A photo essay of notable repots this year, with comments.
A Styrax air-layer ready to separate. The roots were getting tight in the small pot.
And a new bonsai is born.
Will pots up the baby in a training pot.
This is the Cryptomeria shown in the 2024 Pacific Bonsai Expo which won best in show.
The underview. Dense roots.
Another project in a Seasonal workshop was digging into the rootball of this Ponderosa Pine.
Evan excavates mucky mountain soil while leaving areas of root / pumice intact.
A young Quaking Aspen grove.
Downward view to see trunk relationships. We decided to reassemble this one, as we did with a recent Vine Maple.
Again looking down at the trunk placements.
A hillock rise in a forest can help give additional dominance to the larger trees.
Brock brought in this quirky piece of welding to serve as a container for a Lodgepole Pine.
Brock also brought aluminum mesh and some really fancy magnets—permanent Neodymium magnets rated at 65 lbs—to create a basket for the soil mass to rest in.
A Japanese Maple clump with an awkward trunk. This is the first step to removing it, cutting a wedge out. The rest will be nibbled away over the next year to prevent part of the root system from dying off.
This Chinese Quince had to be forcibly removed from its container, which had cracked with the swelling root mass.
The root grafts on this Trident Maple were ready to be cut off. Last year the little trunklets got tourniquets in preparation for this. Here I must admit something. The trunklet to the far left ended up not being a Trident—our supplier got creative, and we didn’t notice the difference either and grafted it. It’s an Amur Maple. Very curious to see if that graft works.