Went to my first "Get Wired" Class at Bonsai West today. I thought I would try some of my newly learned pruning skills on some poor unfortunate Juniper tree that I purchased for $5.00 from Home Depot in Nashua, NH. It was a Parson's Juniper, Juniperus davurica 'Parsonii', often confused with Juniperus chinensis. 

The plant I picked had a great deal of foliage, but what attracted my attention to it were two 1 1/2" inch trunks which I thought might make a nice looking cascade style bonsai. I started by clearing out the mass of dead and unusable material at the base of the plant and then removed it from the pot to view it from all sides. I identified a front face and saw that the joint of the two heavy branches I hoped to use as a cascade was below soil level. Out instructor, Phil, said it would be OK to use the lower branch as a first branch to cascade anyway and use the second heavier branch as a second branch if I chose a new apex. This sounded like a good idea and would work only if it were possible to bend the heavy 1st branch downward and forward. Since the branch was so still, it needed some protection from bending so I learned how to prepare a raffia wrap. After soaking the raffia and placing it on the tree, I wrapped very heavy gauge wore around the trunk.

It bent with some difficulty but there was some splitting sound. No way to tell how it fared until we see how the branch survives the winter. I also cracked the apex branch which required my cutting it short and selecting a new leader for wiring. After final bending, I jut back all of the growing tips, expect the leader, back to last year's growth to induce back bud formation and to shorten the branches. Re-potting will wait until the spring. The finished product:

Here are the intended branch lines. Both the 1st and 2nd will be cut back and the 1st will most likely be angled downward if it survived this round of bending. The extra branches on the 1st branch will remain in case they are needed to take over as future branches.