Picea abies No.5

This tree was collected back in August 2011. You can see first (and only so far) post about it here . Now, it is pretty long time since then, right. So, let me tell you shortly how was tree developing. As you can see on this picture, tree had long branches you can hardly use right away. 

August 2011 shortly after collecting from wild in mountains. 

On picture taken in July 2012 you maybe can see that all inner needles fell of the branches. Spruces do this when collected. They leave only last year needles, fresh. Then you get long sections of old wood without single needle with only needles on very ends of them. 

What can you do with this now? Do you remember what did said Tom Hanks to Catherine Zeta-Jones in movie Terminal? 

I'll wait! I'll wait! with great russian accent.

So, I was waiting, and waiting as well. 

Basically, doing nothing, just watering, feeding and once a year I was awarded with new buds on old wood. 

And then after I cut branches back, just enough to keep sufficient amount of foliage on them. Slowly coming back to the trunk. After enough years of waiting and doing almost nothing (I repotted tree from no so practical plastic bowl into ceramic pot somewhere in between waiting time) tree reached this stage in autumn 2016.

Then I found out tree is ready for some styling so I was working on few jins, still enough left to finish. 

You see big black jin on bottom right? That branch was 20 years old. It can give you idea how old the tree is. 

Here are few shots of nebari, seems to be quite wide for such tree. 

So I was removing and styling tree from bottom to top in autumn 2016. And after couple of hours I realised that amount of removed foliage is too big. I was afraid to loose the tree since conifers even if well established do not like to lose too much foliage at once.  So I left top third of the tree untouched until now. 

When it was clear tree is doing reasonably well during the spring top few unnecessary branches were removed. During autumn styling I relised tree would be too tall if I will use all branches. So, decision is there will be long jin on the top of the tree. rest will be build from branches which left now. 

Tree now has first rough styling, many more must be done in the future, such is life with spruces. Since I have couple of them, original idea was to make group planting, but I'm not sure. Seems this could be decent solitary tree. I will collect new trees fro group or forest, maybe.