Bizarre Weather and Bonsai

Excellent as usual, well worth a read.

Michael Hagedorn

Wacky weather makes bonsai grumpy too. We’ve had, in the middle of the United States and in Europe, some of the oddest weather in years: Very cold springs in both places. These unusual weather patterns can result in seriously bummed out bonsai.

Even if you’ve only a few seasons of bonsai under your belt, it’s probably obvious that a bonsai is a very vulnerable plant. Because it lives in a pot, strange weather is a stronger version of strange to the tree. We might need to wait longer to bring our trees out of winter storage, which can result in tree weakness if they’ve been growing there for a while already. Pests and diseases can latch onto trees they normally would not have a chance with. Or, we can simply have hotter summers than normal which create other problems.

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I remember very well my first year as an apprentice in…

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Accent of the Day – Unknown

Answers on a post card please 🙂

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Kusamono fatto al Bonsai Club Ticino

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Kitora no do

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Root Over Rock Juniper

Another one of Stephen’s brought on Saturday. This one a Common Juniper. We wanted to make a few changes to the longer branch cascading down over the rock. The over all image was not that exciting at this point.

You’ll also see Stephen here frantically weeding before I got the camera out, or so he thought 🙂

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This is it after a shortening of that branch and a general thinning out. However the cascading branch visually looks as if it goes towards the back and the left hand side of the tree looks very flat.

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This is the tree rotated slightly which improves the image for me, however the shape of the rock means that it would never fit in the pot at that angle.

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Therefore we wired the cascading branch more to the front and also added a guy line that pulls the apex round to a better position, therefore creating the same image without the rotation.

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We failed to get a photo after we added a little Cotoneaster to the bottom left of the rock. Next step will be a full wiring, but not now 🙂