Where did the Thyme Go?

Today is Sunday and it’s usually a good day for me to do something creative or just take a break from work.   Work have been very busy and despite of being a Sunday, there’s always work for me to do and should be doing  but decided I want to take some quick photos of my trees and share some of the trees that are being developed as bonsai (but have little work done to them yet).   It will only take me less than half hour to photograph and post….until my attention focused on my thyme bonsai.   Yes, it’s the herb thyme.   I collected this plant from a project where this thyme was going to be demolished and thrown away.    That was probably 5 years ago.  I took a chance a it and now it’s still doing well on a bonsai pot but really have not done much styling.  Partly because I didn’t know how this could be trained as a bonsai.  The branches are very brittle and delicate and it’s prone to die back.   But today it was there in front of me begging some attention.   The trunk has some interesting movement but the canopy has become too wide in proportion to the trunk.  So what started as a quick photo shoot became a pruning and styling session for this thyme.   I want to take advantage of this plants potential energy.  It usually puts out white flowers in the summer and instead of using all that energy to produce the flowers, I wanted to prune early to redirect that energy to become foliage.  1.5 hours later, I’ve cut branches and now I’m writing about it.   Not to say it was a bad thing, I truly enjoyed the moment but like a time warp, the 1.5 hours went by just like that.   This is definitely not the final shape of this bonsai.  I curious to see how it will respond later as our temperature heats up.   I will continue to fertilize this bonsai and hope that a more compact form will take shape.  Here are some photos:

Here are photos of what I was originally going to do within my half hour time frame: