Here are after many small sessions of wiring some quickly made cell phone pictures of the almost finished result of my Old White Pine that was imported from China some 32 years ago and was one of the first Bonsai I ever bought! Her height is 87 cm/34 Inch so getting her to where she stands in this picture by myself to wire her proved to be a backbreaker for my bad back indeed! And that I had to stand on a small stool the whole time to reach the higher branches to wire them did not make things any easier for my poor back!! The wiring itself took me (in short sessions) more than one week! Below: Some big decisions were made to shorten or remove some otherwise good branches!
So after finally finishing wiring, lifting her to the place where I usually take my pictures was out of the question for me at this moment (sigh!) So the below pictures of her are shot with my cell phone at the place where she was wired! She is on her way to her older glory and needs just a few more years to back bud some more and hopefully double her foliage! And a new pot because the one it is in now is precariously cracked on opposite sides (frost-proof my ass!)! The now more than 30 years she has lived with us have aged her so well and she has become a part of our family!
Below: A close-up picture of the amazing mature bark on the trunk! And when I cleaned up and removed the top layer of old soil around the base, I discovered that the roots had widened a lot and almost doubled in size! The fled large root on the left bottom side and everything else below where that moss line stops on the lower trunk is all new to me O joy!!!
Now I have to find a nice new pot for here because after more than a decade it is time to repot here in some fresh soil in a new home! I hope you like my old Pine?!
Cheers,
Hans van Meer.
The Bonsai Blog of Hans van Meer 
Beautiful tree Hans. I’ve had similar problems with ‘frost proof’ pots and discovered that although the pot material itself can be frost proof, the opposite sides of a pot are not very good at withstanding the expansion within the pot caused by hard frosts, so they break. It’s more likely to happen in pots with tall, almost upright sides too.
LikeLike
Thanks, Paul! I am glad you like her! And you are right about the material! Funny thing though: every pot that broke in my garden because of frost expansion were cheaply mass-produced once made in Japan?!😉 So they were expensive pots after all! Never had any problems with their better pots like from tokoname dow! The many handmade ones that I have from other (mostly European) potters never had any problems whatsoever!!! ?!
Cheers,
Hans van Meer.
LikeLike