Style A Juniper Bonsai

Today I'm going to be showing you how to get the very best out of very basic raw material such as this Chinese juniper by applying wire and repositioning all the branches. Juniper have very flexible branches and we can manipulate these wherever we wish in the Around the trunk. There are also many branches on here, so we should be able to build up a good full crown. But first, I need to prune away any excessive growth coming from the center of the trunk, make sure that each branch junction bifurcates or divides into 2 smaller branches, and just generally prune around the tree in preparation for wiring. I can now start applying wire to the branches, coiling the wire around, around all the lignified wood. That's the wood that's nice and hard, using anything from 2mm wire down to just 1mm wire. Notice that I'm bunching foliage at the tips of each of the branches. And these will be laid out flat into flat pads. Wiring a tree 100% can take a considerable amount of time, and even something as small as this still took around 3.5 hours to apply all the wire. But it gives you complete control over the branch placement and is something that's worth doing every 4 or 5 years at least, and certainly on an initial styling. With the tree fully wired, it is now time to lay out the branches and give them their final positions. The final height of the tree today is 5.5 inches, so it, it qualifies as a shohin-sized tree. That is, it's underneath 20 centimeters in height.