The question is; when creating a shari, how do I know which part of the bark I can remove,
without killing the branches above it.
The question is about making deadwood on junipers and basically if we look at junipers,
like this one which is a finished tree, although there is not enough deadwood on it.
Junipers can be almost all deadwood, anything up to 70 or 80 % deadwood
and it is generally considered that the best junipers feature a lot of deadwood with
interesting character. This is the true nature of junipers
So looking at making deadwood, the question is how much of the live vein can we remove,
carve off without branches dying or the tree suffering.
Basically you can remove up to half of the live vein at one time and the tree will not suffer.
This is especially true when dealing with cultivated trees (not yamadori),
losing half of the live vein will not be a problem.
You can in fact remove up to two thirds of the live vein if you are experienced,
but I recommend that beginners just try and stick to the idea of between one third
and a half at most and the tree should not die.
So where can you remove the live vein? Where is ok? Can you see this? - Yes
Here we have some shari, on either side of the shari we have a live vein.
We can see clearly the difference between the dead and live wood.
If we remove one of these live vein entirely, the question of will anything die can be answered
by looking at the path of the live vein.
If there is a branch which is only connected to that one live vein, then it will die.
Here however the two live veins on either side of the shari join back up and become one.
This means that we can consider removing the thinner live vein and drawing attention
to the thicker live vein without causing any serious damage to the tree.
If we did the opposite, remove the thick live vein and left the thinner vein,
I seriously doubt the tree will die,but it may lose a branch or two; its more of a gamble.
Thats the case when looking at a situation where we have two veins of different strength,
but with this tree they are both good, solid live veins and so there isn't too much to worry about.
We could remove either one of them and make shari without the tree suffering.
The best one to remove is the one which makes the tree look more spectacular.
However we are not going to work on this tree at this time, instead we will look at this tree...
This tree has had virtually no shari or jin made on it whatsoever.
Its all live vein on the trunk, almost no dead wood.
We will look at how to make some dead wood, create shari by looking at this material.
When looking at his tree now, nobody knows the ideal place to make shari.
But we know we can make some shari on the trunk.
First we should clean up the bark as much as possible first.
This branch here, this is dead, it was cut a long time ago and it is almost entirely dead.
It still has live tissue half way along and so it is relatively easy to remove the bark.
This was most likely a long branch grown to thicken the tree and because there were no
shoots or branches at the base, it has died with the intention of creating jin and shari.
There are no branches or shoots on it so it can be made entirely into jin and shari.
The dead wood area stops at the base of the branch, it doesn't carry on down to the base,
however, the live vein that was attached to this branch can be removed across
the trunk and down in to the base.
Can you see this? - Yes
If you pull the bark and live vein off like this, you can follow the natural line,
the tree will show the line.
This branch has no foliage on it, so there is no need to have live vein feeding it,
so it will become shari.
Pull off the live vein naturally and listen to the tree, it will show you where to remove.
This situation is a little different from the original question,
here we are carving from a dead branch.
The real problem is how to make shari on the lower trunk to create character,
which accentuates the upper section of the tree.
Basically this is what I said before:
for example, if all of these are live veins,
if we remove this one will the tree die? No it won't.
If we removed this one, it wouldn't die. If we removed this one it wouldn't die.
As long as you have at least one third of the live vein remaining then it won't die.
Junipers are very strong trees and so they won't die easily.
If we had a round trunk, full of live vein, and removed half of it, turning it to shari.
As long as the other half remains, Junipers will be fine, and so you can carve away a lot
of the live vein at the bottom without worrying.
The one thing to be careful of is that the live veins in junipers move in a linear fashion.
It starts off at the bottom and moves up the lower trunk.
If you can see the line, it moves up from the base of the trunk,
twists around and then is connected to each and every branch.
So looking at this branch for example, lets make half of it shari.
If you have a look you can understand I think, if you follow the live vein from the branch tip
It goes around the back and twists but it reaches the roots.
If you follow this idea then you can carve along the lines that will keep the branches
in good contact with the roots.
If you do this then the branches should not die.
Now we have only removed about 20% of the surface area of this round trunk
and that is absolutely no problem at all.
There is no fear of this dying or losing branches.
Even if we took off half of the trunk, the tree would be fine and not die.
And so by using this idea, you can slowly increase the amount of shari up and around
the trunk, carefully following the live vein as it winds around the trunk and into the branches.
Kind of like that, thank you very much.