re-styling of a needle juniper #3

Here the intermediate result after the first cleaning phase. The tree should be tilted upright. The crown is triangular. We will have to get rid of the old-fashioned tip of a triangle at the top. The whole crown is too "nice", symmetrical and too wide. The last picture, a virtual, of course, shows what will happen within the next days. This looks like it will be a dramatic change from the beginning.






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re-styling of a needle juniper #2

The first thing again is to clean the soil surface, bring out the nebari, take off moss, brush the bark, clean the deadwood.

re-styling of a needle juniper #1

This is the next tree to be re-designed. It was acquired in Japan a couple of years ago. Then it sat arond in Germany and gained health. Now it is ready for some serious design.
It is a needle juniper, Juniperus rigida. It was obviously styled before from a collected tree. At this moment it looked a bit awkward. The owner was not even sure whether it was worth to do serious work on it. Sure it is worth it. We'll see.

re-styling of a Japanese red pine #7

Some more branches were fine wired. It will still take a couple of days though to see the finished tree.

re-styling of a Japanese red pine #6

Now comes the task to wire the whole tree. This will take a few days. Here the beginning of my work. Progress will be reported.

re-styling of a Japanese red pine #5

A main consideration was to get rid of the "nice", but boring symmetrical design of the crwon. Here the result now of the first cleaning and cutting phase. The pine already looks so much better, almost ready for exhibit. But this was only the start.

re-styling of a Japanese red pine #4

Next thing was to pluck old needles. The name "densiflora" means "dense foliage". And this tree sure had dense foliage. It was left alone for a few years and now we had a problem which we want to have: there was just too much foliage on it. Quite a few small branches had to go. Besides we cut off all the little dead ones and the left over stumps in between. This is a good time to look at the tree again from all sides and carefully think abut future design.

re-styling of a Japanese red pine #3

The pine sure looked healthy and ready for serious work. The very first thing was to clean the nebari, take off moss and clean the surface soil. Lena is my assistant since a couple of weeks. She did this work under my guidance. But first assistand number 1, David, had to take a look and tell me about his ideas for re-designing. His ideas were almost exactly mine, btw.