It NEVER ceases to amaze me how you lovely folk are (generally) so impressed with with my silly little blog. I was humbled during my recent visit to Peter Chan’s to receive so many comments on how my dear readers just love to peruse my ranting bullshit.
This all started about 1998/9 when I took on the newsletter at our local bonsai club. Back then I didn’t know shit about shit as far as bonsai was concerned but, having got my little Bondi blue Imac hooked up to the interweb via a telephone modem I figured I could do my research and compile enough, what we now call ‘content’ to fill a page or two every month.
Of course being an old gas-bag that quickly turned into an intimidating four pages of closely spaced text. These days I doubt most folk would have the attention span to read that much. Over a few years I wrote more than a quarter million words, I still have all the copies. The newsletter got so popular I was mailing hard copies to as far away as Australia. I remember one of our members picked up his newsletter and said to me he had strict instructions from his good lady to return with a copy or don’t come home. Apparently as soon as it was in her hands she would retire for the evening to read the whole damn thing. She had no interest in bonsai by all accounts.
I have always loved words. My second best subject at school was English. My lovely old mum has always been a voracious reader though I have not, she did instil in me a love of our magnificent language. Whilst I do not have a particular grip of all the technicalities it seems I do have a knack of making my subject clear and interesting.
Taking a complex and nuanced subject like bonsai and presenting it in a way that cuts through the hazy mists of confusion, to a point where just about anyone can get it, takes a very specific type of simple bloke to achieve i.e yours truly…..me, an uneducated knucklehead with a finely tuned bullshit radar. IMHO the modern world is so deep in slurry, in the agricultural sense, to be clear piss and shit soup it’s often hard for any of us to make sense of even the simplest of subjects. We’re up to our chins folk!
As a simple country boy I know what shit looks like and I have a finely tuned ability to see right through it much of the time. Being an old cynic helps a lot I feel. I’m not here trying to sell y’all anything, i’m not promoting products (most of the time), no sponsored ads, products or clickbait, i’m not trying to be popular, get the likes, clicks or subscribers. I write this for my own ‘mental health‘ and to bring clarity to my simple life and place in a crazy world. That’s why my ‘content’ is free, I never made a penny from this blog or any of the other stuff online. That’s what the Kaizen Bonsai store is for, buy that stuff and I can then be free to write shit and make daft video.
This weekend the clocks went back, sadly only an hour. How much better would it be if we could turn those clocks back to about 1960. Whilst i was not quite there (-4) I can be sure that the world was a better place and I feel I would like the people and their attitudes a whole lot more than I do today. I don’t have a single person I can call a friend that was born after about 1975. Now I know the past, in fact all of human history, was far from perfect but todays utter insanity gives me a significant sense of unease.
We’re (GB) circling the plughole and my advice would be to start making plans to leave now or be prepared to fight to protect your own. Loose weight, get fit and get busy folk, in the words of Eddie Abbew (look him up)”Wake the fuck up!” but then what do I know I haven’t been out the front gate for a week. These days screens largely bring me nothing but bad news, lots of which is utter bullshit and it’s very hard for a fellow to stay on an even keel. It’s got so bad I can hardly be bothered to rant and rave at the TV any more. How sad is that folk?
So, having got that off my chest I actually came here to present what I might call a review of my bonsai summer or, to be precise the lack of it. The Summer That Was (not) & Upcoming Bonsai Projects. I know it’s actually autumn, I intended to write this in September but I had a massive hangover and just couldn’t be assed but at least now I know we won’t be having and Indian summer whatever one of those is.
I live out on the east coast, the sea is two miles east of me. Norfolk sticks out into the cold north sea and so our spring time will always be that bit later than it will for those living a little further inland. For instance Norwich is just 25 minutes drive directly west and in summer the temperatures are typically 5-7 degrees warmer than here. Come a warm sunny day in spring those folk flock to our broad golden sandy beaches but, typically they get out of their cars before promptly turning around to leave because it’s so fricking cold.
However in winter it works the other way around. Years ago I was inland pike fishing on a dark cold autumn night. Soon the temperature dropped below freezing and line started to stick to my rod and everything was going white. I packed up and came home, just 12 miles and here it was 5 degrees above. Nearly 10 degrees difference in such a short distance.
So come spring time for most everyone else we’ll still be in the grip of winter cold, spring cold or even summer cold. We are subject to northerly winds right off the sea and even August can see us endure a cold snap sufficient to find my sparking up the fire to keep warm of an evening. I know it’s hard to believe for ‘inlanders’ but the first warm day of summer 2024 occurred here on June 22/23. Sure there were plenty of sunny days but those were even colder. We missed spring entirely this year and just went straight to summer but I can’t really call it that.
The pursuit of bonsai, particularly in Blighty is all about the weather simply because half the year is too cold for growth on average and when May was as cold as February, which happened here this year, even the better half of the year might not produce appropriate conditions. I can, hand on heart, say that 2024 has provided only about 7 weeks of growth potential and even that consisted of a few good days here and there. As a result most of my bonsai have achieved virtually nothing. In 35 years of fanatical bonsai activity this year has quite simply been the worst I can remember. However….
My garden, by design, creates a harsh exposed environment for bonsai. I keep most of my trees in direct sunlight and exposed to wind and everything else the weather can throw at us. That makes for strong compact and characterful growth which in time creates impressive bonsai, it takes a bit of time but I can typically use everything I grow in the development of my trees. I do have shady spots which are useful in some circumstances. As a result I do very well with trees that like my moderately harsh conditions. I do well with olives and other Mediterranean species as well as most varieties of pine, yew and Japanese maples are typically pretty good. Junipers and most non-native varieties are unreliable at best.
The weather here is largely consistent in its inconsistency however after twenty years experience (in this garden) I can manipulate my conditions to provide what most plants need…. more or less. As a result I do get fairly consistent results year to year. However this year has produced some very unexpected and, as it turns out, very welcome results I was not expecting and have not seen before. Having been very cold on average and with high rainfall and extreme cold northeasterly winds for the period from February until late June most of my trees reluctantly came into leaf and then stopped altogether and produced nothing further. But, to my great surprise, what I term high mountain trees have actually done exceptionally well. I include in that list larch, junipers, spruce, scots pine and mugo pine. All those have produced record results this year, some in excess of anything I have ever seen before. I guess our favoured long hot summer days are not suited to everything after all.
The thing I love most about bonsai is that every day there is something new to learn. Every passing year is a reminder of how little I know and every day’s a school day. Next year I’ll be moving a few of those high mountain trees into different positions because I now know a great deal more about their favoured growing conditions than I did before. I ought to know this, I have been very lucky to go to the places a lot of these beautiful varieties naturally inhabit but it’s easy to forget the role of altitude in providing the conditions a plant might like.
So, on balance this summer was a write off for several tree species whilst others have excelled. Looking for the silver lining I learned something very valuable and have certainly seen dramatic improvement in some varieties with which I often struggle. In reality most years are like that, up and down, winners and losers. Talking of which I have a potentially exciting project in the pipeline. A story over thirty years in the making, an emotional rollercoaster ride for me and one that takes me right back to my very first days working with bonsai. Anyone remember this yew?
Collected around 1995 I had no expectation the tree would even live. I literally had no clue what I was doing, it even took me a while to figure out which end went in the soil. However despite my best efforts the tree survived and went on to thrive. By the time it was ready for first work I had met my now long term friend and mentor Kevin Willson who in conjunction with this tree and a few very long days work transformed not only the tree but my entire life, for ever. After that long weekend nothing was ever the same again.
As collected around the mid 1990s.
Right after the first work/styling around 1998/9
The yew went on to be selected for the Ginkgo awards in the early 2000s. For me that was a great moment. To get a tree I dragged out of the woods on a damp autumn day accepted for what was the best assemblage of European bonsai ever seen at the time was a truly special moment. After that he appeared at many European and British shows including commendation at the fabled Noelanders Trophy.
So, where has the tree been since then? We’ll get to more of this in the future but basically having moved house in 2008 and with a burgeoning bonsai business on my hands whilst still working as a landscaper and travelling commitments life got much too busy and I took advantage of my supremely vigorous yew by totally ignoring it for years. By the time I got back to it the strength had gone and drastic measures were required. This resulted in the tree ending up in a corner of the garden I used to call the dead-pile. It lost all it’s roots and 90% of the branches after I poisoned it with compost infected with a fungal pathogen (don’t ask). As far as I was concerned that was the end of the story. I sold the beautiful pots the tree had inhabited and chalked it all up to the price of an education.
As they say, “Lessons cost, good ones cost a lot!”
The ‘Plucking Yew’ or “ *ucking yew’ as it became known, once again refused to lie down, despite my best efforts, and it survived. I chucked it into the nettle patch behind my pond where it sat, surrounded by three foot weeds for several years where I neither fed or watered it. Some roots got into the ground and gradually it came back to life. Eventually I noticed it’s progress and started to take better care.
Kevin was well acquainted with my miserable failure and being eagle eyed, kept trying to buy it off me, much like he did when I first rocked up at Oxley Hill with it. I may have done a stupid thing but that does not make me stupid and I didn’t sell it. Two years ago in August I took the tree back into the workshop and 100% bare rooted it. There’s no way I was going to restore the tree and then run into repotting/root issues. My ethos has always been ‘roots first’. There was soil coming out of there I hadn’t seen since the 1990s.
In the end this has all paid off. The tree now has the vigour and strength it did 25 years ago and so the next step? Well, following on from the success of last years joint venture with the big scots our next project will be this yew. For me an emotional moment going right back to where it all started nigh on thirty years ago with my favourite tree and my raffish mate from Essex. We thought it high time we revisited this tree whilst we’re both still compos mentis, time’s passing fast for us old geezers. This should be happening sometime in the next few weeks. Not too sure if ya’ll would like to see a video? Let me know.
So, summer was not so great, but then it had a few surprises too. Living in Blighty we learn to roll with the punches and make the most of what we got. There’s always next year assuming Starmergeddon hasn’t done us all down by then.
There’s other stuff going on right now too with some fresh imports of special pots and other great bonsai products new to the UK. Stay tuned folk and stay in touch, it’s always a delight to hear from you!
Graham.
My old friend hale and hearty once again
Much has changed but much remains and so it goes.
That’s what a healthy taxus looks like. It’s all in the roots folk!
Back in the day I grew ever branch from a bud and now look.
