Had a few mates around on Friday night to play with trees. Ben here found it hard to comprehend the light requirements 🙂

And the penny drops 🙂 Phil gives his salute to the greater bonsai community as per usual.

Michael was first to arrive with a Larch for wiring.

After Michael and I diligently wired the tree, Phil arrived late and jumped in to do the styling. It’s OK , I’ll fix it for Michael another day 😉

Ben brought a clump of Lonicera collected from a garden. We worked through in and removed a few unwanted trunks and left what will be the basis of it’s future image.

Remaining stumps will be carved away.

John McP brought a Spruce that he tells me has been neglected for a number of years. John’s new to the club but has been dabbling with bonsai for a few years on his own.

The tree has a few issues, leggy branches, bar branches and a few empty areas that will need work. However, this is a great tree for John to learn from. We only wanted to do a little branch selection on the night and get John wiring. We only wired the primary branches to drop them down and create an future, older image for the tree. The green was thinned out and will be left until next year as we try and promote some better inner structure to work with.

Ian B brought along a Scots Pine that he has grown from seed. Ian must be about 150 years old as the bark on this little fellow is very nice indeed. I didn’t get a before shot sadly. After everyone else had left, Ian and I worked through this tree and got it wired. We removed about 50% of the foliage. There were a few options with this one. Ian opted to keep the hanging primary branch. There remains a nice literati option for the future if required.

  An enjoyable evening.