A  Blackberry Thumb, and Shaping My Junipers

by Thomas J.

In my June article which was based primarily on the procumbens juniper, I mentioned that pinching your procumbens would be a chore, especially if you have quite a few of them. Well this article is for those who fit in this category, be it with procumbens junipers or any other juniper that will need your sometimes daily devotion to pinching them to keep their desired shape.

For those of you that are new to bonsai, and probably new to this newsletter, you might want to go back and search the newsletter archives for a two part article I did on the procumbens juniper which goes into a little more detail about the correct way to pinch these junipers. I use the same method on my shimpakus also. Many people don't use the same for both, probably because they see it as too tedious a job on the shimps because grabbing a small bunch of foliage and pulling them out is what most people do with them to give them the shape they are looking for.

Some people wire very meticulous in order to give their tree that award winning look, while I do my meticulous work in the way of pinching. For me it's an every day thing, and for that reason I think I've developed "Blackberry Thumb". I'm sure most of you have by now heard that term, referring to
the pain and agony that comes with the repeated and probably overuse of that new little high tech gadget where the thumb is in constant use on the little keyboard. The same can be said for the constant use of the thumb when pinching your junipers, almost to the point where it can be considered
a tool in this respect, since scissors aren't allowed when shaping the tips of your juniper foliage.

Now I'm sure the thumb wasn't meant to be used as some kind of tool that's for sure, and since some of us use it in that respect, we may have to pay the price down the road.

Most of my junipers have been in training around three to four years, and in that time I'd like to show you what you can get from constant pinching, sometimes in as little as a few months to a year.

If your constantly watering and fertilizing, and you know that your trees are in excellent health, you can probably also notice the way they are putting on new foliage and an increased thickening and lengthening of the branch system. At the same time if you are constantly pinching, you should also be noticing a beautiful refinement of that branch system starting to take place along with the desired overall shape.

Look at these first two pictures. They show a tree with potential, but with a lot of work needed to make it more pleasing to the eye.

Now look at the tree three years later. Constant pinching refined the branch system, and more importantly it brought out the mature foliage, something you should strive for if your doing procumbens junipers.

These next two pictures show a time lapse of exactly four years. After the initial wiring was done, the entire shape of the tree was done by pinching.

Take this shimpaku for example. It takes a good eye to see the possibility in something like this

After the initial styling is done, it's off to a good start with the pinching program.

Here it is only a few months later. Shimpakus are so nice to work with because you don't notice the brown tips as much as you do on the procumbens after pinching, mainly because they don't brown out as much.

Now here it is fifteen months later. The ramification of the branches is coming along very nice, and the tree is responding wonderfully to the pinching routine. A little over a years work ,and this one is almost finished.

And finally, here's one that's almost finished after only nine months. The first two pics show the raw material and the initial styling.

After that it's just pinch to shape.

Now can you see why I have "Blackberry Thumb"? But I hope you'll agree with me that it was worth every twist of thumb, in producing some very high quality bonsai trees in a rather short period of time.

Stay dilligent in your pinching all year long, and especially during the heavy growing season, keeping in mind that you want your juniper to resemble  a tree and not a shrub.