the really big hornbeam saga, part 3

In spring of 2006, two years later this looks a lot better. Now one can see why I cut back so much in 2004. Unfortunately at this point in time I had to make a crucial decision. A lethal fungus had popped up at the dead parts of the tree and also on the bordering live parts. Many people are paranoid about fungi in and on trees. The truth is that EVERY tree has fungi and 99.99% of them are harmless or even beneficial. Most fungi live in the dead parts of a tree. While it is true that they will ruin the deadwood, they normally don't do harm to the live parts. This fungus unfortunately was of the kind that lives in deadwood and then goes into the bordering live parts. Normally one has to burn the whole tree right away. Well, I had sprayed and painted all sorts of fungicides onto the surface. But the fungus came back every time. So I decided to carve out the parts which were infected. This meant to destroy the planned image of the bonsai. As one can see on the last picture it looks much worse thatn before again, really hopeless. Well, the experienced bosnaiist knows that this will become much better again rather soon.