Here are three trees from my garden, the Blackthorn in full bloom with over 1000 individual flowers (no I have not counted them) The Fat Guy hawthorn just about to burst and the Twin Trunk Myrtle filling out well.

Welcome to the new Blogsite of the Leinster Bonsai Club, please give us a follow by signing up using the options on the sidebar to the left 🙂

You heard it here first folks. The first meeting of the Leinster Bonsai Club will be on Friday 27th June in Balbriggan Community Centre at 7.30pm. We have some members from the NI Bonsai Society coming down on the night to help us get the ball rolling and to offer advice and support regarding the club and also on our trees. If you have any trees, please bring a few along on the night for display and discussion.

If you have been waiting for a club in the greater Dublin area, then this is your chance to get involved right from the start. Please get in touch via the ‘Contact Us’ Tab at the top so we can gauge interest. If you are…

…apprenticing with Shinji Suzuki! Are hats are off to you, Matt, this is a huge week for you!

If any of you remember the ridiculous, stressful stories from my book Post-Dated about the life of the apprentice, well, how anyone could have done that for nearly 8 years is simply ASTONISHING to me, and it makes me smile, too. I hope those stories might give you some sense of how momentous an event this is for Matt.

Matt joined us briefly at the last March Seasonal, and here are a few photos of his visit:

In total surprise, Matt Reel called me this week from a taxi in Japan, asking if I’d be around the next day. I was, and so were my Seasonal students, so in his first day in the United States as a free man did some bonsai work—after just finishing his 7 years and 9 months…

Beech are highly prized for bonsai because of their characteristic white bark, beautiful foliage, winter hardiness and easy training. There are several beech species native to Japan. The Japanese beech, Fagus crenata is the most commonly trained species for bonsai in Japan. Specimens near Mt. Fuji are especially valued because of their small thick foliage. The American beech, Fagus grandifolia, has rather large thin foliage and often collected specimens are grown for bonsai. The European beech, Fagus sylvatica, is trained for bonsai in Europe and spectacular bonsai are created from thick trunked collected trees.

In the United States European beech, and its numerous cultivars are commonly used in the landscape for different colored foliage or unusual growth patterns. These cultivars are usually grafted onto seedlings of European beech, so they are a widely grown nursery stock.

The normal leaf size of European beech is a bit larger than Japanese beech…

Today we’ll take a second look at the work of Echizen Hosui, and take a look at the subtle difference between a Copy, a Forgery, and an Homage. For our first look at Hosui, you can look back here:
Echizen Hosui
Echizen Hosui was born Zenzo Yoshida in Fukui prefecture in 1936, and began making bonsai containers in 1974. It’s quite clear from his work that idolizes many of the greatest artists of Bonsai pottery, including Tofukuji, Yusen, and Aiso. Today we’re going to take a look at some containers that are marked as Hosui, and some that were made by Hosui, but marked as the work of Tofukuji. I don’t think these containers were meant to be forgeries, as enough clues were left for the discerning eye to distinguish them as copies. However, every pottery collector should be aware that such copies exist, and be able to distinguish between…