We have four Eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) specimens in our bonsai collection. That's a lot. Redcedar is not a favored bonsai subject, I think, mostly because it is difficult to find suitable old trees with which to work. Trying to grow a redcedar bonsai from young material is a long term, long shot project. All four of the redcedar bonsai in our collection were donated to us, so they all had some age on them before we started working on them. All four were collected — two from extreme sites in nature and two from the cultivated landscape. One of them that came from nature has previously been featured in Curator's Journal: Crazy Horse. The two redcedar bonsai that started life as landscape plants both happen to be on display in the garden right now, and they are the subjects of this entry.

'Grey Owl'

Eastern redcedar is found throughout the Eastern half of the United States and is a common species in many places. It has historically been useful for its aromatic, rot-resistant wood, and for the tree's durability as a pioneer species preserving soil in hardscrabble conditions. Birds and other wildlife feed on redcedar seed cones — small, round, waxy blue fruits usually referred to as berries. Redcedar can be a handsome tree reaching up to sixty feet tall in favorable circumstances, or a rugged shrub in inhospitable sites where few other woody plants can grow. Redcedar is not so frequently valued as an ornamental landscape species, although there are a few cultivated varieties available if you go looking for them. 'Grey Owl' is the name of one such cultivar, so called for the blueish-grey color of the foliage. The habit of Grey Owl is shrubby with a tendency to be wider than it is tall.

Grey Owl might be a hybrid juniper, although it is typically credited as being derived from Juniperus virginiana. There seems to be some uncertainty about the cultivar's provenance. For that matter, the plant we have was dug out of a cultivated landscape and donated by a friend, who thought it might be a Grey Owl but he wasn't sure. I've never been sure about it either. It's a juniper and it might be Grey Owl, but if some Juniperus expert happens by and pronounces it to be something other I won't fight about it. My interest in the plant has always been as a bonsai subject, and I'm pretty certain it's worked out alright in that regard.

The tree was donated around 2006. The first photographic look we have at this redcedar comes from summer of 2008, a pair of "before and after" images made during a demonstration in Raleigh:

This particular specimen came to us tall and lanky. For a while I worked with it that way, trying to find an agreeable literati design that fit the nature of the tree. The following images show how that effort played out in the two years following the demonstration:

Ultimately, I never found a structure I liked for the redcedar pursuant to this design idea. Understand how the process went — the redcedar lived in the hoop house so I saw it every time I was out there watering or doing other work. Sometimes the redcedar would catch my eye and I'd spend a little time looking it over more closely, tinkering with it, trying to visualize what it needed in order to make a better presentation. I usually wound up dissatisfied. After a while frustration led to spending less time on the tree, giving it more free reign to grow. One day I went out and looked at the redcedar, now all bushy again, and thought, Hopeless! It's too tall, too awkward. It has to be made shorter. The lowest limb has some interesting movement... What's to lose? This isn't working, so try something else and see what happens. With that, I removed the entire crown except for the lowest branch, essentially cutting the tree's height by half. I left several inches of trunk jutting beyond the one remaining branch on speculation that deadwood was going to be part of the redcedar's new identity.

That minute of action with a hand saw was followed by years of letting the plant grow with little or no restraint. Photo documentation ceased during this period because the redcedar had become just another beat-up little tree building character out in the hoop house. The next available images are these two from summer of 2017:

The above photos were made for the purpose of giving my friend Jack Sustic a chance to see the tree prior to his visit to the Arboretum to be guest artist for the 2017 Carolina Bonsai Expo. At that time Jack had recently retired from being curator of the US National Bonsai and Penjing collection. I wanted to give him a good subject to work with for his demonstration program, so the Grey Owl redcedar got the call.

Jack did a great job in his demonstration. Too bad I don't have a picture to share of Jack at work on the tree, or even what the redcedar looked like immediately after the restyling. What we do have, however, is a sketch Jack made showing his vision of how the bonsai might look a few years in the future:

Jack was a student and friend of the legendary American bonsai artist John Naka. Jack's drawing reflects a strong influence of Mr. Naka's California strain of classical bonsai design, and I expect if Jack had continued working with the redcedar in the ensuing years he would have brought the tree to something closely resembling the drawing. That was not to be. The redcedar remained here at the Arboretum and the development of the branching followed a more naturalistic path. The larger structural design implemented by Jack in the demonstration program very much remains, but the final effect of it has become much looser than in his original concept.

The next available images of the Grey Owl redcedar are from 2020, showing the tree before and after a design session:

Further developments are documented in these images from the following year:

A set of portraits from December of 2022:

In January of 2023 the redcedar was intensively worked once more, and now I felt it was time to start looking for a quality pot to put it in:

Finally, after a journey of nearly two decades, our Grey Owl redcedar made its bonsai garden debut in the spring of 2024:

Sentinel

The Eastern redcedar bonsai known as Sentinel came to us originally as a donation from a man named Alan Tarbell, a member of the Blue Ridge Bonsai Society in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Alan had retired to our region, moving down from Connecticut and bringing with him his personal bonsai collection. Included among his trees was a straight-as-an-arrow redcedar standing over two feet tall. Alan brought that redcedar to the Arboretum for a workshop once and it later was shown in an early Carolina Bonsai Expo as part of the Blue Ridge club's display. I was familiar with the tree and always complimented Alan on it because it was unusual to see redcedar as bonsai and because I knew how proud he was of it.

One day Alan offered the tree to the Arboretum. I wanted to accept it, but it was necessary to first make certain Alan knew that once he donated his prize bonsai to our collection it would very likely be changed. That is the reality any time a bonsai passes from the care of one person to another — the bonsai will change. It might change gradually, unintentionally, over a prolonged period of time. Or, it might change more noticeably, right away, because the new caregiver has a different idea. I had an idea about Alan's tree. Although the redcedar was tall, skinny and sparse, I thought it needed to be stripped down even more. I saw it being a minimalist sort of literati tree and I needed to be sure Alan would not take offense if that were to happen. Alan was a smart, no-nonsense, taciturn yet direct, genuine New England Yankee. He told me if the tree became part of the Arboretum collection he knew I'd do right by it. We accepted his donation.

There is no photo I know of showing Alan's redcedar bonsai as we received it. The tree did come with some notes he had kept over the years, from which we learned Alan first started working with this specimen in 1971. It seems to have begun as a young tree in a friend's home landscape but was badly damaged when a big limb from another tree fell on it. The friend offered it to Alan, knowing that he had an interest in those strange little trees in pots and thinking maybe the damaged redcedar could be made into something. The tree was estimated to be about ten years old at the time. For those of you keeping score at home, that would have made the redcedar about forty-two years old at the time of donation and about sixty-three years old at the time of this writing.

Alan's notes relate that the redcedar was the subject of a couple of different demonstrations he did for his bonsai club up north. He also took the tree to a workshop or two, and displayed it in several shows. At one time Alan even gave the tree a name — he called it I-95 because it reminded him of a pine tree that grew alongside that Interstate up in Connecticut. In short, Alan had a long and active history with this specimen, developing and sharing it with others and generally enjoying the hobby of bonsai. He brought the redcedar with him when he relocated, and when Alan became too old to keep up with the bonsai he gave it to us. Alan lived long enough to see his favorite bonsai restyled, displayed in the Arboretum's bonsai garden and eventually selected as the logo tree for the 2010 Carolina Bonsai Expo.

There isn't too much more to say about this formal upright redcedar. The tree hasn't changed much since the restyling it received when it came to the Arboretum. It did get a new poetic name — Sentinel — because it seemed to have enough character to warrant such a distinction and I-95 just didn't do it justice. It is a most picturesque specimen so its time in our collection has been well documented. Among the portraits of this bonsai are some beautifully memorable images.