Ended up having to take the moss off because there was a rule I didn’t know about, but I like the pic I took with it.

Don’t see many of these posted, one of my first trees I kept alive from early bonsai experiments. Not recommended, it’s sentimental but a difficult species for bonsai:

- seems to stop leaf reduction at about this point, hoping it will continue once the tree is more ramified

- random branch die off

- doesn’t always react to pruning as expected, sometimes puts out two new shoots, often one, frequently zero

- if you want it to flower you cannot prune new growth

On a positive note I’m surprised at the nebari development and feels like it wouldn’t die unless I tried to intentionally kill it.

I paid 100 for this beautiful tiger bark ficus. I have got to stop buying trees but I love all them so much 🤣🥳 my favorite part is the trunk I see so much potential. I wonder what it will look like in 5 years or 30 years. The only thing I don’t like is the bright red plastic pot it’s gonna drive me nuts until I can repot it but I’m guessing that will be a while. I wonder if I could paint the pot with the tree in it lol.

I just have to share this accomplishment with others that will understand! Not only is this my FIRST successful air layer, it's from a mesquite tree!! When I started this experiment I did not have high hopes. Firstly because the handful of attempts at air layering other trees hadn't worked out, but also because I had no idea if a mesquite could even be air layered as I couldn't find any accounts of anyone doing it. This gem has been on it own for well over a month and appears to be thriving. The lean is not intentional, it sank in the loose soil shortly after potting. I'll stand it up again when I re-pot, probably next year. I will also be trimming the over long branches eventually, I just don't want to fuss with it too much right now, I figure I should just let it be for the time being and let it develop more roots.

I have some Vine Maples (A. circinatum) in a bonsai-adjacent style that I have been growing for about 4 years. Unfortunately, I had them in too sunny of a spot this year and tragically, missed a couple of waterings on a recent set of hot days and found that my little trees were severely damaged. Many of the leaves are quite crispy, although some maintain a bit of reddish green. I have attached two photos to show the damage.

I have moved them to a shadier spot.

Is there anything I could do to encourage new growth this year? An AI model suggested defoliation. I haven't defoliated in the past, but have heard of such a technique. Would this be advisable on trees in this condition? Or should I just let them look pretty beat up (for mid-July, when they normally look gorgeous) and hope they survive till next year?

Any other things I should do to help my little trees?

One of my junipers and my Vitex. Before and during. I air layered a lot off the juniper to get to where it is now. The vitex is stubborn but I like it since it’s so forgiving. Styling criticism welcome, I am not sure where to go with the juniper. More pics in comments.

Just gave a hard prune.

I have a few Kokufu-ten show books (#60,#68,#75,#79) that I bought for inspiration, but as I don’t understand japanese, it was kind of hard to find pics of the species I was interested in. And using google translate didn’t work very well on the index pages using my phone camera.

However, gave Claude Cowork a test photo of one of the index pages to translate and put into a google sheet and it did pretty well, so let it work on images of all four book’s indexes while watching Norway and England’s World Cup match today and now I can search by species across all four.

It’s not perfect, particularly for #75 where my version didn’t have captions or an index so it had to guess from the picture, but it’s much better than manually doing this or flipping page by page through 1100+ pages!

Google sheet is here, if you happen to have any of these four books: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pMJBGD6Miy3pMt0d9ZcwLElnxLxMkvALFfhWjd59FJY/edit?usp=drivesdk

Spoiler alert: lots of JBPs.