bonsai apprentice

This week Brent received a shipment of bare root seedlings. 400 Black pines that he will use for grafting, and 100 Larch. They needed to get potted up pretty quick, so we got right to work. In under 3 hours we potted up 500 trees into 2 1/4 inch pots! That’s workin’!

In the afternoon we called it quits early, to spend some time getting ready for Walter Pall’s arrival the next day. I wanted to pick out a few trees to work on with him. Most of the stuff I brought with me from Chicago either is too little and rough to waste his time on, or it’s already been styled. So I had my eye out for some good raw material that Walter would be able to help get me started in the right direction.

Brent and I walked through the nursery, looking at pretty much every tree that was in my price range. There were many that I could have chosen, but I narrowed in down to 3 top choices. One was a Liquid Amber or Sweetgum tree that was quite large. The next was a Dawn Redwood that would have made a nice formal upright, and the last was a cork-bark Chinese Elm with a fat trunk with excelent movement and taper.

You can probably tell from my description that I liked the elm the best. But I was afraid that it was a bit higher than my price range. Fortunately, when I told Brent that it was the one I liked the best he quoted me a VERY good price – so good in fact that I decided to buy 2 small mugo pines as well.

Here’s a pic of the elm as it was in the growing area.

And here is how it looked after I removed the multiple large sacrifice branches that were helping to bulk it up. You can see from the pruners laying at the base that this tree is over 5 inches at the base.

Check back in a few days when I post my write up from the Walter Pall workshop to hear what Walter thought of it.

If you enjoy scoping out a really well put together bonsai website, and who doesn’t, then you definately need to check out Harry Harrington’s website. It has great information for the beginner or the advanced bonsaist. And Harry’s a really nice guy too. He can often be found posting at bonsaisite.

If you are from the land down under, then you should swing over to Brian’s website. Great tips there, and another really good guy.

And then there is my teacher’s site, and Walter Pall’s site, both of which I’ve linked in previous posts.

The most amazing trees I’ve ever seen are at this Japanese website.

Enjoy.

I didn’t spend the second Friday in February at Brent’s, as I took my wife for the weekend to a bed and breakfast in Mendocino county. I did go there yesterday, but I’ll tell you about that later.

Today I want to tell you some exciting news! We have arranged to have Walter Pall, a very well respected German bonsai master come to the nursery to do a workshop next Saturday. He will be in CA doing functions at several events and clubs. He was originally scheduled to do a workshop at REBS, but apparently no one signed up for it! They don’t know what they are missing.

It was at the REBS meeting last month that I found out the scheduled workshop was canceled. I decided to take matters into my own hands! I called Brent, and asked him if he thought we could get enough people together to host our own workshop. He said we could probably get 5 people without much of a problem, and gave me the go-ahead to make the arrangements. Mary, the REBS president, gave me the name of the guy who is coordinating Mr. Pall’s schedule, and I sent him an email. Fortuately, 1 day in his schedule was still available, so we staked our claim.

I’m really looking forward to this. Mr Pall is a very interesting man. He gave up a pretty high level job in a multi-national corporation to devote himself full time to bonsai. He has amazing trees! Check out his website. Most of his trees are collected from the wild. Some from the mountains over in Europe, some from over here in the states.

He also excells at making virtual designs for a tree. He will take a photo of a tree and modify it with photoshop, showing the changes he would make. It’s quite amazing to see how subtle changes of an angle here or there can really improve the image of a tree. Check out his virtual styling at bonsaitalk ATM.

I will definately include a large post after the workshop, so make sure you check back in at the end of February. The great thing about hosting the workshop at evergreengardenworks is there are pleanty of great trees to choose from.

This week we worked on putting some trees in the ground – more of a long term project. These were various types of chinese elms, as well as some oaks that had been in pots a little too long. They also had some big trunk chopping scars, so Brent felt they would be rejuvinated by growing them out in the ground for 5 years or so.

Lemme tell ya, Brent is going to have some amazing big specimen quality stock trees for sale in 5-7 years.

Most of these were the result of air-layers taken from big branches from big trees several years back. Many of them had only 1 sided roots, so we did some scarring and applying of rooting hormone to improve this. My theory is that on an airlayer the pots gets warm and dry on the side facing the sun, because it is usually a small pot. This leaves you often times with roots only growing on the shadier side of the pot. I don’t know if that is really true or not, but it sounds reasonable.

The first step, as usual, was taking them out of their pots, spraying away the old soil and trying to untangle the roots. Some of these were really root bound, so it required some serious work. Here’s a shot of a Cork bark oak right out of the pot. You can see that the root ball is one solid mass of roots.

Here is is with another, after the root work.

As you can see there were some pretty big roots that had to be cut. The next step involved the apprentice and a shovel. I dug holes in the growing fields to place these trees. Just prior to putting the tree in the hole we dunked the remaining roots in a tub of muck made from the mud in the field. This was to coat the roots with the stuff they will be growing in, to ease the transition and help them to grow into the surrounding soil more easily.

Here’s a shot of one of the rows of elms and oaks. You can see some really big junipers in the next row over.

In one of the growing areas Brent has some trees that he put in the ground a few years ago. Some of them had died, and one had died back to the base, but then put out some new growth. He let me dig that one up and pot it up to see if I could make a mame or shohin out of it. Here it is fresh out of the ground.

And here it is in it’s new pot.

I will leave it alone for the next year to recover, then start working on what to do with the top. The base is nice and fat – it will make a nice little tree some day.