bonsai apprentice

Every once in a while I will see someone standing outside of a building, smoking, in the rain. I think to myself, boy what an addict that person must be to be standing out in the rain to smoke. So what did I do on Friday last week? I stood in the rain for over an hour working on root pruning and repotting this big shimpaku.

Brent said he purchased this tree as a 1 gallon size tree 25 years ago, along with 2 others. One of the others died, the other he potted up right away in a bonsai pot. That one is still alive, but has a trunk about 1 inch in diam. (I will get a shot of it next week.) This one, he potted it into succesively larger pots, and allowed it to grow. It has been in this pot for about 10 years. As you can see, it is quite overgrown, but at the base it is over 7 inches in diameter!

The first step was to get it out of this pot. The plastic was starting to break down, so it pretty much came away in pieces. The tree was completely root-bound. It was a solid wall of roots all the way around the tree. I tried spraying with the hose and picking at it with the root hook, but those roots were’t budging. So Brent handed me the ax. That’s 2 weeks in a row that I’ve used an ax on a bonsai tree! Welcome to the big league!

So I used the ax to chop of the outside layer of roots all the way around the tree. Once those were off, things became easier. I was able to use the hose and hook to untangle things a bit - at least around the edges. Up at the base it was solid roots. Those nebari will be staying exactly the way they are.

Here’s a shot after I had removed alot of the longer roots.

Next we fired up the tractor and hauled the tree over to the other end of the nursery to be potted up. Brent removed a small ammount of top growth, but not much. Primarily because the tree will need the energy produced by that foliage to re-establish it’s root system. He plans to leave it alone for another year or two, depending on how it responds, then start working on the top.

Here’s the final shot. Sorry about the poor picture quality, my better dig. cam will be arriving in about 2 weeks.

And here’s the dawn redwood we did last week.

After that, I went back to those white pine grafts. Finished 17 more before it started getting too cold outside. Here’s a shot of the trees from this week and last. Don’t they look like sushi rolls?

There will be a couple of extra posts this week, as I need to tell you about 2 bonsai shows I went to recently. Check back later in the week.

Tuesday night I attended my first meeting of REBS - the Redwood Empire Bonsai Society. As I was pretty involved with my club in Chicago, and it’s a pretty active club, my expectations were high. Plus, Brent had spoken highly of REBS. Well, I was not disappointed. It was a great meeting!

I arrived a little early, as I was not sure how long it would take me to get to the place (one hour 20 min. from work - which is not much longer than it took me to get to the meeting in Chicago with rush hour traffic.) There was a workshop going on - a pretty informal advice session, really. So I just hung around and looked at the member’s trees. The new president of the club was there, so I introduced myself and started chatting. Everyone was very friendly. Jeff, who was leading out in the workshop, is a friend of Brent’s that I had met when I was out here in June. He introduced me to several other members.

Some of the members had brought in some of their trees for display. Here are a few pics.

In the center is a very nice shohin display on a stand the member made himself.

I didn’t catch the species name of this shohin bunjin cascade pine.

Not too long ago these were two branches on a big chinese elm.

“Monterey Pigmy Cypress” - The picture doesn’t do it justice - amazing bark and ramification.

The member who brought the shohin stand also described a technique to turn a thick un-attractive slab/stand into a more attractive stand. If I can find some pics to illustrate this, I will put it in a separate post.

The main feature of the meeting was a demo by a visiting bonsai master from the east coast, Suthin Sukosolvisit. Originally from Thailand, he has a fantastic nursery south of Boston called Royal Bonsai Garden. He spent about an hour or so working on a very nice ezo spruce that a member brought in. It was an imported tree that had been grown out in the ground for 5 or more years after it was brought over. He potted it up into a 15 gal nursery can 2 years ago. It was healthy, and just screaming out “bonsai me.” There was some good movement in the trunk (it had had some preliminary training many years ago) and many good low branches to choose from.

I don’t have a good “before” pic, because it was pretty much just a big bush, unless you could get a close up of the base. Here it is after he had removed most of the upper part of the tree.

He spent a fair amount of time showing us all the possible new leaders that could be chosen, and the plusses and minuses of each one. He said, “You don’t get lucky every day,” but seemed quite pleased with this material. He talked about choosing the weaker branches to keep. These generally have a finer structure, and will look older than the stronger branches. Plus, strong branches will only get stronger, stealing energy from other parts of the tree. Leaving only weaker branches will give more balanced growth.

He changed his mind a few times, but eventually decided on a leader, main branch and back branch for what would be a very nice semi-cascade shohin tree. He stated that with a shohin tree, and even with a larger tree, you really only need 3 branches - main, back and leader. He did, however, keep an additional branch. He recommended that a tree would look better if the longer branch is pointing in the same direction that the tree is leaning. This keeps all the motion going in the same direction and gives a more stable and pleasing appearance.

He then started wiring. During this time the club gave away a door prize of about $100 worth of tools and soil. I didn’t win Here’s a shot of the wiring process. He’s not really that short - I think he was crouching down at this point.

If you don’t like it as a semi-cascade, he said the long branch could be shortened, and the tree be potted in a more upright angle for an informal upright. Or, the leader could be shortened, the extra branch removed, the potting angle made more severe and it could be a full cascade.

And here is a shot of the final tree as a semi cascade.

A very nice shohin. He states he left the branches longer than they would be in the final design, as shortening them now would further weaken the tree. He recommended pinching back the new growth by about half in the spring, then next year cutting back the branches to a shorter length. After that, it’s working on ramification and appropriate tapering of the branches, and you will have a showable tree in 3-5 years.

The tree was then raffled off, and won by the daughter of the former president of the club - she’s about 7 years old or so. Imagine the trees she will have when she’s older!

So, I joined the club, and got my name on a waiting list for workshops with the club sensei, Kathy Shaner. She was highly recommended by my former teacher, Ivan Waters, so I am looking forward to working with her.

I also spoke to a few members who are active collectors. There are some good species in the area, and they also organize trips to the high desert to collect trees.

While I certainly miss my old club, I think this one will be a suitable replacement.

As of today, I have over 1000 hits on my blog since I started using the counter one month ago. Pretty cool eh? I hope this means that there are people that are getting something out of reading this. I will continue to make it as informative and or entertaining as possible.

Feel free to add a comment with any suggestions.

Love him or hate him, Andy Rutledge does design a great website. He has done it again with his new offering, Bonsai Village. He states that the purpose of this site is “a repository of articles, galleries, interviews and worldwide bonsai community news. It is a free online resource for enthusisasts” to replace the now vanished Bonsai Today Online.

Check it out.

Today I had my second session as a bonsai appretice. It was a perfect day. Sunny, temp in the upper 60s. Another day in bonsai paradise.

We started out working on some more of the pine grafts. Wash off roots, untangle roots, remove understock above the graft, repot. I didn’t count, but I probably did around 30-40 of them.

After lunch, Brent had a fun project for me. One section of the yard is filled with several thousand trees that have not been sorted through since he moved them from the old nursery. Some of them have been sitting untouched for several years. Today he chose a rather large dawn redwood from this section to work on. It’s roots had “escaped” through the bottom of the pot and into the ground, resulting in some pretty impressive growth. Here’s a shot of the tree after we cut away the plastic pot. The base is over 12 inches across, and the tree is about 5 1/2 feet tall.

The first thing we had to do was sever the roots coming out the bottom of the pot. This was accomplished with a large lopping shear, a hand saw, and an ax. Once it was free I drug it over to the washing area and started hosing the soil off from the remaining roots. One the soil was removed, we started working on reducing the size of the root ball. I severed the roots along the outside with the lopper and the saw. At this stage, it looked like this:

Beneath this layer of roots was pretty much solid wood. Out came the ax again. We took turns chopping until the ax handle broke, leaving the ax head wedged in the tree! So Brent had to bring out the big guns - a large log-splitting maul. Sorry I don’t have any action shots of that. Here’s the base with the bottom 4 inches of rootball removed.

Now we had to pot it up. Tip of the day - when potting a tree of this size, you pot it right where it is going to sit, because you don’t want to move it afterward. This is how we moved it to the area where it will live:

Sorry that I don’t have a final pic - my camera battery died. But come back next week, and I will have a pic of the potted tree.

After that, I went back to repotting the pines. Only 400 or so left to go!

Today was a perfect day to do some work at the nursery. Unfortunately, I was unable to go there. Instead, I got to take a course on neonatal resussitation (what to do for a baby immediately after it’s been born if it is not doing well.) I had taken it before, but you have to keep the certification updated, so I got to do it again. It was pretty painless, but I would have rather been working on trees.

This weekend down in the bay area there will be a show put on by Bay Island Bonsai , the club founded by Boon Manakitivipart. It is supposed to be a very good show, as only club members can exhibit. I will post some pics when I get back.

While I am in the area, I will also stop into to see my sister and my new niece Abby. You may get to see a pic of her too.

OK, so this is basically a free comercial for statcounter.com, which provides free statistics about who visits my site. Fun Stuff! For instance, I now know that in the last week I’ve been visited by people from the US, Great Britain, Korea, Australia and Canada. Someone from Pennsylvania spent over an hour looking. He/she must have fallen asleep, I don’t think I’ve written that much.

Here is a fun graph that shows the traffic on a daily basis.

So anyway, if you have a blog, you should add this to your site. Here’s the link: www.statcounter.com

Of course, it does tend to make you focus on trying to get your hits up - which if you are writing good stuff it shouldn’t be a problem.

OK, it has been raining every day for two weeks. I thought I moved to California, but apparently I ended up in Seattle!

I was supposed to go over to the nursery and work some more today on the tridents and pines, but the weather was just too crappy. So, instead I spent numerous hours trying to get my internet connection re-established after a power outage. Everything seems to be running smoothly now. I even installed a WiFi system, so that I can work on the laptop anywhere in the house. WooHoo.

Maybe tomorrow afternoon the rain will let up and I can get to the nursery. Then again, it might snow.

Much thanks to all those who have visited my little blog here. I hope that you have found something interesting.

Lake County is not like the rest of the country. Kind of wierd, but good in many ways too. Here are a few of the wierd ones.

There is a serious lack of good radio stations. The ones I can get seem to play an unusual ammount of songs by “The Artist Formally Known As ‘The Artist Formaly Known As Prince.’” In the 3 weeks or so I’ve been here I have partied like it was 1999 many more times than I partied when it actually was 1999. And the sounds of doves crying won’t get out of my head.

I can also get 4 different stations broadcasting the same satalite fed Contemporary Chrisitan music. This is actually not as bad as it sounds, as a fair bit of that music is pretty decent.

Micro-climates. The weather is dramatically different 500 feet in any direction, depending on proximity to the lake, elavation and which side of the mountain you are on. It can be cold and snowy in one place and warm and sunny not a 1/4 mile away.

Property values. The single biggest factor on determining the value of a piece of property is what the view looks like.

Yippy rat-dogs - chihuahuas etc. There seems to be an unusually large number of them here. And not just on little old ladies laps. Big burly guys in giant pic up trucks with a little yippy dog on the seat next to them. Very strange. I think I’m going to put together a coffee table book called “The Little Dogs of Lake County.”

Ah - variety is the spice of life, I guess.

The first time I visited Brent’s nursery I was pretty overwhelmed. So many amazing trees everywhere I turned. The image that came into my head was from the movie Dances With Wolves, when Kevin Costner is walking through the fields of grass - lightly touching them - having a sort of mystical connection to nature. I felt the same way, but it was fields of bonsai instead.

Sometime later in a silly mood my wife and I were coming up with Indian names for each other - I don’t even remember why. But I thought that Dances With Trees would be a fitting name for me.

Today, in another moment of silliness, I decided to do a little cutting and pasting with some clip-art and come up with an image to go with the name. Here’s the result - what do you think?