However this wood is very hard and the tree is healthy even with the damage.
Additionally the trunk both front and back show signs of the damage cause by this large cut. So some carving will be needed to clean up this wound and reduce the mass of the large chunky deadwood.
Sometime in the Summer of this year I visited Jim Smith’s Dura-stone in Vero Beach to pick up some new Bonsai material to work on. I wasn’t sure what I was after, but Jim has some of the best tropical trees in the business and his prices are right on. So after a 2 hour drive I arrived and walked through the rows of tree for hours, but nothing was jumping out at me. So I decided to have a seat in front of the little shop entrance for a while and try to think of what I might want. Jim Van Landingham sat down and we began to speak about bonsai (of course). However it wasn’t 5 minutes later that I stopped him mid sentence say, “Is that a Simpson’s Stopper?” It surprised me for a number of reasons, especially that it was at Jim’s nursery.
Well it turned out to be a Simpson’s Stopper for sure, and a nice one at that.
Even thoug the driftwood was shortened this tree still required a lot of work. It has been pretty much neglected all year and was showing that pretty clearly. So my first action was to select the branches and get this tree wired out.
As you can see, long leggy branches with no structure. It is trying to revert back into a shrub. The long branches take away from the nice trunk of the tree and make it look small.
After just a short time the tree now looks like a tree. The branches are shorter and taper up the tree. Additionally the driftwood will be the top of this tree. Once the bottom fills in and has nice pads for branches the color contrast will be great. The tree is potted incorrectly in the pot and will have to be turned to this front during the winter. This tree is less than a year away from being completed.
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