Tags

, , , ,

I happened to pass a shopping center where they were tearing out all of the trees and shrubs from all the medians in the parking lot. My reaction to this really got me thinking about just how differently bonsai people see the world.

I guess this distinction was brought into focus when I ask someone working in one of the shops how long the work had been going on. When I suggested I might take one or more of the plants she looked at me like I was an alien.

I guess the average person would just see a big mess and maybe think, “Oh, how sad that all of those plants had to die.” A bonsai person, on the other hand, wonders how long the plants have been out of the ground and if any of them have viable roots.

This experience also got me thinking about how this shift in thinking began. When I was just getting started with bonsai, my attention was drawn to tiny saplings, seedlings and even seeds. Everywhere I looked, I saw tiny young plants and wanted to put them in pots. I have evolved a bit, as my bonsai collection improves, but wasted a lot of years with tiny material.

If you are fairly new to bonsai and get excited about young plants, let me make a suggestion: Turn your sights to older material. The prospect of free plants is awesome, but when they are just seedlings, you may be decades from the kind of tree you’d really like to have.

In the case of this parking lot, I was able to find a number of plants with significant root masses, and all of them were older with a range of potential as bonsai. If I had a larger vehicle or a smaller collection, I might have taken more than one, but this time around, I selected the one below from a dumpster.

Since I wasn’t sure how long it had been out of the ground, I washed the roots when I got it home and let it soak in this wagon until the next morning to make sure the roots were nice and wet.

Take a look at this trunk!

The plant had been roughly handled, no doubt having been ripped from the ground with heavy machinery. So I spent some time finding and removing all of the broken branches. I was happy to see that there was still a good bit of foliage remaining. Then the next day I put it back in the ground in a sand and Turface mix.

Juniper can absorb a fair amount of moisture through the foliage, so I am going to mist it frequently to improve its odds of survival.

Keep your fingers crossed for me. If this plant survives, it has excellent potential!