Following on from my demo’ last weekend one of the club members there (Ian) has posted a video. I had nothing to do with it and it’s a bit long winded……or is that me who is a bit long winded? Certainly not our usual stripped down production but for those of you who have always asked for more detail here it is 😉
G.
Last Sunday I rolled out of my sack at four thirty in the morning, glugged a cold cup of coffee and hit the road. I picked up a couple of compadres and we settled in for the long run south to a little place called Herstmonceux, your guess is as good as mine regarding the pronunciation. The only good thing about being on the road at that time of day is the fact the roads are pretty much empty. I drove nearly forty minutes before I even saw another car. These days I avoid driving at all costs unless my transport has only two wheels. I find being on the road an absolute misery what with all the cameras, grinding traffic and what-not. My ancient dilapidated van does not exactly help the cause either, it’s done nearly a quarter million miles and every single one of them have been hard. There is a word to describe my old clunker but I am much too polite to repeat it here*.
We were on our way to the Eastbourne & Wealden Bonsai Club show, a fair old run from out here in ‘Clod Hopper Country’. I get a great many invitations to travel these days but decline most of them just because I like it here and I hate traveling since I became an ornery old grouch. However once I get to where I am going I always enjoy myself and am left wondering what I was fussing about. I couldn’t say exactly why I agreed to this trip, I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Seeing as I was on a power tool ban and considering the time of year my choices of what to work were a bit limited but, with close to three thousand trees out back there were a few possibilities. In the end I plumped for the juniper I put up on the blog last week. I spent a couple of hours preparing it and then ‘Master of the Wires’ Ramon spent a day weaving his special magic. That left us with a more manageable task on the day. Much to everyone’s surprise the room was packed with standing room only and folk outside in the hallway for much of the day. My guys got their wiring done and I spent a fairly frantic hour or so getting the tree whipped into shape. I have to admit I was not holding out great hopes for the result and therein lies another tale……
Overall I don’t have a lot of confidence in my own abilities simply because I am hyper critical of my own work. So far I have never done a single thing where I could stand back and be content knowing I had done my absolute best. Because I am hyper critical I tend to see the bad in things and because I see things that way it’s hard for me to justify the prices we have to ask these days. I rarely look at a tree, particularly raw material, and think it’s worth even close to the asking price. The net result of my psychological issues are good prices for our customers.
Last week I had a visit from a long time friend and fellow bonsai enthusiast known to a select few of his friends as ‘Grandad’ (as in “Ted” Trotter from Only Fools……). We spent a very enjoyable morning tinkering with his trees and in the course of conversation this juniper came up. The tree has been for sale for the last year right here on our web site, the price was about £600 as I recall. Bearing in mind the tree was going to be worked, we managed to agree a deal involving a number of elements. On the face of it what could possibly go wrong. I got paid for the work on the tree, got more than I was asking and a cool trade in too. What I did not count on was the tree coming out this well, i’ve sold it for half what it’s worth. What an absolute DUMB-ASS!
As I have said here before, good bonsai material is one of the best investments you can make. I have very rarely bought good material, worked it and not doubled my money. Even if you have to pay for help (wiring masters, workshops etc’) there’s still plenty of meat left on the bone to make the whole exercise worthwhile, especially when you consider the value of the experience. Even if you have to put in a twenty hour day like we did last weekend there’s nothing but upside. Keep your eyes open there are a lot of bargains right here!
I would like to offer my sincere thanks for all the hard work the volunteers from Eastbourne & Wealden Bonsai Club and their friends put in over the weekend. Putting on a show is never an easy undertaking but when an event turns out as well as this one did I think it’s all very worthwhile, especially in such a beautiful part of the world. Well done to everyone involved!
G.
*Â F**ked
It’s a rare day I leave home. The chain around my ankle does not reach out of sight of my desk. I am constantly asked to travel for demonstrations, often to far flung corners of the world. However being from Norfolk (and apparently an uneducated carrot crunching clod hopper) once I no longer know where I am I have to return on account of not being able to read the road signs.
Some time back in a moment of madness I agreed to get involved in an event run by the Eastbourne and Wealden bonsai club. That event has now arrived and so I will be on the road before dawn this sunday with my trusty helpers. Through the day we will be beavering away on this juniper.
It’s pushing thirty years since I bought my first bonsai tree. It was a serissa, we were at a koi show and it was my birthday. My wife and parents chipped in, whilst the tree was only £30 that was more than any of us could afford back then. Little did we all know what would ensue all these years later. My long suffering father recently accompanied me on a buying trip, chauffeuring me around in a very nice top end car we hired whilst I spent the equivalent of the deposit for a large house. Sounds like the dream job to many I guess, a few days in the sun buying bonsai trees. However buying four hundred trees in two days, especially after a 2am start and a twenty hour day is not as idyllic as it might sound. Then of course all our suppliers delivered their orders on the same day, yesterday in fact. DAD!!!
I stuck my head out the door yesterday before seven am and there was a big van in my drive. That started a long and heavy day of moving trees around. We spent the entire day up to our nuts in wagons, pallets, trolleys and boxes. By the time it got dark at least everything was unpacked. It’ll take another two weeks to sort it all out and the rest of the year to get it all photographed, on the web site and sold. That’ll be just in time to go and do it all again.
Here are a few snaps of the chaos just now. We have everything you could want whatever your budget. Lots of native species this year as well as all the usual suspects from Japan, China, Korea and Indonesia. This year we have a lot of smaller yamadori in very familiar species including scots pine, junipers, oaks, prunus, hornbeam and elm. There’s even a massive ginkgo and almonds too.
Watch this space.
G.
My first real contact with bonsai over twenty five years ago was at a little nursery in the backwoods of Norfolk. It was one of those little places where time had stood still for decades and whilst it was actually a rose growing nursery the owner, Andrew, had been growing bonsai all his life, as had his farther and his father before him. Grandfather had come across bonsai when he was in the army stationed somewhere in the far east around the time of the first world war. By todays standard there wasn’t much to see but to a wide eyed beginner this was a mystical place with it’s pitch painted sheds and dirt floors, the place didn’t even have electricity and was five miles away from a decent road. However for me this was a little bit of heaven on earth.
Of course I was as poor as a church mouse without a church back then and so most of the trees on display were out of my reach. For the endless hours I spend bothering Andrew he certainly didn’t get paid, I guess I cost him more in tasty beverages. Looking back today it’s safe to say I would not be here today were it not for this wonderful little place and it’s proprietor. The best of times indeed. However one thing bothered me…. Andrew lived around back in a caravan and next to that was a little courtyard affair and nobody was allowed in there. To this day it bothers me, what was stashed away behind those six foot fence panels? I had visions of ancient and magnificent bonsai specimens marking the passing of eons……
I am constantly badgered by folk trying to find out exactly what I have got squirreled away here. I am sure everybody feels we only sell the junk we don’t want and that I keep all the good stuff for myself which of course I do. However I find too much good stuff to keep it all and have actually sold more magical trees that I currently own, some people can be very persuasive as can a fist full of notes. Be that as it may folk are adamant I am being cagey, I guess that’s just human nature and the fact I don’t let many people visit probably does not help. Trust me there is no mystery here 😉
Kaizen Bonsai is a working business and as will all production based activities we do have a lot of stock in process (progress?). Firstly there is no sense in us buying special raw material and selling it right out the door if we can get double the price in a couple of years time with the addition of a little work and a pot. That accounts for a lot of plants we do not offer for sale. Another issue is that I often pay over the odds for something and those tend to hang around here for ever. I recently sold a very special Japanese pine that I bought about eight years ago at a hefty loss even despite improving the tree a great deal, adding a very nice pot and taking plants in PX which I still have to sell and ship. That accounts for a lot of plants here too.
We buy in a lot of bonsai collections and PX a lot of trees too and many of those arrive here in less than perfect condition. Often it takes years on end to restore old bonsai to significant health and that amounts to a LOT of trees here on the nursery since I won’t simply dump those problems on other folk. I have been caught out by some crooks too, selling dodgy yamadori, most of that is in my log pile but  a few sorry specimens are taking up space along with hundreds of skip rats and other nonsense.
So for those with feelings of being left out I had a walk around this morning and took a few snaps of some of the more significant plants not currently on the web site. Of course that may not be everything 😉
G.
P.S Next week we have close to four hundred new plants arriving, some keepers too.
P.P.S I later found out what was in Andrew’s little hidey hole because I bought the entire remaining stock when he left the nursery. Some things are better left a mystery, keep romance alive!
The Scots pine hat!
If you have been trying to access our web site over the weekend but to no avail we have to apologise for not being here. Our web host 123-reg decided to blow themselves into oblivion by deleting lots of web sites across the UK. Just to add insult to injury they decided not to be honest about what they had done and kept us all hanging around whilst they figured out how to bullshit us all. It appears that some ‘fat head’ ran a script with errors and burned a, not surprisingly, undisclosed number of sites and permanently deleted a ton of data. Whilst it appears they do back ups, in such an event as this their T&C absolve them of any responsibility.
Thanks to the diligence of our very own tech’ Sarah (the unsung hero of Kaizen Bonsai) we had our own back up and after a lot of hard work by Sarah and her other half we were back on line Sunday evening. Had Sarah not made our own private back up it’s very likely our web site could have been lost. I have been building this site now for about fifteen years and there is simply no way on earth we could have recreated all of it. Safe to say Kaizen Bonsai would have been finished for good. A lot of UK businesses were not so lucky, or prepared, and today face a very uncertain future. We’ll be moving servers very soon!
All this techy stuff leaves me cold, I prefer to pay those that understand it to work on my behalf but if it’s your thing here is a little more detail …
We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused and I would like to pass on our sincere and heartfelt thanks and gratitude to Sarah without whom none of this would be here.
G.