There's a very cool old Ponderosa pine hidden in there somewhere. The handiwork is by Colin Lewis. Here's his caption: "Thirty-one approach grafts of mugo onto ponderosa. Got fed up with long needles that get longer as the season progresses. Wish I'd done this years ago."
I discovered the photo above at about 6am this morning while perusing facebook (the NY Times of bonsai news). Just looking at it and reading Colin’s caption (also above) begged more questions than I was prepared to answer. My solution was to bother Colin with 7:00am phone call. As always, Colin was gracious and what follows is a bit of what I learned.
It all happened over two days. About 12 hours total. Just Colin, no assistant “there isn’t really any room for more fingers in there.”
Colin says he’ll wait until late summer next year to separate the mugo scions from their roots. The grafts will most likely take in one growing season, but “there’s nothing more frustrating that separating a scion from its roots only to discover that it hasn’t taken.” Better safe.
Meanwhile Colin is concerned that the parts of the ponderosa above the grafts could switch their allegiance (my words) to mugo roots; a less than ideal situation. His solution is to weaken the link between the mugo roots and the graft by gradually scraping away bark between the roots and the graft. A slow weening process.
There’s much more that could be said, but who reads that much nowadays anyway? You might however, want to take a look at an earlier photo of the ponderosa (just below) before it became engulfed by thirty one little mugos.
Here it is four years ago. Shot from a different angle and in a different pot, but the same tree. From Colin's web gallery.
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