Dec 2 2012

Friday Night Lights

Had a few mates around on Friday night to play with trees. Ben here found it hard to comprehend the light requirements 🙂

And the penny drops 🙂 Phil gives his salute to the greater bonsai community as per usual.

Michael was first to arrive with a Larch for wiring.

After Michael and I diligently wired the tree, Phil arrived late and jumped in to do the styling. It’s OK , I’ll fix it for Michael another day 😉

Ben brought a clump of Lonicera collected from a garden. We worked through in and removed a few unwanted trunks and left what will be the basis of it’s future image.

Remaining stumps will be carved away.

John McP brought a Spruce that he tells me has been neglected for a number of years. John’s new to the club but has been dabbling with bonsai for a few years on his own.

The tree has a few issues, leggy branches, bar branches and a few empty areas that will need work. However, this is a great tree for John to learn from. We only wanted to do a little branch selection on the night and get John wiring. We only wired the primary branches to drop them down and create an future, older image for the tree. The green was thinned out and will be left until next year as we try and promote some better inner structure to work with.

Ian B brought along a Scots Pine that he has grown from seed. Ian must be about 150 years old as the bark on this little fellow is very nice indeed. I didn’t get a before shot sadly. After everyone else had left, Ian and I worked through this tree and got it wired. We removed about 50% of the foliage. There were a few options with this one. Ian opted to keep the hanging primary branch. There remains a nice literati option for the future if required.

An enjoyable evening.

Nov 30 2012

Korean Hornbeam – Winter

Nov 29 2012

Parent and Layer Update

An update on the parent plant and the layer I took on a Cork Bark Chinese Elm in 2011.

This is the parent now achieved from a stump in a year. A few bits need to be cut back to balance out the growth but not bad for a year. Might even get a suitable instead of this Sh1te one 🙂

This was it in September 2011

And this is the layer a year on.

Post about the layering

Nov 28 2012

Ballot Prize

It a first for me to win something, but at the Willowbog School our club had a prize draw and I won this little Scots Pine in a delightful Ian Baillie pot. Long term for the tree but a nice little bit of material.

Que the comments, Fix! Fix!

Edit: It was pointed out that it was remiss of me not to mention that the tree was donated to the club by none other than Peter Snart of

WILLOWBOG BONSAI

A very kind and generous gift from Peter indeed.

Nov 27 2012

Danny Use Hornbeam Forest Creation

Another great post on a blog I follow, this one was on Danny Use’s Blog showing the creation of a Hornbeam Forest over a number of years. Click on the image to visit the blog. It’s well worth following as regular posts are made with interesting content. Not like the tatt I serve up 🙂

Nov 27 2012

Trident – 2010 – 2011 – 2012

2010

2011

2012

2012

Ready for some thinning out but I’m trying to increase the canopy size.

Nov 26 2012

Worth a Look

These two are worth a look.

First up are some great photos from the www.ofbonsai.org website showing bonsai displayed at 32st Nippon Bonsai Taikan-Ten (2012)

Second is a video from Merlin showing some tasty trees.

Nov 26 2012

Spring Summer Autumn Winter – Root Over Rock Trident

Nov 25 2012

Fix Up

I spent some time yesterday afternoon fixing up the trees damaged in the storm. Not an easy task as I’m suffering from a bad dose of man flu courtesy of Mr Snart who spread it to my household last weekend 😛

I potted the large Scottie into a large plastic training pot, roots not touched at all just transferred and give a little extra space to spend the Winter in. I’ll look for a new pot in the Spring.

My biggest disappointment was when I found out that the deadwood at the base of my Cotoneaster had been damaged in the fall from the bench. There was obviously some rot that had contributed to the damage but a lot of the deadwood I lost had been fine! I removed the bit that had been knocked off, it was just sitting there. I decided to go ahead and repot the tree for a few reasons. I could see wood now that was soft and I wanted to get wood hardener on it. This would be easily done during a repot. I had bought a pot for the tree last weekend and with good after care I felt confident that I could repot now.

Here you can see were the deadwood has now gone 😦

This is the tree removed from the pot and the wood that was rotting has been treated.

As you can clearly see, I now have a few problems to deal with. I cannot pot the tree to the same level as before as the gap at the base will be a major issue. I opted to pot the tree deeper to lower the remaining deadwood to the surface level. I decided to mount the soil slightly to assist with this. This will allow me to give further treatment to the deadwood and once the tree is established in the pot and ready for showing, I can add moss to hide any gaps.

Not ideal but the best I can do for now. I have had this tree since 1995 and it’s one of those memory trees that I like to keep around. It’s been a long road! For the full history of this tree, see this case study.

Nov 24 2012

9th Higo Gayu-kai exhibition

More great photos shared from the Bonsai Days Blog. This time they are from the 9th Higo Gayu-kai Exhibition. A club with some great bonsai. For more information about some of the displays shown and to see who won the public vote, visit Bonsai Days.