I was not allowed to announce or share photos of the winning trees until after the award ceremony. The awards were different this year from last year’s “China Ding” award for the best individual penjing. This year the awards went to the artists with the best collection of trees. Below are the top trees in the exhibition.

It’s quite interesting that all three are Japanese black pine. AND even more interesting is that some came from Japan. The China Zun Award was presented to the artist who had the top three scoring bonsai collection. When the top winner cam on stage he never smiled and later we learned that he is in business, not a hobbyist and people did not like that he or the imported tree won. It WAS a good tree. The award was brought out on stage on a rolling cart and looked quite heavy. There were…

Many thanks to Bill and Diane for opening their garden for us to visit!

Great pyracantha in a fun yellow Yamaaki

Ginkgo

Larch

Entrance to the sales area:

Chinese quince:

And a great parting shot, meeting the iconic Penelope as she was being packed up at the end of the show.

The China Zuni– 2014 (Yoyo) National Exhibition of Collections of Chinese Penjing Collectors will be held on October 31- November 2, 2014 in Yoyo City, near Shanghai, China. I was honored to be invited to attend and help with the complicated judging of the most important penjing exhibition in China for 2014.

The exhibition opens to the public on Friday while the complicated and detailed judging began on Wednesday morning at 8am. There were a total of ten judges, eight from China and Taiwan and two foreigners, Tony Tickle from England and me representing the United States. We were bused to the event and had a meeting to explain the complicated process. Fortunately, the 14 page “Evaluation Scheme” was in both Chinese and English, but we still had questions which needed to be answered. Lots of regulations, no discussing penjing with other judges and more.

There were supervisors watching us…

This is one of our grand leaps down the rabbit hole…0-10-10 fertilizer for bonsai. It has very limited uses, and yet it’s often touted as THE fertilizer for all bonsai in the fall.

The 0-10-10 fertilizer is essentially for maximizing blooms, or perhaps, when you plant a perennial, you might get its roots better established without much top growth. For a bonsai garden with many non-blooming species present, the recommendation to use it exclusively in fall is on very shaky ground.

One of many 0-10-10 fertilizers, which do have their uses, but is NOT the bonsai fertilizer for fall.

The urge to outthink how a plant works is fairly common to most who grow plants. We all do it. Certainly this is where the mis-use of 0-10-10 for bonsai started.

0-10-10 has no nitrogen in it (nitrogen is the first number of the three).

• And yet every cell process, even…

A few years ago I did an article in the BSA Newsletter about  a display that had been put together by Hans Vleugels and subsequently commented on by Morten Albek.  With the permission of those two august gentlemen, I thought it might be a good idea to open the article up to the wider audience that we now have to see what others think.  Here goes.

When Hans Vleugels posted this shohin display on the Internet Bonsai Club many people would have thought that it was already a fine offering. The trees were individually superb, and together they seemed to create a restful and unified
display.

Hans’ original display

The display was created as part of a photo session at Hans’ bonsai club Eda Uchi Kai where members were asked to bring some trees for a professional photo shoot by Jan Dieryck. The trees in the shohin display are a Juniperus chinensis, an Acer buergerianum…

I returned home from Japan and Indonesia on late Thursday evening to find my main display garden ablaze in color, what a nice welcome home! Although the colors are beautiful, they are not quite at their peak… yet. Probably next week or the week after they should be even better.

Most people think the cold temperatures bring on the autumn colors of deciduous species. However, the onset of dormancy actually begins on June 21^st when the daylight decreases. Although the diminishing light is not immediately apparent to humans, the plants can detect the reduced light. This stimulates the onset of dormancy, but the cooler weather in September is more apparent to people. Sometimes after a hard frost or freeze colors intensify.

It’s interesting that some species always turn a certain color in autumn, like the Ginkgo which always turns clear yellow. Burning bush, Euonymus alatus, always turns red to…

I once met an older man around 75 years old that had amazing trees. One of them a Juniper he showed at a clubmeeting I had also seen on shows earlier. When I looked closer I saw no wires and that it was really refined. The beautiful part was that it didn’t have a front and was attractive from all angles. I asked him were he bought the tree and he told me he bought it many years ago in a gardencenter. Hearing that it inspired me even more to see if I could grow such trees for myself from ordinary gardencenter stock.

We have a little flower shop around the corner here, bit shabby and full of cheap plants. Mostly indoor, but sometimes some outdoor plants too. The reason they are very cheap is that every morning they go to the flower auction and buy the left overs that wouldn’t…

I am still recovering from what was for us, a very satisfying but tiring 2 day trek to the BTA bonsai show in Elescar, Barnsley. Guess what? To our great surprise and delight, our shohin display was awarded first prize.

Here are a few pictures of our display at the event. I must apologise for the quality of some of these images. Lighting in our part of the hall wasn’t ideal for photography and the public interest around our display, throughout the day left very little time for me to take pics of each tree individually.

The Lanarkshire team from left to right are myself, Robert Porch, Jim McMaster, Andy, Maurice Maidment and Ian McMaster

The following 3 pictures are courtesy of Robert Porch

Individual images of most of the trees displayed can be found in this earlier post

 I managed to take quite a number of pictures of trees that…

Today we visited the opening day of Robert Steven’s International Bonsai Art & Culture Biennial 2014 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. There were lots of beautiful bonsai displays to appreciate in a large exhibition hall, which was divided into about ten smaller galleries, plus a Robert’s “Thinker’s Secret Studio” complete with “peep holes.” Each gallery displayed several different styles and forms of bonsai and displays. Most of the compositions were labeled belonging to Robert, but other exhibitors were listed as well.

This was not an exhibition where one goes to study the form, trunk, and roots leaves and the bark of a bonsai. The beauty of each tree was creatively used to present a new use of bonsai artistically, unlike anything that I’ve seen before, and I loved it! Although I’m accustomed to seeing bonsai displayed in Japan with a quiet and refined taste, these bonsai were dramatic, creative, exciting and innovative…