First off, I apologise for the poor quality of the photos in this article – I am sure I’ll get better with practice !

Many people strive for what I can only describe the “cloud” look and effect for their chinese junipers – thick rounded pads or pompoms of scale foliage at the end of the branches, and for some years I too subscribed to this vision of how a juniper should look. This naturally tends to happens as the pads of foliage are constantly pinched as all the books tell to develop the pads– the foliage becomes denser and denser, and the pads become rounder and rounder.  If you are like I was, then I hope here to persuade to think again in how you treat your junipers.

I now try and achieve a more open and look and feel to my junipers, regardless of how they are styled – this makes them look far more natural and effective in the image we strive for in Bonsai, ie that of a mature tree. Pinching alone is not enough for me, as the pads I end up with don’t look natural, and I feel there needs to be some negative space introduced both between the branches but also the foliage pads/masses on the branches. This tree was thinned and heavily wired last September, but already you can see how thick the pads are becoming.

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The first clue is the “June drop” and how heavy it is  (well June in the UK anyway). This is the tree’s natural response to thin out overcrowded foliage, and results in large quantities of needles going brown and being shed inside the foliage mass. This in the normal run of events needs to be cleaned out by raking through all the foliage with your fingers to remove the brown needles to allow light and air into the centre of the tree and foliage pads, and to make sure all the debris doesn’t harbour bugs and fungus. The additional air circulation helps with this as well.

The June drop is minimised or eliminated if the foliage is already thin enough to allow light and air into the centre of the branches and pads, and the look of the tree is much improved from the pompoms effect. I noticed a heavier than normal (for me anyway !) june drop this year and took this as my cue for some slightly more radical pruning and thinning out of the foliage than I get from pinching. I don’t usually tackle this until late August or early September, as most of this years growth has already happened, most of any aggressive feeding regime has already finished. The tree has enough time to heal before winter, but not enough time or food to explode into juvenile foliage production, or masses of new growth which might be susceptible to tip blight or winter weather. Wait for a dry spell if you can.

Trace each thick “bundle” of scale needles (they get thicker and denser towards the tip of each branchlet) back towards the trunk. Probably you need to go back 1 – 3 cm depending on how overgrown your juniper is. Use a sharp, clean pair of snips and trace backwards to where there are two obvious candidate branchlets that you can cut the bundle back to, and remove most of the heavy, dense foliage on the tip. Do this for each branchlet and you will significantly reduce the depth and “heaviness” of the foliage over the whole tree. This opens up the tree, makes it easier to wire, reduces the chance of fungal infection as you increase the airflow, lets light in which encourages back budding, and also reduces or eliminates the june drop.

Below is the same tree after the thinning.

It's now ready for detailed wiring. Below this is a picture of the the thinnings - it looks like a lot of material but it really opens the tree up to get in some light and air, and also will make the detailed wiring of the tree again this autumn much simpler. The pads i have left will be pinched as they grow and will start to fill out and the cycle starts again. As this is a kishu shimpaku chinese juniper (which has been grown out from a whip I obtained 25 years ago),  I will attempt to root some of these as cuttings for some new material, but thats for me to document and present another day !.