I'm not sure how Nacho Marin did this. Carefully I suppose. His caption reads: "Ceiba Stick, drunk, choricia.... 65 cm (25.5")" BTW, drunk refers to drunken stick (palo borracho*) a common name for Ceiba, and not, you can assume, to Nacho's condition while working on the tree.
I don’t know anything about Ceiba speciosa (aka Chorisia or Silk floss tree) beyond what I just read on Wikipedia. And though you might wonder why anyone would bother to bonsai such a difficult tree, there’s always the challenge that some humans seem to thrive on and perhaps there’s an interest in novelty too.
Or, in this case, perhaps it has something to do with Nacho Marin, a skilled artist designing and executing another great bonsai. Thorns be damned!
Continued below…
Cropped for a closer view of the base of the trunk and the nasty thorns of course. There's also the design on the pot.
To make the degree of difficulty even worse than you might think, it looks like there are two types of thorns. Those nasty little triangular spikes that pretty much cover every millimeter of the trunk and branches, and the long narrow needles at the tip of all the twigs. Talk about a plant that doesn’t want to be bothered.
In case you missed it, day before yesterday was also Nacho day, so I thought we’d just keep going. Like that one, this one is from facebook (Nacho used to have a website, but I can’t seem to find it).
Continued below…
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A little fuzzy (blown up a little too much) but still an okay look at the two types of thorns.
*On a personal note, and of no significance whatsoever, borracho was the first Spanish word I learned… long before my first high school Spanish class