I have re-potted most of my chojubai this year but this tree, i decided could go another season. That’s not to say it escaped the work bench…….
After another year of development it was again looking a bit ‘all over the place’ so i began by busting out the mini-pressure washer and removing the moss from the trunks and soil surface and pondered what to do next.
Above: Post clean up.
For anyone who grows small clumps, you will know just how difficult it can be to wire the individual trunk lines so in this case i Jerry-rigged a wire around the pot rim which i used to attach tie down wires to to lower and adjust the the various trunks and branches into positions i was more happy with.
Above: Post adjustments
The aim was to spread the clump out a little more and even out the density of branching more evenly across the canopy. I started with the outer most shoots and worked my way into the center of the group as i went. I think it’s shaping up well.
Chojubai are a great species to grow. They are fast to develop, grow easily from cutting and as the above tree shows, you can go from a handful of cuttings to a little clump setting in a fairly short period of time.
A few weeks ago i was incredibly lucky to be the Artist in Residence at the NBPCA.
The NBPCA is part of the larger National Arboretum (https://www.nationalarboretum.act.gov.au/) located in the heart of Canberra. The larger Arboretum is a great day out for any tree lover with 100 forests planted across the site amongst a scattering of lookouts, walks, a killer playground and a restaurant / cafe with view that’s hard to beat!
Terrible photography on my behalf: Part of the view the collection looks out across with a constant stream of people enjoying the collection and larger Arboretum site. The view is much more panoramic but the above gives you a taste. Get up there and experience it for yourself!
Within the Arboretum, the Bonsai and Penjing collection itself commands impressive views over the city, with the views of the bonsai inside it’s walls also pretty impressive.
With a mix of permanent collection bonsai and loan trees there is always something interesting on display to see with the trees changing with the swap over of loan trees on a regular enough basis to make re-visiting the facility each time fresh and enjoyable. In fact, at the moment I have 3 trees on loan and on display adding some fresh faces (fresh trunks perhaps) to the smaller trees in the collection. If you haven’t been, and you’re into bonsai or trees more broadly, i would thoroughly recommend a visit!
It had been a number of years since i had been to the collection proper, and it was great that i got to catch up and Spend time with both curator Leigh Taafe and assistant curator Sam Thompson. Leigh i have know for many years but it was really good to get an opportunity to hang out together, reacquaint ourselves and talk all things bonsai. It had been a long time between chats!
Sam on the other hand, i had met on some previous occasions but it had only been in very small, passing hello’s at conventions and the like, so it was really nice to spend some time together and get to know him better.
Sam and I spent the first day of my stay working together and discussing a whole range of things from pottery obsessions to the day to day challenges and methods of running a collection such as the NBPCA.
As for what my role there was, the Artist in Residence program is predominantly a knowledge sharing exercise with a range of different bonsai practitioners from around the country being given the opportunity to share ideas, techniques and skills with the collection and it’s volunteers. On the flip side it provides a great experience for those outside of Canberra to have some involvement in what is a the jewel in the crown of the Australian bonsai community and be exposed to trees from around the country and the inner workings of a high end public collection.
Another part of my time at the collection was working on some trees. The trees were provided with the aim that they will likely be used as part of the annual fundraising for the collection, with raised monies going back into the collection, it’s trees and it’s ongoing operations. A nice thing to be able to contribute back to.
The first tree I worked was a large Trident Maple that I was able to slowly style over the course of the first day, all while chatting to a few of the Volunteers and Sam.
As a bit of a side note, I didn’t take many pics but luckily Sam and Mike (from the Friends of the Arboretum group) took and kindly sent me a few which are below.
Above: Before
Above: After, (with me for scale.)
I was pretty happy with how this one turned out. Being a trident, there is only so much bending you can get out of thick branches, so the existing structure dictated many of the styling decisions. Via slowly editing the branching and wiring what was left I think you will agree that we were left with what looks like wild and mature deciduous tree. I think this one will have a bright future as further ramification is built upon the branches we set.
As part of the knowledge sharing side of things i also prepared a presentation on refining, or more so maintaining refined trees. The Arboretum is a little unusual in that all the trees it has or likely will receive for their display are already in a refined state and so maintaining that refinement is an important skill-set over those skills used to take a tree from say a developed structure into that state of refinement. I think it was well received.
I also conducted a demonstration on styling and how i go about taking stock through its first styling into a bonsai.
I was really happy with the material i was presented with as i have been playing with a lot of similar trees in my own collection lately.
The tree itself was a procumbens Juniper and had some wild and unusual movement, including a loop the loop feature. I began by removing unnecessary branching and making shari that highlighted the movement of the trunk-line.
The aim was to compact the foliage around the movement in the trunk to really play this up as the hero of the composition.
With the completion of the demonstration the structure or the future bonsai was set. I was really happy with how the tree turned out and think that it has a bright future ahead of it once the foliage fills out a little (which will happen quickly on a procumbens) and it gets a suitable pot.
And with that my time was done and i was back on my way home.
All in all i really enjoyed my time as Artist in residence. It was really nice to have some involvement in a collection that is essentially owned by the wider Australian bonsai community.
I cannot recommend enough getting up there for a visit and if you would like to be involved in some way I am sure Leigh would be more than happy to talk about Volunteering, Donating, Loaning trees or being otherwise involved.
As a final though, I’d like to extend a thank you to Leigh and Sam for so graciously hosting me and to all the Volunteers i met who were also very welcoming and accommodating. I hope i can get back up there at some stage soon for another visit.
I’ve just about finished my re-potting for the next season’s growth. It has gone fairly easily this time around for some reason despite the collection growing in size a little. While I wont be posting every tree, this will be one of a few posts capturing the most interesting re-pots of the year.
The first tree is a new tree to the collection. It’s what we think is a Crabapple. It arrived to me in a very shallow pot, which while it suited the tree, i wasn’t sure it was the best choice in my garden with the often hot summers.
So as a starting point i got it into my mix and a deeper pot. By doing that I now know what baseline i am starting with and if any issues do come up over the growing season i will not be questioning the roots or a soil mix i do not usually use.
Above: The tree sans pot. The hook root on the right of the trunk annoyed me so i took it off. i planted the cut root in another pot to see if if will shoot from a root cutting or not.
Above: Post re-pot. I ended up going with this navy blue Reiho pot which i liked. It goes well with the fresh red growth but time will tell how it looks when the foliage matures (and maybe turns green?)
As far as i know, the tree has never flowered so i will be doing my best this year to feed it up with some high phosphorus and potassium fertiliser with the hope it sets flower buds next year.
Bonsai social media always seems to target the dramatic, the big restyles and the rapid changes, but for most of what we do in bonsai happens slowly over long time frames. Step by step making small adjustments and building on what was built prior to slowly but surely move toward a refined goal.
I have recently been doing such tasks and the below shimpaku is one such tree that ended up on my bench to be thinned in preparation for this season’s new growth.
It was styled in a demonstration back in 2021, taking rough stock and turning it into something that could easily be imagined as a bonsai. Here’s the last time it was on the blog.
The other day i brought the tree into the workshop and gave it another round of work to set it up for another year of development. Images below outline the recent work.
Above: The tree in 2023 after being re-potted from a nursery container into its first Bonsai container.Note the density of the foliage and the width of the live veins.
Above: The tree in 2024 prior to beginning the work. Since the 2023 photo, i have reduced the live vein width a little (5mm?) showing more of the shari. The tree has begun to fill out but the foliage is in need of a thin, reinforcing the branch structure by removing foliage and branches i don’t need and leaving that which i do.
Above: the tree after the work. All that was done was some weeding and a thinning of the foliage. I am trying to get the branches to have an up turned profile showing some of the branch structure below the foliage clouds which i think is starting to develop. I did also adjust some of the wire and branches to help with this but for the most part only thinned. I had left a lot of extra branches on in 2023 so that that the foliage mass would recover and strengthen more quickly. Now that the tips i wanted to keep had grown strongly i was able to remove the excess. This will also leave some room for more growth and some light and air to get to the inner shoots.
There is still some juvenile shoots toward the rear of the tree so this season i will work on growing them out into adult scale foliage. I will also keep an eye on the live vein with the idea to reduce its width further.
You cannot see from these images but there are two live veins. One on each side of the trunk. This should setup the trunk to grow in only one axis and begin to flatten out like a board. Ideally i would like these live veins half their current width. I will slowly narrow them over a couple of years as the tree develops. Its a longer term process but something i will be managing over the coming years. I go into the process a bit more here if you’re interested.
All in all i am pretty happy with how this tree is progressing, it has a way to go but seems to be heading in the right direction.
I finally got around to finishing the last round of work on the this tree.
Since i wrote the last update on this tree i have been slowly adjusting some of the deadwood and mulling over various adjustments and future plans.
It really needed an angle change and a better pot. As luck would have it I have just got back from a trip to Japan where I found a pot I thought might work well with this tree.
Upon arriving home, being at the beginning of re-potting season I got straight into getting this tree into its new container. I think it is a good fit. I like the colour, shape and size and it should leave a decent amount of soil available for the tree to grow strongly and fill in over the next season.
I messed around with fronts and planting angles a fair bit and landed on the above.
It’s so good to have the tree now potted at what is at least very close to the final angle and into a pot that is much nicer proportioned than it’s previous home.
I am glad i re-potted this tree this season as i found a lot of old garden soil in close to the trunk that i was able to remove and replace with bonsai mix. It should set things up for a bright future.
I have a number of other junipers i will be grafting in the next couple of months and will try to get pics as i do. It is a great way to produce bonsai material as you can see from the above tree.
What to do with boring stock? Good stock is out there but often hard to find or expensive. On the flip side, straight, untrained whips are available not only at bonsai nurseries but at almost every general nursery as well not to mention you probably have a number of neglected cuttings that you took years ago struggling along in the ‘ill get to it later’ area of your backyard.
Which gets me to today’s post. After going through the recent batch of stock that came into my garden these 3 plants were by far the least inspiring. Long, leggy, dead foliage and a general lack of interest in the trunks. Essentially material i would usually ignore if i was in the market for bonsai stock.
But material like this can be a good opportunity to begin something that ends up being interesting and potentially great, all at the work of your own hands.
The stock above is getting to the point where most people would give up on the idea of getting a tree with good movement out of the fairly stiff and straight trunk lines. But for certain species, and especially shimpaku juniper material like this can pose a good opportunity if found for the right price.
First you need to clean up the material.
I tend to remove dead shoots, competing trunk lines and thin the branching aiming for a general spread of branches at good intervals along the trunk. In the case of the trees above i also removed strong branches as well i want these to end up more on the Bunjin side of the style spectrum and therefore I only want short compact branches.
I then applied raffia to the trunks. I don’t often use rafia but due to the thickness of these whips and the tight bends i intended, applying the raffia was a worthwhile addition.
Wire goes on next, I ensure that the wire is coiled on in the same direction as the raffia beneath. This is done so that as i bend, i can also twist the wire in the same direction the rafia was applied in. Having the raffia and wire both tighten to the trunk hopefully provides support to the inner fibers, rather than these wrappings loosening off and allowing room for breakage.
I applied two wires up each trunk and spaced the wraps apart rather than doubled them up together. This provides more points of contact along the trunk and more support along the bends, hopefully further reducing the chances of breakage.
Now comes the fun part. The bending.
The trees were bent making sure to twist the trunks in the same direction that the wire and raffia had been applied, essentially tightening it all down against the trunk.
I also wanted to introduce this twisting for the next phase of the process that will happen after the bends have set, Shari.
As the bark on the tree also twists as the trunk and raffia and wire are twisted through the bends, the sap lines will twist and spiral around the trunkline. This means that removing bark along these sap lines will create sharis that also spiral around the trunk as it moves along its length. While you can on young stock force a twist in the live vein via cutting a spiral, the effect you get from twisting the trunk originally is far easier and i think a superior end result. A tree that has been twisted like this will also have the heart wood fibers twist and follow the twist of the shari making any carving via fiber pulling automatically follow the shari lines.
All in all a productive morning, turning some trees with no potential into material i am pretty excited to continue to develop into the future.
All the trees were bent pretty hard with some cracking and complaining heard from each one. I am not worried too much about their survival as they can tolerate this fairly easily and as this is the first time i have worked them i am not loosing much of a time investment if they fail. Nothing risked, nothing gained, and if you are going to do a high risk process on a bonsai it might as well be before it becomes valuable.
I hope the above inspires a few of you. The starting material for this technique can be found in most peoples backyards, most bonsai nurseries and every club sale day. You can grow these whips from cutting fairly quickly and easily also if you are struggling to find it in the wilds.
I would recommend everyone give it a go, its a very easy way to create good material at a very low cost. Why not make a heap and sell some on! People are always after twisty junipers and you will be helping to lift the average of quality stock in this country!
This post will likely be the first of many documenting this tree’s progress from stock through to ‘bonsai’ over the next few years.
I haven’t had a post like this for a long time because I have been actively reducing my collection to a more manageable size, which hasn’t seen much rough stock make it onto my benches. At the same time, the trees i have kept continue to develop and become refined which hasn’t really seen much rough development type work, until………..
Recently myself and a friend came across a large amount of stock which you will likely start to see show up on the blog as we develop it and progress it towards a higher level of refinement.
It’s actually a bit of a funny story really how we ended up with all this material.
A good mate Dave, (well his name is not Dave, i am using Dave to give him some anonymity, his name is actually Jeff) did a drastic cut back of his collection at the recent Bonsai Northwest show. He sold somewhere in the vicinity of 25 trees leaving his collection compact and manageable. Now Jeff didn’t want to expand his collection much beyond this level but he did want to add a single Juniper to the mix, something a little less refined than what he had previously sold so he had a project to work on and develop.
I respect Jeff’s general approach to bonsai. He has had previously a huge collection and has cut it back savagely on several occasions. I have asked him about this and he essentially came to realise that what he really enjoyed about the bonsai process was taking stock and refining it, styling it and making it into what would be accepted as a bonsai. From this point forward however, he got little enjoyment from the often mundane ongoing refinement and maintenance, so he now builds a collection, then sells of components of it and starts the process a fresh with new owners enjoying taking his creations deeper into the refinement phase. It takes a fair amount of self reflection and self honesty i think to come to such a realisation and then decide that its ok to select a component of the bonsai process that you enjoy and are good at to focus on, essentially being somewhat unique in your bonsai practice compared to the general community.
Anyway, i digress.
So Jeff had told me he wanted just one new juniper, and as fate would have it i had just visited another good friend Kris’s new garden where he had just put aside a bunch of junipers and pines he wanted to get rid of.
Kris is another grower I really respect. He is pretty humble and wouldn’t admit the following but he produces some really great stock and trees, all of which he has produced by reverse engineering Japanese photos of shohin bonsai and rough material. The stock he passed on to us was in the throw out pile so don’t use the below as examples of his work, but just know he has produced some amazingly good material over the years.
So to cut a long story short, after taking Jeff to get a single tree, we ended up leaving with 30 pieces of material and left a pile of pines to be picked up at a later stage.
Essentially that is how Jeff set out to get one tree and came back with 30.
Needless to say, you will be seeing a lot of this stock on the blog being worked and developed over the coming years.
Below is is one of the first I have worked, and have named ‘The Octopus’.
Like most of the stock, this is its first real styling since being wired for movement during its early creation. The material need to develop its foliage and trunk further so it will be grown as styled stock in development rather than go into a bonsai pot. As a result the ‘final’ image below looks scrappy and messy. This is somewhat intentional as all I want to achieve this styling is to establish some branch positioning and trunk lines. As they are setting in place, i will also work to tighten up and get back budding on the areas that will become future branch pads. During this process it can look unruly as health, vigor and growth are what i am targeting over neatness.
Above: The beginning.
Typical of most stock that has been grown uninterrupted for a number of years, this tree was full of dead shoots, old pruning stubs and leggy foliage. Cleaning up that was the first priority which gave me a better understanding of the branches and trunk movement. For anyone overwhelmed or stuck on a piece of material i cannot recommend doing a basic foliage and trunk clean up enough. Doing this clean is how you get to know the material and you often discover features within the tree and get ideas for the styling moving forward.
Post cleanup, i began to introduce some shari into the two main trunk lines.
Above: The beginning of shari’s trying to follow the trunk movement.
The incorporation of shari into juniper bonsai are beneficial on a few levels.
Firstly from a design sense, the shari adds a great white contrast to the green foliage and orange trunk line acting almost as a highlight to draw your eye into the movement.
Secondly, by reducing the area of live trunk but maintaining a similar amount of foliage above forces the trunk to thicken the existing live areas at a rate faster than if the whole trunk was growing. You see this in live vein creating where the vein ‘muscles up’ and bulges as a large amount of sap and resources is channeled through a reduced area. This can be manipulated further by leaving the live areas of bark in spots you want to thicken, ie. a live vein either side of a trunk will only see the trunk expand in those directions, creating more side to side thickening than if a similar amount of growth was to occur on a fully live trunk. But i digress again……
At this point i hadn’t really thought about angles, fronts or trunk-lines so after some pondering and some wiring i shaped the tree into a strange composition that i quite liked. I aimed to continue the movement that Kris had formed early on and also establish some flow within the composition which in turn directed branching and the likes. As i said above i was really just looking to set main lines so the end result is a bit messy. Neatness and refinement will come in future years.
Above: Finished for now
It’s certainly going to be an unusual one. you can see why i have decided to call it ‘The Octupus’ with its twisted limbs going out in all directions.
Above: A close up of the tangled mess
I think i have set a good base building on the early movement in the lower trunks. I have also done a bit of a bad rough sketch which is below to mostly remind me of the direction it is heading.
From here a lot of growing needs to happen which will likely see this tree staying in larger grow containers for at least a few more years. I really want to thicken the trunk lines while also developing shari’s and the live veins. This is something that simply takes time but i think i will be able to simultaneously work on the foliage pad as i go, hopefully minimising the overall development timeline.
Anyway, that’s all for today, keep an eye out for the other trees from this batch which i will post as i get them worked on.
It’s been a while since i have grown Radiata pine. Early on in my collection i had a number but as i moved houses and the collection was scaled back each time the Radiata’s found alternative accommodation in other people’s gardens.
A couple of years ago i found myself in a pine forest, shovel in hand and figured it was time to get a few back into my own garden. I dug a couple of saplings with the intention of testing grafting white pine onto them (so far with no success. If you have had any success yourself grafting red, black, white or other pine species onto them let me know in the comments) but also freed from the shackles of the wild forest this tree that had a funny first bend and the beginnings of some nice bark.
Since digging it it has taken a couple of seasons to get it out of the terrible site soil and into a good mix. I also gave it a first styling last year sometime which for some reason i cant find any pictures of.
Recently, as i have been working through my other trees this radiata found it’s way back onto the bench to be de-wired and the secondary branching re-wired.
As you can see from the above it is still very early days but i do enjoy the unusual branch setting of this tree combined with the strange lazy first bend.
I am still experimenting with how i go about managing the foliage which i might post about when i work things out a little more.
As far as the future of this tree i think i could get it looking pretty close to the below sketch in a few more growing seasons.
Not sure if it will every be a truly excellent tree but for now i enjoy playing around with it and i do find it interesting to look at which will likely see it stay on my benches.
Radiata make great bonsai and as they are an invasive weed in our native forests they are an excellent candidate to dig up, gaining good material for yourself and ridding some native forest of a weed. Everybody wins!
They grow fast and strongly, take a lot of bending and other abuse, have great bark that develops fairly quickly, bud back and make good bonsai, get out there and grab yourself one!
Today’s post is a quick update on a tree that has been in the works for a number of years. I am not sure when I dug this originally but it was certainly a while ago, five years ago perhaps?
The juniper was originally a Sabina Juniper that came from a local school that was removing the garden bed in which it was planted. A good friend put me onto it and we both dug this and a couple of other similar trunks.
Above: Pre-styling……. Ignore the weeds.
Once I had brought it back to some health from the original dig I set about grafting the foliage over to Itoigawa. While Sabina foliage is fine, after many years persevering and working on trees with sub par foliage i now look to grown trees with the best characteristics. With the amount of time you put into your bonsai i don’t want to be investing that time into a foliage characteristic that will always have down sides. Hence the grafting.
Above: One of the graft unions
I ended up with two grafts that took and have been growing them out and strengthening them over the last couple of seasons prior to thinking about styling.
I finally got around to doing a rough first styling last night.
Above: After a rough structural styling.
Obviously the tree has a long way to go, judging by the timelines with THIS tree, it will be another 2-3 years before this bonsai starts to properly take shape.
That said, it was good to get into this styling and set some structure that the future of the tree will grow upon.
As I worked my way through the basic pruning of the tree i decided to move the direction of the tree back towards the right hand side. As part of this re-directing of the movement of the trunk over to the right, i also began modifying the deadwood to reinforce this movement. I will also need to grow the top of the tree further over toward the right as the tree progresses.
The dead wood still needs a lot of work, i need to spend a bit more time going over the bark and finding the live veins and cleaning dead bark from the deadwood sections as well as continuing to carve the shari and jins.
For carving I very much prefer hand tools for this carving. Chisels, large slip-joint pliers, branch splitters and various other tools all get a good work out. It’s a much slower way of carving but I think it creates a much more natural end result.
The one electric tool I do use is a wire brush on either an angle grinder or drill to strip hard to remove bark and smooth out the fibers from the hand carving………. But carving techniques are probably a topic for another post.
I am looking forward to finishing stripping the old bark so I can get some lime sulphur onto the wood and begin to get the contrast between all the colours to develop. This winter i plan on spending some more time on the dead wood so will post an update when it is further refined.
I also need to start thinking about what pot to put it in. I have a trip to Japan later this year to visit family and will keep an eye out while I am there but I’m still not entirely sure what style to use. If you have any ideas or good examples I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
Well, following on from the last interesting but somewhat downer of a post, I thought I’d do a bit of an update / introduction for a tree that hasn’t been on the blog before.
The tree in question is a bit of a rarity in Australia as you don’t see many (if any) Japanese white beech or Fagus crenata around, particularly any that are developed bonsai.
This example was imported from Japan when it was much easier to bring things into the country. There were still stringent processes to follow but it was somewhat less expensive or as regulated as it is today. This tree came in along with many others during this era, many of which are still out there if one looks hard enough.
Recently I was lucky to get some photos of the tree riding the subway back when it was first purchased in Feb 1999, some 25 years ago. Getting these images spurred me to look back over the few photos i had of the tree showing it’s history while under my care.
The tree just after purchase in Japan, Feb 1999.
I was very lucky to get the opportunity to purchase the tree back in 2014 or 2015. Unfortunately the tree had weakened and lost its head along with quite a few branches. I must have been over excited at the time as i didn’t take any pictures on purchase but below is a picture from 2015 after I had removed much of the dead branches, twigs and apex.
2015, after re-pot and a prune removing dead material.This must have been a year or two after i got the tree. Note all the pruning scars from the removal of dead material.
Turns out i was in a bit of a hurry to get it into a nice pot. I also changed the original front as the die-back had effected both the major branching and top 1/3rd of the tree forcing a re-think. (if you look closely at the above image you can see the large scar from where the old continuation of the trunk line that died was.)
I hadn’t grown beech before and was shocked after my first season at just how slowly trees that only have a single flush of growth were to develop.
It’s first year it didn’t really gain much vigor so it got up-potted into a large terracotta pot so it had some more room for roots in the hope this would speed up the recovery.
From there it did slowly gain some strength but it always felt so painfully slow as i tried to rebuild a canopy and branch structure.
The tree in 2020. Noting this is 5 years development from the 2015 image above.SLOW!!!!
It did improve though, i wired it a few times and set about trying to get some thickness into the lower branches as i rebuilt the top of the tree. I think when i shifted from town supply to rainwater was when the tree really strengthened and built up some real momentum, although it was still slow compared to deciduous trees with multiple flushes of growth.
Autumn, 2024
Which gets us to today. The tree is finally strong and even had a second flush of growth in some areas this year.
It has taken 10 years to this point just to get to the above image. Looking at it when it was purchased in 1999 i think it was more ramified than today so i am probably a few years off where it was on original purchase 25+ years ago.
It unfortunately does still carry a number of large pruning scars on the trunk. They are healing, but slowly. I think this spring i will re-cut the edges and encourage them to roll over more quickly. The scars will likely be a ‘fault’ on the otherwise smooth and silky white trunk line for years to come but i can live with them.
I am not entirely sure when it will get it back into a bonsai pot. Ideally i would like to triple the ramification before hand but we will see. It will likely still be several years away. People are always in a hurry to get things into bonsai pots but there is something cool about good trees in training pots. It’s quite a flex.
I think the below sketch is what i am shooting for prior to it going back into a bonsai pot. I think it’s achievable in 3 more years. I’ll try to check back in then and see if my theory proves correct. That should see the branch structure fully built out, then moving the tree into a shallow bonsai pot should then help to build a finer layer of ramification to really fill out the canopy.
A imagined projection of the next few years development.
While a long process thus far, it is now fairly satisfying looking back at the earlier images and seeing how much closer to being repaired the tree is. I am also pretty excited to move it towards the above sketch which i think would signify a completed rebuild. I could then try to take the tree beyond where it was 25 years ago back in Japan.
It’s been nice looking after a tree that has a long history like this. It’s been in Australia for at least 25 years and who knows how long it was developed in Japan prior to export (perhaps 30 or 40 years?). We as a country are only really recently starting to see second generation trees being passed from one caretaker to another. There was a time when this was regarded as cheating suggesting you needed to grow everything from a tree’s beginning as stock, seed or cutting. Thankfully this attitude seems to have fully disappeared which i think marks a real maturing of the bonsai community in this country.
A tree like the above really reinforces this as its has passed through several growers, each adding their mark and looking after it ensuring it moves forward through time.
Does anyone out in the internets know of any other Fagus crenata bonsai in Australia? I’d love to hear about them in the comments or via email. Does anyone have old exhibition images of this tree? I know it was shown in Melbourne from time to time. I would love to collect some more of it’s history if it’s out there.
Nichigo Bonsai 