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During one of the now countless lockdowns our state has been through, I enrolled myself into a Tafe Engineering (Machining) class as a point of difference in what at the time was a fairly monotonous pattern of “covid normalcy”.
It’s been a great change of pace and learning to run Metal lathes, mills and other machines (that seem to always be plotting to kill you or remove you digits) has been very enjoyable.
As re-potting season is gearing up, it was about time to steal another of my wife’s chopsticks to aid with soil settling. This year however, I decided that with 100’s of thousands of dollars worth of machines at my disposal that I should make a tool to do the job rather than raiding the cutlery draw.
So I fired up the lathe and started turning down some steel and brass.
I turned a handle out of some brass stock and made the shank from some 6mm mild steel bar. The two pieces are fitted together in a low tolerance fit and are held together with thread lock. That way should I ever want to change the shank (or switch to a stainless one), I can heat it up, break the bond and swap it out relatively easily.
I’ve repotted a number of trees with it already and it seems to work well. It’s certainly heavy in the hand and feels solid.
I enjoyed making it and there is something really nice about doing work with tools you have made yourself. Which brings me to a question back to who ever is reading this:
Does any one have any good idea for bonsai tools I could try to make in the future? If you have a good idea, please comment below. If it is something I could see myself using I will more than likely have a go at making it.
Another tree that has been worked recently was this Japanese Red Pine.
It was a tree that I styled for a friend that later found it way onto my benches. I really love this little tree and enjoy working it and getting lost looking at it.
The tree had a fairly dramatic first styling back around 2016. The before after shots of that work are in the bloc post below:
It was also displayed at the 2018 AABC national convention where it was in great health and form. It’s the last tree you see in the 6 trees I displayed in the below video:
The work this time around was more of a maintenance styling and of course I forgot to take a before image as i got carried away in the work. The tree like many others had suffered with my poor water issues and has lost a few branches and shoots so I had to be a bit creative to fill the gaps once more. That said, I am pretty happy with how it all turned out and I am looking forward to the next couple of years as the tree develops further.
As per my pervious post, this tree is also a little thin in the canopy. That said I am fairly confident that this will fill in nicely this next growing season. It may be due for a repot also this year so I might see what containers I have on hand to mix up the image a little. Pretty sure I have a nanban style pot hidden away somewhere…. I just need to find it.
I don’t grow cedars myself but I have worked a number of nice ones over the years. The tree below is no exception.
It is owned by a good friend of mine who had just got it back after it spent a number of years with someone else. It was a little weak when he got it so he had spent some time letting it gain strength once more…….. which gets us to the below (terrible quality phone pic) image.
I’d love to take all the credit for this tree but really all I did was follow the bones that were there. I compressed the apex a little and moved some things about, all in all I was just bringing out the qualities that already existed.
The tree still has a ways to go but it is covered in buds in all the areas you would want to fill out (like the bottom branch) so I’m pretty confident that even after one year the tree will look full and much more developed.
On a side note, the roots remind me of a hand grabbing at the soil. Try to un-see it.
I’ve been working through some of my trees. Two of which are these black pines that were featured in the below blog post earlier this year:
Those two trees had their yearly needle work done and I now finally got around to wiring them.
Due to my water issues I had let many of my trees grow out (without doing the usual candle work etc) to gain some strength, and as a result their styling looks a little more sparse than it might otherwise. That said, I am happy with the strength they are now displaying and this styling will set them up for the next few years where I will work towards some more back budding and ramification.
Before after’s below:
After needle plucking 
After some wire…..
I discovered on the tree above some significant rot had formed on the left side of the trunk. I dug out what I could but I will have to further investigate / treat it during repotting in the next few months.
Post needle plucking 
Some wiring later…
This next tree was fairly straight forward, it was wired out and it’s branching spread to allow for the in-fill budding and ramification that I will hopefully build over the next couple of years. With any luck, this tree will fill in fairly quickly and present a dense canopy.
There is something to be said about the different ways in which you might approach styling depending on what stage the material is that you are working on. Trees like the two above, I tend to try to spread things out much more than if I was to style something that was more “finished”. You need to make a guess as to how many future buds and branches you need to make room for. If you style developing material as if it were a display tree (tight, dense branches) you end up having to re-wire almost yearly to re-distribute the branch ramification to make room for the new shoots.
All in all nothing ground breaking with the above two trees but I suppose it tracks the often mundane nature of the slow improvements over the years. Not every styling is a dramatic transformation and in fact the real skill lies in the fine tuning, not the dramatic, which is something I am still trying to perfect……….
I’ve had a spur of motivation lately. In my private life i have changed jobs and am now working a 4 day week. It’s given me the hint of a day a week i can spend on myself and thus far i’ve been dedicating it to Bonsai.
One of the trees that has benefited from this work is a Japanese Maple that i begun work on several years ago. You can read a blog post about it below:
Its been a slow road, mainly due to my lack of attention but I have been slowly removing course growth and re-growing better branching.
It has a long way to go but finally I am beginning to see it growing into its final form.
The upper areas of the tree have a lot of length to add to the branching and there is the start of another trunk (which will be the fourth, shock horror) on the bottom right of the trunk.
That said I am pretty happy with where it is at and with a little more time up my sleeve I hope to get some more mileage out of it this year.
This post will hopefully be the first in a run that i have been preparing and working on. I have a couple of pines left to un-wire before repotting season hits us so i will try to cover off some of that as it happens.
I am thinking that when I repot this tree it will likely get a change of pot to mix things up a little.
Until the next one………
The below tree is bonsai i have had on my benches for a number of years. For some reason i hadn’t really worked it much over that time and was putting it off so it could be used as demonstration stock. With covid hitting and my calendar being cleared i thought it made no sense to put it’s styling off any more. I think this tree was last worked in 2012 so it was certainly due for a re-visit.
The work revolved around framing the trunk movement and shortening / compacting the lower branch. Most of that was accomplished with a handful of guy wires and standard wiring.
Not the neatest job on the planet but as the new needles were still a little delicate i left more on than i otherwise might in case i damaged some during the styling. All in all i am pretty happy with the results and will begin hunting a new pot for this coming re-potting season. (probably means i will have to dig through all the boxed up supplies….)
As promised, I’ve been working my way through the seasonal needle work on my black pines. Its a busy time of year for pines (as the title’s poor taste pun suggests) and can become a bit monotonous.
Endless thinning out, cutting back and de-wiring in preparation for next season growth and future styling is the order of the season. It’s not particularly glamorous work but necessary much like the bulk of bonsai care, the dramatic styling we all know and love really are a minor part of growing bonsai.
Of the two trees in this post, one was de-candled last season, the other was not. Can you guess which is which?
Not a whole lot to say that the pictures cant do on their own so I might leave this update brief. I have a bunch more to get through so expect some more updates in the coming weeks.
I was hoping to have a few more done but as is often the way, I got side tracked and began to re-wire on of the trees I was working (possibly a subject of a future post). As a result, it pushed back the other trees I need to clean up but we should be back on track shortly.
Trees below:
I have begun (slightly late) my pine work and tonight I had the chance to select buds, pluck some needles and de-wire this little Japanese red pine.
The process itself essentially involves assessing the new growth that developed after de-candling, balancing strength and density of old and new needles and reducing shoots back to pairs of two where more than two have developed.
Its a fairly straight forward process but certainly can take some time. Luckily on small trees the amount of time required is conveniently shortened while the frustration of not enough room to work is increased.
Pine in its pre-work state
Shoots selected and needles plucked
…..and a front branch removed (for better or worse?)
As part of the work I de-wired the tree. Most branches stayed in place but I decided to remove a front branch that was getting long and leggy which has created a hole that I plan to fill with some upper foliage next time I fully wire the tree. (perhaps next summer after de-candling)
For those interested, I did dig up a very early shot of the tree that I am guessing is from around 2012 or there about. Its come a long way and endured many an insult and mistake along the way!
Do you ever look at a tree and wonder what you were thinking when you made a previous decision about it?
Pretty sure (according to my detailed and hazy recollection) that this tree was re-potted some time in the last two to three years. It hazards a guess then as to why I chose to pot it with this front at the time?
The tree in question is another English Elm (brother of THIS tree) that I have been slowly growing branches on. I tracked down the gnarled trunk a number of years ago along with some other weird and wonderful stock which are also in similar stages of branch building.
I brought this particular tree into the workshop the other day and removed some old Autumn leaves along with the weeds that were thriving under my care.
As is often the case when performing routine maintenance, you really get a good chance to look at a tree from all angles, inspect features and generally get reacquainted with it, which is exactly what happened here.
Having turned the front 15 degrees I realised that it was a much better front (the square hole of negative space disappears, the canopy is more even, movement is more directional and it flows better).
After making this discovery, it had me questioning why I had chosen the original front in the first place?
Had the tree developed in such a way that the front had gone from a good decisions to a poor choice? Had I not been paying enough attention last time I potted the tree? Has my eye developed so I am now seeing something I previously couldn’t?
There must have been an answer at one point, unfortunately it seems to be lost to my immaculate mental record keeping and the rigors of time.
This is another tree ready for a change of pot (to something more suitable than its current grow pot) and hopefully in the coming months I can rectify these past miscarriages of bonsai artistry and who knows, i might also get around to re-wiring the branching (particularly the lower left branch).
This constant update and change that happens with bonsai is one of the points that keeps me engaged and interested in growing them. As I develop as a grower (heaven forbid I brand myself an artist, (more on bonsai and art in a future post) my eye and tastes have shifted which has often seen previous good decisions become bad choices that need to be remodeled and remade.
It brings me back to the idea of self reflection and looking at your bonsai objectively with fresh eyes each time you work on them. Never accept what you are presented with, and always look to push past where you last left off.
Maybe to be able to do this well you need to forget the decisions that came before…………..
Looking back at the date of the last blog post (2017), it kind of feels like i have abandoned this blog!
A lot has happened since the last post with life squarely getting in the way of bonsai on a regular basis.
I now have 2 kids and getting through their young years has certainly taken away from the amount of time I have had to work my own trees.
My motivation has had it’s ups and downs, with it hard some days to look at trees that are screaming out for time to be spent on them, time that I simply don’t have. It’s been hard seeing some trees go backwards while i focus the limited time i have on my better trees.
I will likely be selling off a few trees to get back to a number that I can spend the right amount of time upon.
I have managed to keep the teaching side of my bonsai practice going which has been really good as it is always exciting to help students get the best out of their trees.
I have also recently been announced as one of the Australian Demonstrators at the World bonsai Convention in Perth next year (more on that in a future post) which is very exciting and daunting all at once!
On the home front my trees have been getting some attention but never as much as they need. To rectify that I have built a small shed/ workshop which has allowed me to get some bonsai work done once the kids are asleep. It looks like I will turn into a nocturnal bonsai grower!
I will probably do a shed tour post at some stage if its something people are interested in. One of the things the recent covid19 lockdown has allowed me to do in the shed has been installing an old blind that now serves as my new photo background. Its a warm beige (or perhaps bone, off white, cream, light brown, or any other number of versions of that colour).
It was chosen to be close to the colour that Taisho-en uses for its photo background in my good friend Asunma San’s workshop (some pics of the colour can be seen in the post Quiet Reflection). You can let me know if you think the colour is a good match below….
Anyway, enough excuses, its been over 3 years since my last post and I figured that it is about time I got back into the swing of updating the blog on at least a semi regular basis.
I’ll jump straight in with a small unusual English Elm.
I wont go into too much detail around the work, in essence it was a gentle rewire but i like the direction it is heading. I guess i will have to start looking for a pot……. Probably a good excuse to go through all the boxes of pots I have stashed away. (more potential future post content)
I am a big fan of weird, lumpy and strange material, so this tree is right up my alley and perhaps the perfect restart to the blog. I hope you enjoy the tree. What pot would you choose?
See you in the next post!
Joe.
Nichigo Bonsai 