More picturesque, if not as potentially tall, as Douglas fir, western red cedars are magnificent trees. They have been revered by native people for thousands of years, and now they are revered by me.

We don’t have room to have a full-grown western red cedar tree on our city lot–they can get 200 feet tall, with huge spread and massive, buttressed trunks. But the house across the street has a couple of trees that were left when the new houses were built about a dozen years ago. These trees drop seeds around and the seeds occassionally start in the ground or in pots here in our yard. I have been potting up the seedlings for several years, planning to bonsai some and possibly put others in larger pots on the patio.

They don’t seem to mind growing in pots, so long as they never really dry out–even when I let them get way to potbound, which happens surprisingly quickly.

My future plans are to prune the roots of these plants late next winter and trim them up a bit to prepare them for their futures as tonsais (my name for the half-assed bonsais I intend to produce).