"Less is more." ― Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
As I mentioned in my first blog post, right around around the turn of the century I took my last few trees and planted them in the ground as hedges. The one that did the best, in my opinion, was a boxwood that grew a nice thick trunk and some very nice nebari.
Last winter, I removed it from my hill and potted it in good soil. I then pruned it ― hard, I thought ― and started styling it in what I thought to be sort of a majestic oak style. By mid-summer, it looked like this.
I was fond of it, so I brought it into the July Kofu Kai meeting for critique by visiting bonsai master Roy Nagatoshi, the proprietor of Fuji Bonsai Nursery. Roy took a good long look at it, had me explain my plans for the tree, and then informed me that he thought it needed a different path. He sketched out an outline right there on the trunk, and asked if I wanted him to go to work on it. With some trepidation, I told him to do whatever he would do to it if it was his tree. The photo above shows him gleefully making the first big cut.
By the time he was done, it looked like this.
The club all laughed when he was done. Supposedly, this was because of the look on my face, but from where I was standing, I'd be more inclined to comment that you should have seen the look on their faces. I had more than a few people say that they couldn't imagine standing there in front of the club and seeing someone do that to their tree. But I accept the fact that I am the Bonsai Dilettante. If someone like Roy thinks this is going to produce a better tree, I'm willing to see how it goes.
Obviously, it has given the trunk good taper and interesting movement. Roy recommends pruning the new growth to develop a triangular shape to the foliage. That will take some time, of course, so for the next 6-10 months, all I'll be doing is watering and feeding the tree, and pinching back some of the new growth to promote ramification.
My kids have decided to name this tree. The name they chose is Meelo, because for several weeks, this tree was basically just one leaf. Meelo is a character from The Legend of Korra who was advised by the new Avatar to "be the leaf." [Link goes to a YouTube video loop of the scene they were talking about.] So far, after almost two months, Meelo looks like this:
I like what we've done to it, and I can't wait to see how it looks this time next year.