Juniper Bonsai – Before, During & After 9/15/17

This Itoigawa juniper (Juniperus sargentii Itoigawa) belongs to Yannick Kiggen of Yama Bonsai Studio. The shot is from Noelanders Trophy 2017. The 200 year old pot is by Nakawatari. The stand was built by Pascal Houdusse

This before, during and after sequence, covers four years in the life of Yannick Kiggen’s massive old yamadori juniper (yamadori is bonsai collected from the wild). Yannick bought it in 2014 from Maarten van der Hoeven of Bonsaiplaza, who imported it from Taisho-en in Japan.
Continued below…

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This before shot was taken in 2014. Of course it's not the original before shot from when the tree was collected, but it's all we have. When a bonsai is this well established, it's more a question of annual maintenance, at least until more dramatic changes are desired or required (it's impossible to simply maintain a bonsai as is - sooner or later some more serious restyling will be necessary)

Continued from above…
You might notice the wide range of foliage colors in these photos. This is the way we found them in Yannick’s facebook photos (I did do some cropping and just a little background tweaking in the photo above, but no changes in hue, saturation or color balance*)

 

Here’s Yannick’s caption… “I observed the tree for a year, and than the first shaping came in 2015”

 

Yannick's capton... "2016- thinned it out again. stil needs a few wires and a different pot"

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And again, Yannick's caption... "Few weeks ago was time to unwire this Yamadori itoigawa. Manuel Germade cleaned this beauty"

Here's the after shot again. You might notice the pinkish tone on the shari and the background. When this happens it usually means someone has played with the color. In this case, it looks like they wanted to enhance the red in the pot. I adjusted the levels to take some of the pink out, but didn't want to mess with things too much*

*I usually consider messing with color taboo, especially when working with photos that belong to someone else. The exception might be a little softening of unreal looking background tones (this often means someone has already fiddled with the color)

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