Today, strangely enough it was raining in Melbourne. I decided to rewire a little 30yo black pine i have been working on for a while. I originally took possession of it when it was in poor health. I nursed it back to health and started to look towards styling it. I had severe wire scars on the upper half of the tree and as a result some ugly bulges and lumps. I rectified this by cutting off the ugly top half.
I have since started the needle reduction and back budding process in the hope to improve the ramification on the old branches while i re grow the apex. The new apex is considerable lower than the initial trees apex which gives the old trunk more oomph. Today i rewired the tree over 3 or so hours and below is the result. I am going to continue growing the long first branch until it becomes ridiculously long like some of the trees you see in the Kokufu albums. I have always liked those trees and i am always drawn to them in the albums. I will keep the other branches pretty much within there current outlines. That being said, the apex and top couple of branches need to do some filling out to form a nice rounded crown.
I am happy to receive comments and criticism both good and bad. Just don't expect me to agree with everything

. Also bear in mind that the tree has not had any old needles removed yet as the new growth from the candle removal phase is still to young, therefore some of the branches appear really dense while others are very lean. There is still a lot of work to go on this pine, (like adjusting the exit angles of some of the branches) but it should be a nice tree in a few years time. Photos are below. Please forgive the bad quality of them... the afters in particular look like they were taken in the 70's and left outside in the weather till now

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Before-Front.jpg
Before-Left.jpg
Before_Right.jpg
Before-Back.jpg
After-Back.jpg
After-Left.jpg
After-Right.jpg
After-Front.jpg
Before-After.jpg
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