the new ezo spruce #1

This is an ezo spruce, Pice jezoensis. It is definitely a collected specimen and probably more than 100 years old. It may well have been collected in the northern Japanese islands many decades ago, maybe even before WWII. Anyway, it came to Europe about twenty years ago and was located at Bonsai Rueger in the very center of Germany close to Frankfurt. It must have been already styled before it came to Germany. Here it went through a couple of maintenance stylings.

The first image shows the tree at Ruger's as it stood there past weekend. I talked Helmut Ruger into trading this spruce and so I brought it home. The next images show the tree as it was. An impressive spruce with a very old loking bark and a nice well defined crown. The crown was just a bit too voluminous and so the trunk did not look very powerful nor elegant. The strange roots somwhow did not fit to the nice well behaving crown. My first raection was to plan to cut off the thick roots that go up into the air to make the nebari fit the crown. Later I decided to do the opposite: make the tree fit the nebari and make the nebari the key to the whole design.