Blue Point Juniper?

I found one of these in the home depot garden center. It has some nice looking, frosty blue-green foliage, and actually happened to get 5 separate plants out of one pot, because it had several small trunks with their own roots. I'll post some pics later, but I would like to know if anybody have worked with it.

Blue point is yet ANOTHER J. chinensis cultivar. Treat it like you would any others. They make nice bonsai, but if you got 5 trunks from an HD plant, you must have 5 TINY plants with skinny trunks. I'd plant them out in the yard for several years or at least in largish, shallow pots and let them GROW

JimLewis wrote:Blue point is yet ANOTHER J. chinensis cultivar. Treat it like you would any others. They make nice bonsai, but if you got 5 trunks from an HD plant, you must have 5 TINY plants with skinny trunks. I'd plant them out in the yard for several years or at least in largish, shallow pots and let them GROW

It was actually an interesting tree. From the soil level to about 1 inch up the tree, it had one trunk, which then diverged into two separate, trunks, which were maybe 1/2 of an inch thick. I wasn't sure what to call the 4 smaller trunks. They weren't quite suckers, or branches and they were all smaller than a pencil. Basically, I have one decent little tree, and 4 cutting sized trees, with their own roots systems already established.

Maybe a picture would help me understand what you just said. <g>

JimLewis wrote:Maybe a picture would help me understand what you just said. <g>

I did my best to illustrate what it looked like, before I removed the suckers or rooted branches etc.



There you have the actual trunk of the tree, with a quarter for scale. It starts off as one trunk, which quickly diverges into two trunks, one of which then splits itself. The four small bits I drew with paint represent the suckers that I removed, which had their own roots.

Junipers normally don't produce suckers. The more likely scenario is this. Growers put a small handful of cuttings in a pot in hopes enough root to make a salable plant in the shortest time. What you probably removed were the cuttings that didn't really take off. Go to most nurseries and look at the base of common landscape shrubs and you will find multiple trunks for this reason.

Billy M. Rhodes wrote:Junipers normally don't produce suckers. The more likely scenario is this. Growers put a small handful of cuttings in a pot in hopes enough root to make a salable plant in the shortest time. What you probably removed were the cuttings that didn't really take off. Go to most nurseries and look at the base of common landscape shrubs and you will find multiple trunks for this reason.

That's not what they were. I've had that sort of thing happen in other plants I've bought at other garden centers, but this was different. I actually cut these off of the main trunk. I suppose they weren't suckers, but perhaps very low branches that had naturally soil layered. There were also several roots emerging from the trunk and main branches, so it seems likely.

OK, if the tree was repotted too high before sale some of the lowest branches would probably root themselves.