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I picked up a Juniperus Sargentii at a Home Depot clearance sale last weekend, and I'm trying to decide what to do with it. This is my first juniper of this size - maybe 3 feet (1 m) in diameter with a 2" (5 cm) trunk - and I've never tried to create jin or shari, so I'm hoping this will be an opportunity to try some new techniques. I'm willing to take some chances, since I paid only $11 for it. The only real risk is that I'll make a bad choice and miss an opportunity for something better.

The images below are of what I'm currently thinking will be the front. There's a large branch going off to the lower left that is almost certainly going to go. The trunk is split where this branch is attached and already has some deadwood in the wound, so I think that's a good candidate for a jin.

Otherwise, I'm undecided on where to go with the rest of it. The trunk kind of leans backward, which I don't like, but I might find that that changes when I repot it. My first impulse for pruning is to be conservative and keep everything centered over the main axis of the trunk, but I've seen many examples of junipers that lean so far that none of the live foliage is actually directly over the base of the trunk. I'm trying to be open-minded about that possibility as well, but I'm not seeing it yet.

Any and all suggestions will be appreciated - thanks!

More images, for anyone interested:

Without seeing the plant in 3D it is really hard to give good styling advice. It seems to be good bonsai material, so I would not decide to quickly. Is there a club nearby where you can discuss the tree?

Before you do any trimming, look at the roots, remove all the soil untill you hit the nebari, so you can see whether the roots dictate a front of the tree or and angle.

leatherback wrote: Without seeing the plant in 3D it is really hard to give good styling advice. It seems to be good bonsai material, so I would not decide to quickly. Is there a club nearby where you can discuss the tree?

Before you do any trimming, look at the roots, remove all the soil untill you hit the nebari, so you can see whether the roots dictate a front of the tree or and angle.

If you can open the photo album that I linked in my original post, there are images from eight angles around the circle (I had it on a turntable and just rotated by 45 degrees between each shot). There's even one of those auto-animations that Google kindly creates for you using those image.

There's still not a lot to go by, however, due to the density of the foliage when I took those shots, which was before I'd pruned anything.

Thanks for the suggestion to hold off on any pruning until at least after I've seen the root structure - that's a great suggestion. I've been curious about what I'll find, naturally, but I hadn't considering the implications it might have on overall styling decisions.

I'll try to get to that this weekend, and if I do, I'll take another series of photos from all around the tree.

Sorry, but no; I do not open external links to see pictures. This forum has decent imagehosting. Adding it to the forum will also ensure that in the long run people can still see what is happening. External sites do too much tracking & linking.

belliott4488 wrote: I picked up a Juniperus Sargentii at a Home Depot clearance sale last weekend, and I'm trying to decide what to do with it. This is my first juniper of this size - maybe 3 feet (1 m) in diameter with a 2" (5 cm) trunk ....., since I paid only $11 for it.

Wow that is decent material for $11. I have been scouring the local box stores and nothing on the clearance rack is that nice but I will keep looking.

leatherback wrote: Sorry, but no; I do not open external links to see pictures. This forum has decent imagehosting. Adding it to the forum will also ensure that in the long run people can still see what is happening. External sites do too much tracking & linking.

Okay. It's not an external site in the sense of a commercial website; it's just a link to a personal photo collection of mine, but it is hosted on Goggle's servers, so if you don't want to see it there, that's fine. I've got 20+ images in the collection, though, which I thought was a bit much to post on a forum thread.