In late September, I went to a property out in Haymarket to remove a number of boxwood shrubs that the owner no longer wanted. Rather than just ripping them out and discarding them, she found Northern Virginia Bonsai Society through our website and asked if we could give them a second chance as bonsai.
Only one other member was able to join me that day and there were so many plants, in both the front and back yard, that I quickly decided I would take as many as I could manage to fit in my car.
A row of smaller bushes came out fairly easily and could be packed in with some quick, sloppy pruning, while the larger ones were much more work and filled the car quickly. Five small and two large plants was all I could manage.
I got them home and started the process of rinsing the native soil from the roots and boxing them up. You’ll see in the photos and short video below that many of them have nice looking bases with interesting surface roots (nebari).
It took the rest of the day to get them all arranged. A few went into pots I had lying around, and others went into wooden boxes that I build from scrap lumber and plywood.
Despite efforts to squeeze each into the smallest container I could, I used up at least 30 gallons (a full Rubbermaid bin) of a cheap soil mix of grani-grit, turface, and pine bark. Maybe it would have been better to plant these into straight pumice or a proper mix of akadama, pumice, and lava rock, but I just can’t afford to do that in volumes like this. My “cheap mix” has served me well for many collected trees.
I will do my best to provide extra shelter from winter freezes, but otherwise, it is just time to wait.
Bonsai Iterate 
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Reblogged this on Wolf's Birding and Bonsai Blog.
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