Apr 11, 2016 | General
If you had the misfortune to get my attention over the last couple of weeks, which hasn’t been easy seeing as we largely stopped answering the telephone, you will know I have been a bit grumpy. However if you had the extreme misfortune to bump into me over that same period you will know that in fact I have been EXTREMELY grumpy. In fact I have not been so stressed out since I ended up in hospital with life threatening pneumonia bought on by extreme stress and three years of not sleeping more than a couple of hours a night. I think most folk in my situation would be very happy, to say business is booming is a very significant understatement. However with that comes a lot of stress simply because being in business in Britain today is being made so difficulty by all and sundry. I shan’t go into all the details here because unless you are directly involved it’s just plain dull and little incomprehensible. Suffice to say this year I have only had about 12 hours not working since we returned from our Christmas shut down. In my case all work and no play makes for a very grumpy boy.
Last week was one of the most stressful I have had in decades and so the thought of preparing for a weekend bonsai show just added insult to injury. The last thing I wanted to do was load up a ton of stuff in the pouring rain saturday and then drag my ass out of bed at 4am Sunday morning. However, having ‘manned up’ we arrived nice and early and got our pitch set up in good time. Bonsai shows are an impossible imponderable as far as business goes, you can lose your shirt, cover your costs or do well, it’s just a crap shoot on the day.
Today I am much happier, not because we had a good show or because we came home to a pile of new orders but because of the amazing good will we received from everyone at the show. Trading online leaves one open to the world and sadly there are a lot of folk out there that are very mean and many that are plain nasty. We try VERY hard but are not perfect, it’s becoming an increasing problem to meet peoples expectations and when we fail the abuse we get is often quite breath taking and there have been some tears. Because this goes on it’s very easy to have ones view of the world skewed by bitter and twisted folk. 99.9% of orders go without a hitch and we never hear from customers but those orders where things are not ‘just so’ cause a barrage of hatred to be thrown at us which drowns out everything else. It was so refreshing to be at the show and everybody was so complimentary and pleased to see us I had my faith in folk at least partly restored. So, to everyone that came and said hello, showered us with thanks and made their appreciation of what we do known, Catherine and I would like to offer our sincere and heart felt thanks. You make all the hard work worthwhile and we have now shelved plans to give up for a while. Thank you 🙂
If on the other hand you have been bitching and moaning you can go …….. yourself and …….. off! 🙂
The Coventry show has been a fixture of the British Bonsai scene for as long as anyone can remember and it was very refreshing to see the show increase this year. The sun was shining, business was good, we were surrounded by spring time bonsai trees and nice people and only did a 15 hour day. A perfect Sunday in the Potter household.
Here are a few pictures of trees I liked that were part of the displays assembled by local bonsai clubs. Sorry I don’t know who was responsible for what, just some nice (if questionable quality) pictures I snapped and in no particular order.
G & C.
Mar 29, 2016 | General
It’s been a crazy year here so far. I have never worked so hard, we’re on our knees, my last day off in January seems a very long time ago now. Sitting here in a waist high pile of parcels and a hundred still to do it seems unlikely we will be getting caught up any time soon. However just to add a little insult to the injury my year begins in earnest in April with lots of running around.
This coming Friday 1 April I will be teaching a class on the more technical aspects of developing bonsai at the Norfolk Bonsai Associations meeting in Norwich.
Sunday 3 April will be our first group workshop of the year (full, sorry).
Also on Saturday & Sunday 2/3 April we will have a stand at the British Shohin Bonsai Show at RHS Wisley. If there is anything you need drop us a line and we can bring it along for you and save a delivery charge.
April the 10th we will be at the BTA show in Coventry for the day so again if there is anything you need drop us a line and we can bring it along for you and save a delivery charge. Please don’t leave it too late as we will be packing our vehicle on Friday.
April 23 is another group workshop (full again, sorry).
Finally somewhere in the middle there I will be off on a buying trip to sunnier climes. Look out for over 300 new trees and some of the most spectacular yamadori seen so far in the UK 😉
Now back to packing parcels…………………
G.
P.S Looks like spring may be just around the corner as the cherries are in flower…
Mar 7, 2016 | General
Just put up new dates for our bonsai group workshops for 2016. Places go fast so don’t hang around!
Here’s a recent juniper I did with a friend of ours….
G.
Feb 13, 2016 | General
It’s silly season around here and it’s tough to get much done from beneath your avalanche of orders. Not that I am complaining it’s just an insanely busy time and I also have to run around buying and moving our new seasons stock too. This year we have a lot of different and unusual plants coming including incredible scots pines.
I have noticed over the last few years as Japanese imports have reduced in quality and increased in price just how hard it is becoming to find mature bonsai trees at an affordable price. Not so long ago it was a buyers market and good mature bonsai were there for the asking. However that’s all changed for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. The scarcity of decent trees has caused some businesses to simply increase their prices. The cost of nice bonsai at the recent Noelanders exhibition was the highest I have ever seen with some trees that just a few years ago would have been a few hundred now being offered at a few thousand. The trouble is nobody was buying, folk are not stupid. We also saw yamadori, much of which will take ten or more years to even come close to being bonsai offered for sale at prices that would far exceed the value of the finished bonsai. Once again nobody was buying. There is a secret to making plant sales pay in a business context and I won’t be sharing it here, suffice to say most businesses in the bonsai community are simply not aware of a few basic business rules. However the buying public are pretty smart and are not easily fooled and anyone who is duped won’t be caught again.
Good honest value for money wins the day every time. That’s not to say that smart folk simply buy on price. I have always based my buying decisions not on price but on value. In general it’s not what you pay but what you get and as they say “the quality remains long after the price is forgotten”. Buy quality at a fair price and your money is always safe. Buy cheap and you get cheap. Not much gets cheaper than bonsai. Considering what goes into producing these plants the only folk making any money are the VAT men. Take this new arrival for instance………
I recently got this old Korean hornbeam from one of the UKs most talented bonsai artists. It’s been twenty to thirty years in a bonsai pot and probably twenty five years or more before that. It took me four hours just to tidy it up and the John Pitt pot would have cost a few hundred. Untold hours for less than a couple of grand or about half a weeks work at your local garage. The VAT man is getting the lions share here! However keep the tree looking good and improve it and in ten years time this tree will be worth more even allowing for inflation. I have proved that fact hundreds of times over during the last twenty five years. Unlike your worthless car which plummets in value every year the cost of decent bonsai is only going one way and as trees become harder to obtain the demand is simply going to increase. Junk, nobody wants. Good bonsai are hard to finance but worth the price in the right hands.
This old hornbeam will be for sale on the web site next week but for now here’s a peek…..
G.
Jan 26, 2016 | General
Just got back from our annual gruelling, but ultimately rewarding, trip to Belgium for the Noelanders Trophy. Too many years have passed by with us visiting this event but it never ceases to surprise in one way or another. This year the buzz around the trade was a maudlin one bought on by the dramatic increase in the number of traders attending (96 in the end I heard). Everyone feared the worst, after all there is only so much pie to go around and with more mouths to feed everyone is going to get less. As it turned out one or two did indeed lose their shirts. However thanks to our faithful and loyal customers, a few good prices, some new products and a dash of hard work and good luck we were a cats whisker away from a record year. SINCERE THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO CONTINUES TO SUPPORT US! It’s quite humbling in a way but then we do work harder than anyone else in this business and are not here just to make a quick buck and so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise when we do well but, at the end of the day, we know folk have a choice and are supremely grateful that so many of you continue to support us. Thank you!
We were so busy over the weekend I barely got chance to walk around. However early Sunday morning before anyone was about I got ten minutes to nip around the show benches. I do not know who won what but did take a few snaps of trees I personally liked so, in no particular order, here are those snaps.
G.
Got the washing out 🙂
My other personal favourite. Creativity of the highest order!
Privet supplied by us a couple of years ago.
My own personal favourite in the show.
Jan 16, 2016 | General
If you stick at bonsai long enough and do enough work there comes a time when the doubt and uncertainty disappears. In relation to styling trees a lot of folk seem to struggle when it comes to dealing with the initial basics. A few years back I was regularly running group workshops at a local nursery. I turned up early Sunday morning and generally had ten participants, mostly absolute beginners, who turned up with garden centre material, a great deal of which had no business being bonsai. Given six hours I had my work cut out to teach everyone how to wire and get ten presentable trees out by the end of play. At first it was a struggle and I was dreading every visit. After a while I learned to trust my instincts and just went with my first impression every time. This worked out pretty well and before long the classes grew to fifteen folk 🙁
Having worked on bonsai relentlessly seven days a week, more or less, for twenty five years now I have honed that instinct and now I generally only have to glance at a tree to know how to deal with it. I always trust my first impression and go with my first idea. I have seen a lot of folk approach raw material and they instantly know what to do but then over complicate the process and start turning the tree this way and that. Before long they have lost their faith and become very confused and lost in the process. Then the cutting starts and in time there is simply not enough left of a tree to do a really good job and in most cases a promising tree becomes a semi-cascade, windswept or literati. All impressive styles if done right but not so impressive as a last resort because a tree has been reduced too much. Given a styling by committee this is the usual outcome.
Dan Robinson said it’s really important to fill your mind with images of wild, old and impressive natural trees. Then when faced with a piece of raw material at some point your mind can regurgitate an image for you that fits the bill. This all seems to happen at a sub-conscious level and some folk have become masters of exploiting the process. I find it’s a rare day I can’t walk up to a tree and some how just know what to do. In some cases a tree is just not right for the process and that’s tough. In other cases the material is so good there are a few options and experience dictates the best solution from several possibilities. On other occasions I look at a tree and see that the sum of it’s parts should make a very good bonsai but do not necessarily see the whole story. In this case I tend to put the tree away until one day I just know what to do.
This week I decided to get one of our sabina junipers worked. It’s been here a while and seeing as nobody gave it a second glance I figured a little refresh should do the trick. The tree has a lot of deadwood and some sand blasting soon sorted that out. Once clean it was easier to see what I had to work with. Designing junipers primarily revolves around getting the trunk inclination right and I thought this one was easy. However given the limitations of where the roots were and the live veins I was suddenly stopped in my tracks. What made it particularly difficult was that the top went away from me and was simply not bendable. The reverse side looked good but the roots were a foot behind the trunk and could not be seen from any angle. I turned the tree every which way for an hour before giving up. I just could not find a pleasing and practical solution. However having slept on it the next day I could see the answer as plain as day. The resulting tree is unlike anything I have done before and whilst it is currently all a bit short and thin i am content with the outcome for first work.
When working with yamadori it becomes necessary to suspend a lot of the rules we rely on for guidance. Trying to make yamadori conform will destroy a trees unique character every time. Personally I love to see these trees in their natural form but at some point we have to move forward and compromise is always the order of the day. This tree will easily re-pot at this angle with a minimum of trauma for the tree and as the foliage fills out and the two parts knit together I think it will build an impressive bonsai. Watch this space.
G.
