Hello guys, its been a while.. Just recently I did a group demo with a few friends at a bonsai show. We pheonix grafted young juniper nursery stock to mopane wood. Pheonix grafting is not technically grafting in botany terms, but one can attempt to graph a plant between the viens in the wood, with the idea of making the young nursery stock resemble an older more mature plant. My idea is that all bonsai's should tell a story and from this I attempted to make it look as if a big mature tree had partially died (perhaps by a fire or something) and new shoots had regrown around the dead wood.

Before the demo I used a power tool to carve deep grooves into the wood were I planned on placing the plant. Mopane wood was used because its very durable, people often use them in fish tanks, after I carved the wood I then painted it with lime sulphate to ensure it would last as many years as possible. The plant was then bent into the the grooves and wired down into place, the idea is that the tree will eventually grow into the groove and become stuck to the dead wood, creating a natural look.

Here are the pics, three of us each did our own tree.

Nice!

Tnx man

looks very good!
i am not familiar with the term pheonix graft but i think this is a tanuki.
i have heard that there are not much high quality tanuki out there. (heard on other forum when i had the idea)
aquarium wood is truly very hard so it probably will last more than 50 years.
never the less these are beautiful. (like the one in white pot most) ^^

grts

the serpent ,the elephant and the dragon ...those are freakin' awsome...i am partial to dragons so the last one would be my pick

anyway i have seen one old pheonix graft in my time.it was done with a spruce.the bark was scraped on the graft side and over time was healing over the deadwood. i was studying it for about 5 minutes before i noticed then looked at the nametag :blink:

...aquarium wood! genius! ive got some in my garage

Tnx guys, Ive never heard the term tanuki used for phoenix graft, time to look it up. The serpent the elephant and the dragon? Whats that meant to mean haha. Interesting, that's how I hope these will turn out looking manofthetrees.

the pic of all 3 thats what the driftwood looks like to me,the dragon even has a redish eye in the pic
i do wonder was the wood picked out for that reason or was it more a spiratual guidance thing...pretty cool

Haha, cant quite see what you are talking about. I guess you could call it spiritual guidance if someone told me about it.