Stop ‘Doing‘ Bonsai!

Not a phrase I bet you were expecting to hear from me right? My mum always called me Tommy Opposite because I was such a belligerent and awkward little bastard incapable of doing what I was told. Every school report had words scrawled across it that amounted to “Graham can do this shit standing on his head but the awkward little cuss just WONT!” I might have mentioned that before.

Now, I’m a working class lad. My dad dug holes and put gas mains in them for a living, my grandparents owned a village shop and butchers (Open All Hours style) whilst the Potter elders were respectively in the merchant navy and nan was a scullery maid at a big country house. My mum worked in the library which made her a bit posh, having attended a grammar school she could actually read. Back in the late 1950s my dad was thrilled to be marrying up the ladder, Grandad owned a TV, a car AND….. a bathroom whilst dad grew up without indoor plumbing and rode a bike.

When I was 11 going on 12 I lied to the man who owned the local newsagents telling him I was 13 and got my first job delivering papers. I had a dirty grey canvas bag with about forty papers in it that weighed nearly as much as I did and went wobbling down the road at 7am every day on me bike. We didn’t have health and safety back then, or minimum wage, I was getting £1.50 odd a week. Saturday I had to collect the money from my customers, with a little red accounting book and stubby pencil. I did that round every single day except Christmas, NO MATTER what the weather and never lost a penny or missed a single delivery.

Imagine giving a job like that to some of todays affected teenagers never mind twelve year olds. It made me! I have worked every single day since unless I was sick, broken or in hospital and loved every minute of it. The only time I am not happy in life is when I am not working, or stuck in front of a screen.

I like to work and I think work is important. Where I come from a man is what he does, the men in my life have always been defined by what they do. There’s honour in real work and it brings both respect and fulfilment. There are people who walk the walk and then there are those who talk the walk but actually are full of you know what. It seems to me we have a lot of those second kind’a folk these days and sadly too many of them are in charge. Working folk can no longer function properly but today i’m going to leave that particular subject.

The problem, it seems to me, is we have too many folk telling us all how it is done but very few actually doing the work. Starmer’s dad may well have owned a company that made stuff but, and I’m guessing here, I very much doubt the old fella could take a little bar of high speed steel and turn out a functioning tool…….. but then again……… i’m sure you can fill in the blanks here right? *

Unfortunately being Tommy Opposite I don’t cope well with being told what to do, particularly when ignorant folk are doing the telling. The reason I thought school was such a pointless exercise, for me, was simply not a single person could convince me it was particularly important to my own prospects. Once I got past the basics the rest seemed like self perpetuating claptrap. Growing up I knew quite a few very successful local characters who made a lot of money and most couldn’t even read. So age 15 I ducked out of school for good. I may well be wrong here, this may be a stupid approach but at age 15 I set my journey in motion much like the little bonsai tree we’ll get onto later.

Now years later I can say, with a single exception I got every job I was ever interviewed for. In fact I turned down more job offers than I accepted and now in my advanced years I can hand on heart say I have never once been asked for my exam results. I know it’s different today, it’s difficult for a bright hard working lad to get on but that’s only because we put toolmakers (tools) in charge for far too long now. Folk educated beyond their intellectual capacity with cookie cutter brains trying to form all of us into their image. These days one needs a degree just to shovel shit or mop up. I’m SO glad I’m on this end of life and not starting out again. Maybe one day I’ll expand on this particular modern scourge but that’s not today y’all be glad to know.

I have said here, multiple times, plough you own furrow, go your own way, follow your heart. Seems to me the folk who get the most done in life are often mavericks by which I mean folk who follow their own rules. Think, study, meditate and learn every aspect relating to what you are doing whilst drowning oneself in activity, remember everything and learn from then, given sufficient time, experience will lead to confidence and understanding which I believe is what we call success. Success is obviously relative but that depends upon what metric we apply. Accumulation of money is not always a great indicator of success. History is full of people who acquired great wealth before going off the rails or turning into despots.

Now i’m 60 I have a lot of shit. House ✔️ Business ✔️ Family ✔️ Grandkids ✔️ Cars ✔️ Bonsai Trees ✔️ A stable of bikes ✔️ Koi ✔️ Good knives ✔️ A big garden✔️ and so on. Does that make me successful? I don’t think so, it makes me comfortable but being comfortable is only really important when I need to sleep, not something I do much of. To me the only marker of success I care about is doing a good job. That does not mean I do the best job ever or to use a Trump-ism ‘the best anyone has ever seen… ever’. It’s about doing the best that I can. Nobody but me knows if, after applying myself to a particular task, I left anything on the table.

Back when I was a teenager I didn’t know how to get a job. School’s careers adviser had nothing for me. The job centre didn’t have any in 1980 and so I bought a printing press, as you do, a big heavy lumbering metal machine from the 1960s. I installed it in my Dad’s shed and armed with nothing more that a 20 page Quarto (8″x10″) instruction manual I proceeded to screw up paper and get ink in all the wrong places until I mastered the bastard thing. About eighteen months later I got my first full time job as a press minder before going on to teach myself every single machine in the place. That put food on the table for the next 21 years. Everyone else had to do a six year apprenticeship on piss-poor money. Not me I went right in on full pay. All I had to do was show the boss what I could do and they locked me in.

This is what I purchased aged 16. An AM Multilith 1250 A4 single colour press capable of about 7000 impression an hour.

I figure we all start life at zero with a pack of seeds, some cultivate the little ones, others the yellow ones, some the big ones etc’. How that goes depends upon many factors, often beyond our control. Some folk have better seeds, some have better growing conditions, more help or greater opportunity and we all need a little luck and a fair wind. Overall our own degree of success tends to pivot upon the amount of effort we put in, what we are prepared to sacrifice, and how readily we retain and use learnt information whilst simultaneously using experience to dispose of irrelevant or erroneous thinking.

I don’t suppose I will ever get an MBE for services to bonsai but then other than you and I few folk give shit about little trees, so long as I do the best I can i’ll go to my grave happy. Besides I don’t give a crap what those folk think. If Charles called me up to tell me “come get your gong” my retort would be along the lines of… not going into Khan town, pop it in the post mate!

So what ‘nearth’s  this got to do with bonsai, and in particular this sorry looking little Acer deshojo?

Autumn 2018. Acer palmatum deshojo.

Stop ‘Doing’ Bonsai!

This little Japanese import came my way as part of a messy deal including a bunch of swops back in 2018. It has always seemed to me some trees are destined to be passed around endlessly. In my experience this seems to happen with folk who are basically ambitious but have a high degree of fecklessness. The trees usually come in with good basic bones, the start of a nebari, some half decent bark and hastily grown branches. This allows them to be pretty cheap for what you get but they are, in reality a very long way from being bonsai. With leaves on they do a passable job of fooling the uninitiated (being a triangle on a stick) and of course this variety always wows folk with it’s crazy colour leaves in spring.

Over the years I have bought a lot of trees in this category. The trouble is our ambitious owner probably bought it because it was what ‘looked’ like a nice bonsai, the right variety and a bargain price. However once our mates see it or it goes on socials it’ll get torn apart for all it’s ugly faults and coarseness. Therefor our owner starts chopping, bending and battering the tree until it’s, frankly, much worse. But, because it’s a popular variety folk lower down the food chain are forever keen to purchase it for their collection. So the owner, by now realises the tree was not such a bargain after all, given how long the development’s going to take,  and passes it on to another ham-fister and so it goes on until, mysteriously it ‘just died’ one winter. Truth be known it’s little light was snuffed out by, excuse me…. fuckwits following many years of abuse and battery.

So what’s to do? First up I have to ask, why on earth would you put this in a Bryan Albright pot? This tree needs a decade of development, that tiny pot and UK weather pretty much guarantees no real progress at best. My rule is never mess with a tree until you have owned it for a full calendar year. This gives time to determine what you’re dealing with. The picture above shows the tree after a full summers growth. Pretty poor right? So, I sold the pot which recovered most of my outlay. The following spring I bare rooted it, cut back really hard top and bottom then put it in a big pot twice as deep and four time the size of this one.

Result? A year after the picture (2019) it had 18″ of growth all over. That was pruned in autumn and then the following summer (2020) it was defoliated and wired completely. Subsequent growth was stopped at one or two nodes and that’s all I do now. Deshojo are notoriously slow to grow, develop, ramify or bulk up in Blighty. A green leaf maple might well develop at twice the pace here. So here’s the tree right after leaf drop a few days ago.

Autumn 2024. Acer palmatum deshojo.

Ultimately two factors have resulted in this improvement. First up has to be a plan. I know what these trees are capable of (not a great deal) and so i plan to make the most progress I can each year. Second factor and relevant to my earlier diatribe is the ability to do nothing. Not easy for me, I like to work, I like to be busy, hands on. Trouble is often in bonsai we have to know when to walk away, when to stop and when to just leave alone. Every time I hear about folk ‘doing‘ bonsai I cringe. For sure at some point we have to take charge but I see some very heavy handed work performed far too often.

When I got this maple it was obviously not happy. Right there I made a simple plan. That was to improve the vigour which ensures a strong response to later works. Once that was done I set the bones in place for it’s future. After that all I have to do is let nature take it’s course and keep it healthy. I recon bonsai’s not about you, it’s not about me, it’s certainly not about impressing others, it’s not about making us popular or prosperous. Bonsai is all about the tree, it’s about working with nature and the nature of the tree to allow them to thrive and flourish. Once that happens likely the tree will be it’s own unique shade of beautiful. In this case my ten year plan included several years of doing virtually nothing. Sure we’re still building structure and refinement but since I got this, all told it owes me less that about three hours. Where I come from that’s me doing nothing.

If you are ‘doing’ bonsai make sure what you are doing is part of a long term plan to help the tree flourish and be beautiful in it’s own unique way. Accentuate the trees strengths and best features and for the lesser parts dilute those that cant be fixed into a natural and harmonious whole. Work for it’s own sake, ticking boxes or hitting our bullet points makes no sense. For instance this tree has had no ‘autumn pruning’. It got a piece of wire and I have a cut to do in spring, anything more is pointless. Like everyone around me keeps saying I need to learn to stop, take it a bit easy, smell the flowers etc’. Trust me I know that’s not easy but here we have the highest form of bonsai. That’s when a tree teaches us how to achieve and enjoy a better life. Man and bonsai in harmony. What’s wrong with that?

We’ll come back to this little maple in the future but for now thanks for you attention. Remember to like, subscribe and share etc’

I’m off to not do some bonsai, thought I might try my had at making some tools;-) Sweet dreams folks!

Graham Potter

November 2024

*Just for the record here is the definition of a tool maker courtesy of Wikipedia.

Tool and die makers are highly skilled crafters working in the manufacturing industries. Tool and die makers work primarily in toolroom environments—sometimes literally in one room but more often in an environment with flexible, semipermeable boundaries from production work. They are skilled artisans (craftspeople) who typically learn their trade through a combination of academic coursework and with substantial period of on-the-job training that is functionally an apprenticeship. They make jigs, fixtures, dies, molds, machine tools, cutting tools, gauges, and other tools used in manufacturing processes.

Working from engineering drawings developed by the toolmaker, engineers or technologists, tool makers lay out the design on the raw material (usually metal), then cut it to size and shape using manually controlled machine tools (such as lathes, milling machines, grinding machines, and jig grinders), power tools (such as die grinders and rotary tools), and hand tools (such as files and honing stones).

Art and science (specifically, applied science) are thoroughly intermixed in their work, since they’re also in engineering. Manufacturing engineers and tool and die makers often work in close consultation as part of a manufacturing engineering team.