Shunka-en working on a Black pine with reverse taper.

The people in the pictures are gardeners.
They all wear a blue uniforms.

These people are still studying to be gardners.
They had to follow a 3 day class at Shunka-en for the gardner education they follow.

The woman you see first lived in fukushima but had to build a new life in Tokyo, pretty brave i must say.




A beautiful looking black pine cascade from a costumer.




Here is a other black pine i could work on.
The minor thing of this tree was the reverse taper were the curves start.
My idea to solve this was to create some deadwood.
So i asked Oyakata if we could do this and so we did.



We looked carefull we followed the lines of the veins, so we could create deadwood so the reverse taper would be much less.


Oyakata created the shape of this one with a knobcutter(also to create movement in jin he used his knobcutter).
To make the deadwood smaller.
After i could rework the deadwood by peeling the fibers of.
There are still some visible signs of the knobcutter but oyakata said good deadwood needs time and these will be gone in a few years time.




Than i could wire and style the tree.
With a guywire we put a backbranch more down and closer to the trunk to have a nice cascading movement down just like the big jin.
You also can see a big open space where the ten-jin is, this is done because the tree has to look like a tree in nature and the old top broke of and a new one rised up like a elegant tree with not much foliage.
Now the tree has to mature and fill up more in the top.



The right side.


Left side, and peter thinking he can hide himself behind a bonsai tree :D



After Oyakata came back and we discussed the ugly aerial roots.
We had to create a better nebari so we decided to cut 2 roots.
Oyakata said you can cut 2 roots a year and the roots in the pot will have more energy and grow better.
He also said a safer solution would be to cut a little of the roots and each time a little more till they are cut off.But this tree was for sale.