This forum has been very helpful to me in the past and I've got a fun new plant that I've been wondering about. My mother received this bonsai tree as a gift from a relative who belongs to a bonsai club. I haven't been able to get a hold of her to find out what type of plant it is, so I thought I would give people here a chance. As you can see from the pictures, its an evergreen plant with very small needles. The sap smells a bit like blue spruce, but the way the needles branch off, I didn't think it seemed much like a large conifer. I thought it might be some kind of juniper, but it doesn't have any of the mature scales, only needles. Also, it seems to be very fragile and many of the tips will fall off if you brush them with your hand.
Is it possible that only the extremities are dead and that some cutting back could bring it back around? The reason I ask is that the stem itself and the larger lower branches are still flexible. I thought that it may have been some kind of winter die back before the new growth formed.
I don't think that it can be a basalm fir. The needle structure is wrong, let alone the size. The basalm firs that are shown in your link show that the needles come of roughly perpendicular to the stem, and relatively flat. The needles on the "tree" I have branch off in a sort of three point spiral up the stem and the needles come directly off the stems. Also, I have a few basalm firs in my yard and the fir needles are almost as long as the stem that I'm holding in the second image.
