Bonsai Island with a small leaf Ligustrum quihoui: Ishizuki

I worked today with a rock planting small leaf Ligustrum quihoui today, finally resetting it back on the stone after it slipped off last year.

I started this project in 2007 as part of an Austin Bonsai Society workshop with artist Terry Ward. We each brought in our own stones and worked on setting a screen cage to hold the roots of a plant.

For plantings like this, you don't want to fill up interesting cavities and formations with the roots, but instead try to cover over an uninteresting part of the stone. Here it is clinging to the backside of the stone. We used window screen with a thin wire woven into it to strengthen the edges and a two-part epoxy putty meant to be used for water projects to bond it to the stone. It created a nice stable pocket.

After assembling it, this stone was set aside for a plant. Four years later I just wanted to put something into it, so started looking for a suitable plant. I wanted something with small leaves and which can take some extreme conditions of living on a stone.

Cleaning up some plants, I found some small collected Ligustrum quihoui I had dug a few years earlier. repotting them in 2011, I found this one with a curved leaning trunk which looked like it would grow on my stone.

It was trimmed back and planted in a small pot briefly first

Then transferred to the hidden pocket on the stone. I had imagined that it would be a windswept image with the trunk snaking over the rock.

It lived on the stone for a several years, but the glue had become loose in several spots, so was not worked on for a while and last year it completely dropped off from the stone. Thinking about it now.. I should have roughed the stone where the glue was to bond.  I don't think I gave it enough "tooth" to stick well in the long run. It has been separated like this for this year and today I couldn't stand it any longer. I had read about an older Japanese technique to anchor loops to the stone and decided to give it a try.

Started off by drilling small holes using a carbide drill. These went down about 1 cm. Drilling into the limestone was fairly easy as it is not too hard of a stone.

Blow out the dust and expose the opening, ready for the next step. 

I made a loop of copper (which won't degrade in the moisture) and the long ends of the loop are pushed in the hole.

Next a small piece of lead was snipped from a fishing weight and placed at the hole with tweezers.

Then I used a nail set and a hammer to force the lead down into the hole, locking in the copper to the stone.

After setting and hammering the lead into place, the loop doesn't move any longer.

After making and setting the loops, I used copper wire to lace the root pad securely to the stone. After fully tied on, it doesn't move anymore. I then filled soil into the voids in the screen using a chopstick to poke the grains into place.

I then coated the rootball with muck made from sticky clay mixed with sphagnum moss. Green moss is a luxury here in Central Texas (especially in the summer), but is necessary to hold everything together as a top dressing. I had a stepping stone which always grows moss and I transplanted it to cover the roots of this tree. 

The branches were wired and worked, changing the shape to follow the curves of the stone. It is no longer a windblown image, but more open branched. Of course this may change again as it is developed. Now that the tree is firmly on the stone, I feel like I can now begin to develop its style and form.