If you’ve read the post on 42, you can probably work this one out. 84 is roughly twice the size of 42.
Some trees come to you as raw material. This one came with a teacher’s work already in it. I bought 84 from Boon Manakitivipart at one of his Bonsai Intensives, and I got to keep working on it there, under his eye.
Where it started
84 is a Japanese black pine (Pinus thunbergii), and I believe it started out at Lone Pine Nursery as field-grown pre-bonsai stock. That would explain the trunk. Years in the ground is how a black pine gets thick, corky bark and real age low down, far faster than it ever would in a pot. What it didn’t have was enough branches in the right places.
So at the Intensive we added some, with three or four bud grafts, and repotted it. Grafting is how you put a branch where a black pine won’t make one on its own. Old pine bark rarely pushes new buds, so if the design needs a branch on bare trunk, you bring a bud to it: a single bud, set into the bark where the branch should be. The bag keeps the graft humid while the two grow together.
The long leader reaching up to the right is a sacrifice branch. Its only job is to grow. Left unchecked, it pulls strength through the trunk below it, and that’s what thickens the trunk and closes old wounds. It’s never part of the design, and once it has done its job it comes off.
Back at the Intensive
84 stayed at Boon’s after that session, so that autumn it was there for the fall Intensive. Fall work there was mostly pine work: pulling old needles and thinning, so the tree goes into winter with light and air reaching the inner buds, and comes out of it with strength where you want it.
Home, wired
It followed me home some time later. By spring 2009 it was wired and guyed. The guy wires anchored to the pot pull the heavier branches down a little at a time, where wire alone would struggle.
The sacrifice branch comes off
By early spring 2010 the sacrifice branch had done its job, and it came off. For the first time the tree’s own shape, not the leader’s, was what you saw.
A new pot
By autumn 2010 it was in a new pot, with fresh wire on the branches and the trunk leaning the way it would stay.
The Florida years
84 moved to Florida with me in 2015 and stayed eight years. Florida was hard on it. It picked up a fungus, most likely needle cast, which loves warm, wet weather, and Florida has plenty of both. I sprayed fungicide, but fungicide only protects the new needles if you keep at it on schedule, and with everything else going on in those years my trees didn’t get much of my time.
84 never lost a branch. It just stopped thriving: alive, holding on, and not much more.
Where 84 is now
84 came back to Louisville with me in 2023, and since then the work has been about health, not design. I repotted it, I feed it, I let it grow, and I’ve got the fungus under control. A struggling pine needs strength before it needs styling, and it builds strength by growing freely with plenty to eat. Every shoot I’d normally cut back is another set of needles making food for the roots.
That’s 84 this autumn. The photos jump from 2010 to now. I’ll add photos and notes as the recovery goes on, so this post keeps growing along with the tree.
Last updated autumn 2026.
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