The following are a group of raw Mugo Pine (ranging in age from 15 – 25ish years), undergoing their first proper styling. This particular group were purposefully grown to have slender trunks, allowing us to create literati styles, or create twists and turns in the trunk lines. A more elegant direction for this bunch, rather than the short powerful Black Pine feel…
Mugo Pine No. 1
Before work
After work
Decided to have a bit of fun with this first one’s second trunk, really compressing it. On Auckland’s West Coast there are some incredibly twisted old pines growing in the sand dunes that have trunks spirally and twisting every which way, they have a large influence on how I style pines as it turns out…
Twisted secondary trunk ‘West Coast style’
Branch detail, foliage needs a lot of filling out over coming years
Below shows the nice bark that has formed on this one (about 20 years old). Mugo pine takes quite a bit longer to develop fissured bark compared to Black pine, so it’s great when it finally does.
Bark detail.
Mugo Pine No. 2
Beginning of work, adding movement to trunk
After work
There will be more movement and bends added to the trunk with this one. It has yet to develop aged bark, being around 15 years old, although it has begun forming at the base of the trunk. The towel is covering a couple of sacrifice branches, kept for thickening the base of the trunk. They’ll be removed in a couple of years. This one has particularly nice needle size as seen in the image below.
First left branch detail
Mugo Pine No. 3
With this one we have a ‘Mother & Child’ style going on… But the Mother isn’t sheltering her child, as is common practice when styling a twin trunk pine. This child wants to get away from her mother… The jin/deadwood area where the main trunk was removed needs to be reduced further as it’s too heavy. We’ll continue the shari of deadwood further down the trunk also. The first lower left branch is not part of the design and will be removed come summer. This one has beautiful bark, even on the ‘child’ secondary trunk (it’s around 25 years old).
Bark detail
Mugo Pine No. 4
After work
Unfortunately I didn’t take a snap of this one before styling for some reason… But it was a tall slender tree, and we’ve used only the first branch in the design to create a nice literati style silhouette for the future. The jin on the trunk half way up will need to go too. Nice bark forming on this wee fella also…
Thanks for reading!