In order to share the beauty of Satsuki azaleas with friends and introduce a bit of rarely seen areas of Japan, Kora Dalager and I introduced a new tour to Japan this week– The Satsuki Festival Tour. Our group includes 14 people from across the United States as well as Australia who want to see colorful Satsuki azalea bonsai as well as some of the finest bonsai Japan has to offer.

We arrived on Sunday evening to visit the private bonsai garden of Shinji Suzuki who lives north of Nagano on Monday. After a two hour bullet train ride we took a local train for 30 minutes. Upon arrival in Obuse, the town where the Suzuki garden is, we walked around and had a wood fired lunch in an old sake factory. Obuse is a quaint town where many wanted to simply walk around to absorb the sights and culture…

Goyomatsu di Shikoku

Been busy as per usual but I have managed time to fit in a couple of customer trees.

Below is a quick before and after of a black pine that needed teasing out of a sea of needles. A fun tree to style.

Before

The after shot is a little lacking in quality but I am sure you get the idea.

After a day or so work.

Last year I wrote a post about fertilizing, Refine your fertilizing this year! I wanted to expand on that and offer a few more notes, since, after all, it’s a brand new year for dung related issues-

Blogging is really a bit assumption-ridden, because we make one simple statement as if it’s unconnected to a million variables. For example, when I say ‘fertilize’, I assume that we’re using a fertilizer that has all 6 macronutrients, Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K), Calcium (C), Magnesium (Mg), and Sulfur (S), which, if I don’t say that, or some other variable you’re assuming and I’m not, we’re NOWHERE. And we are better if we’re somewhere. At least.

• There are very few instances in bonsai, in early training or maintenance, where you don’t want a fertilizer with at least all 6 macronutrients. (i.e., without magnesium your tree can’t create chlorophyll, and without chlorophyll the idea…

I have noticed a lot of flowering Hawthorn Bonsai on other Blogs. So this is my contribution.

I think the flowers are just at their best.