Progress Pics From My Azalea Bonsai, "Kumono"

I’ve taken a lot of pictures of my little Bonsai trees over the years but Ive done a terrible job of trying to keep them organized so I can’t really go back and see the progress. I spent an hour this morning digging through my old google photos and apple photos and creating albums for each of my trees. Bonsai is a slow hobby and up to now I haven’t really been able to go back and really see the progress I’ve made on developing and refining my trees over the years. It will probably take me a few more organizing sessions to get them all but it’s a cool project and I’m planning to do blog posts on a few of these trees this spring and summer.

So I am starting with one of my two azaleas. Since I repotted it yesterday I figured it’s a good one to start with.

I started this bonsai back in 2017 from a fairly large azalea shrub I bought at home depot. It was probably two feet tall and in a 3 gallon pot. The technique I used to get started is not for the faint of heart. You basically just chop everything off the top (leaving no leaves and about 3 or 4 inches of trunk with few stubby main branch nubs) then hack off all but an inch or two of the root ball with a saw. Then cross your fingers and let it grow for a year before touching it again. (Unfortunately, I don’t have any pics of the original plant. )

My oldest pic I can find seems to be from about 2020. The first two are from the spring of 2020 and then flowering in spring of 2021. Basically three years after the big chop. But you can see it’s budded back pretty well from that point and it even flowered so it must be plenty happy. In the last pic you can see a really heavy branch that I ended up trimming in 2022.

I repotted it into a smaller pot in late 2021 and here it is again flowering in 2022. After flowering I decided it was time for that big branch to go. (It’s that thick branch shooting left in the the third pic below). Final pic is the tree after pruning the big branch and a little trim.