Twin Trunk Blauwii Juniper by Bob Wilcox See a large image of this tree History: The twin trunk juniper, juniperus Chinensis blauuii, is 33 1/4 inches high, in a round home-made high-fired unglazed light brown pot. The source of the largest tree was the garbage pile at Humber Nursery in the spring of 1993. It was too scrawny and dried out to be put up for sale. I saw that it had a single trunk with a small curve in it, and the taper was not too badãwhich is unusual for the species. I kept it in the shade for a few weeks, misted it to keep the small branches alive and then put the tree in full sun. After two years, the small branches elongated so I wired them. I had already used a thick wire on the trunk to try and make the curves more prominent. The photo on the top right shows how it looked after the wiring of the branches in 1995. As the years went by, some branches were eliminated and the remaining branches were positioned. Secondary branches were wired as they became thick enough, and foliage pads were developed with the intention of creating dense pads of simple shapes. Although many artists want the foliage to be more transparent, I prefer them to look solid. For me this trees development was an exercise in foliage development and placement, since I knew very early in the development process that the tree was too thin to have the stature necessary for a single tree (photo bottom right). Perhaps it could have been developed in a literati style, but there was another problem aside from the thin trunk, a reverse taper in the bottom section of the trunk. There are ways to correct this, but I decided to deal with it by developing another shorter tree and placing it in front of this tree. The trunk of the shorter tree would be placed so it blocked the sight of the reverse taper and hopefully would create some ambiguity concerning the thickness of the trunk of the main tree. The second tree was purchased in 1997 and developed in the same way as the first tree, in a seperate pot. The trunk of the second tree is really too thickãit should be thinner than the trunk of the first treeãbut with all the other elements the second tree needed to have (curved single trunk, first branch on the left, smaller in height) I was willing to overlook the trunk being too thick. In a few years the two trees were ready to be potted together. The point-of-no-return of course was cutting off the first branch of the first tree.