Jul 27, 2015 | General
I remember the first bonsai show I attended back in 1998. It was called Bonsai Gold, held at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. That experience changed my life and things have never been the same since. In my experience one of the most educational and beneficial things you can do in bonsai is get out and see good trees and meet good people. A show is the very best opportunity to do that. The Enfield Bonsai Group have been hosting this event for a while now and it’s well worth parting with the sofa to go and see!
G.
Jul 21, 2015 | General
I have a particular passion for olive trees. I have a lot and tend to buy them just because I love them so much. The trouble is I am also running a business and there are now just too many holed up here. We have a LOT of new tree stock coming in the autumn and I now need to think about making some space. Much as I hate to do it I have instigated a sale of some nice stocky olive trees. These are larger than they appear in our images and with a little work will make some excellent bonsai trees.
Savings are up to £85.00!
This is a strictly limited time offer, original prices will be restored on
August 21st.
Some of these trees are ‘at cost’ we’re not messing about we need to shift some stock!
To see our reduced price sale items simply type REDUCED into the search box at the top of our home page.
Grab a bargain before I change my mind!
G.
Jul 21, 2015 | General
I recently received an email from someone who was very concerned about the size of the leaves on his bonsai trees. The concern was that a change of fertilizer may have become an issue. In thinking about my reply it became obvious there was a little misunderstanding on the part of the gentleman but his question is not a new one, I have heard it many times before. Over the years I have heard a lot of silliness expounded as wisdom in relation to foliage size in bonsai and I figured now was as good a time as any to set the record straight. This may seem needlessly basic to some but stick with it. Here are a few basic ground rules.
- 1. Bonsai are just regular plant varieties kept small by pruning.
- 2. Bonsai must be supremely healthy in order to survive.
- 3. Bonsai are NOT kept small by living in a small pot.
- 4. Bonsai cannot be perfectly manicured and shaped all the time.
- 5. Fertiliser will not determine the growth pattern of a bonsai tree.
- 6. Foliage size is not determined by nutrient availability.
1. A lot of ignorant folk think bonsai are special types of tree. A friend of mine who sells bonsai out of his florists shop recently had an argument with a guy over a pyracantha. The ignorant fellow insisted it couldn’t be bonsai because it was a ‘motorway tree’. He was implying that as the variety is used for amenity purposes it was obviously NOT bonsai because bonsai are little trees. You really can’t blame the guy, it’s our own silly fault for shrouding our hobby in mystery and making it a lot more esoteric than it needs to be. Even seasoned hobbyists are missing some of the basics, I know I have to deal with the problem every day. Maybe there are a few folk out there who have benefited from this, in fact scrub that, A LOT OF FOLK HAVE BENEFITED FROM MAKING BONSAI A GREAT DEAL MORE COMPLICATED THAN IT IS. Couple that to the fact that almost all the books available have been published by mainstream businesses only interested in shifting books (thus all beginners books) and written by authors on a tight brief only interested in increasing their own demand as teachers and you have the perfect ‘sh** storm’ of poor information and ignorant but hungry consumers. That’s how so much nonsense has become engrained in our hobby and much like the smell of kiddy sick in your car it’s hard to shift 😉
Bonsai are just regular plants that, returned to open ground, very quickly revert to their natural form. Selecting the plants with good character is half the battle. Choosing a raffia palm as a bonsai subject is just stupid, the leaves can be eighty feet long and ten feet wide. A chinese elm is better, it has small leaves and fine twigging, it’s also naturally not a monster. Keeping a giant sequoia as bonsai is always going to be tough. It’s pretty obvious a naturally large tree in a small pot is going to present a few issues long term. Now I am the last one to say these things are not possible, I have seen some remarkable things over the years but for most folk it’s much simpler to cross the road using a pedestrian crossing rather than stretch a tight-rope across the tops of the buildings and use that. For a start let’s just concentrate on crossing the street.
2. There is a wide spread belief that bonsai are kept small by some cruel means and that they are in some way ‘stunted‘. The dictionary defines stunted as…
To prevent from growing or developing properly. Synonyms: inhibit, impede, hamper, hinder, restrict, retard, slow, curb, arrest, check, stop.
There are some pretty negative connotations there. However it does not take a genius to realise that we want bonsai to live a long time. It takes many years to develop a tree and that is accomplished by growth. Because of the time involved, bonsai are expensive and so a tree that is stunted by having it’s growth restricted or inhibited in any way will, ultimately, result is a dead tree and a complete waster of time. If a bonsai tree is unhealthy for any reason in time it will die, all life forms have a limited amount of stored energy and once that is depleted it’s all over. The NUMBER 1 rule in bonsai is tree health before ANY other consideration.
3. Bonsai pots arrest growth. It is impossible to develop anything other than secondary branch structure in a bonsai pot. Trying to develop a trunk in any way will take more than a life time in a bonsai pot. All commercially produced bonsai are made from field grown trunks. So a bonsai pot will stop much happening, however that is not how bonsai are kept small. We use those lovely small pots simply because they look good. However for the well being and ultimate health and survival of bonsai we need a strong and dynamic root system that, as it happens, needs to be small. Allow me a motoring analogy. I recently bought Catherine a little Mini Cooper S (not the classic one). That’s the smallest engine car I have had since I was in my teens. It’s little and surprisingly quick and a perfect little runabout with it’s 1.6 engine. I also bought a 1967 Ford Pickup with a loud and proud 5 litre engine. Unlike the Mini it’s useless for town work, it’s wider than all the roads around here, has no power steering (or anything else) and knocking out over 300 bhp makes it a little thirsty. However throw a ton in the back and it’ll make no difference to the truck at all. Throw a ton in the Mini and that’ll be the end of it. As they say ‘horses for courses’. Bonsai are the same. Raw material needs a big lazy root system with a lot of power and massive energy reserves. Bonsai trees in pots need a high performance root system that does everything very efficiently. Very few folk seem to know what a ‘bonsai’ root system is, what it looks like or how to develop one. So again, bonsai pots are for looking good not keeping trees small.
4. Take a look at any bonsai book or magazine and you will be presented with endless pictures of perfectly manicured bonsai trees. After all most books are sold on the pictures. Go to any bonsai show and you will see row upon row of immaculately turned out bonsai trees. For the unaware it is easy to get the idea that our trees should all look just like that, perfect and beautiful all the time. Now if you live in a place where the climate is ideal that may, to a greater or lesser degree be possible but if you live in Blighty it’s simply not. In fact it’s entirely impossible to keep all of our trees beautifully manicured at all times and certainly not desirable. In order to continually develop and maintain a bonsai tree it’s important to keep it’s energy levels high, we tend to call that vigour. Much like a bank, if you always take out what you put in you never have anything for a rainy day. As a general rule a perfectly manicured bonsai will, in the UK, not make all the energy it needs. Therefore over a period of years the tree looses vigour, development slows and keeping the tree at it’s best becomes extremely difficult. Consider a plant as a little solar generating machine. The ONLY place a plant gets energy is from the sun. A plant does not draw energy from the soil. Leaves are little solar panels and if we do not have sufficient the tree will slow down. This may be imperceptible for years but one day you will see the result. A lost branch, twig die back, poor roots, poor disease resistance, yellowing foliage, the results are varied but inevitable. If you live where the sun is bright and the growing days are long this is less likely but here it happens a lot. The only answer is to allow your tree to grow unchecked for a period of time each year, sometimes for a year or two in succession. More leaves mean more energy and more energy means more buds and more leaves and more energy. Large leaves also produce a lot more energy than small ones.
5. Fertiliser does not have the ability to determine the growth pattern of a tree. A tree takes water and chemicals from the soil and uses them to build tissue and support biological processes. The energy required for this comes from the sun via photosynthesis in the leaves. A plant uses these raw materials to build and maintain cells. If the plant has ideal nutrient supply it will be in perfect equilibrium and the growth pattern will be ideal for what the plant
needs and only limited by it’s root mass and external factors such as light availability. If our plant is in this ideal situation adding more fertiliser will do nothing. You can ask you barman to put a quart in a pint pot but all you will get is a pint, the rest will be in the sink. Applying excess amounts of ANY nutrient element will not have any effect, at least not until the concentration becomes critical at which point things can go bad. Now if the tree has a nutrient deficiency adding that element will have a noticeable effect but only to the point of reaching the trees requirements. It’s also ridiculous to assume we can add a product to force the tree to do something like produce flowers. Now if a lack of flower production is caused by a nutrient deficiency then it can happen but if the tree is not producing the right hormones (auxins) to instigate flower and fruit you can pour stuff on it all day long and nothing will change. In order to encourage flowering a change of care regimen is often required as in the case of
hawthorns that refuse to flower.
6. If a tree has large leaves it is not because you have over fertilised, it is because the tree NEEDS big leaves and you have provided the ideal conditions for the tree to do what it needs. Mess with this at your peril. If a tree of a given size needs ten square inches of leaf to make it’s energy and it only has one bud you are going to get a big leaf. However if the tree has ten buds you will get 10x much smaller leaves and that’s the entire crux of developing all bonsai with leaves and needles.
There are two ways to get what we need in bonsai, we can force the tree to ‘have’ to do something or we can encourage it to ‘want’ to. Much like teenagers the latter is the better option. You can get small leaves or needles by withholding water and, or nutrients but this causes stress and leaves us on the negative side of the vigour equation. That’s VERY poor technique and I will NEVER recommend such procedures.
Let me quote an example. About eight years ago I bought a massive and stunning yamadori scots pine. The needles were less than an inch long but the foliage was on straggly thin and floppy twigs like string that on average were a couple of feet from where I needed them. I started to improve the vigour of the plant with careful cultivation. The following year the needles doubled in length and a few back buds appeared in late summer. By the end of the following year the needles were four inches long and I had more buds than I would ever need. Gradually over time I was able to shorten the branches as new growth worked it’s way up the branches, always being careful not to tip the balance by removing too much. Today I have twice the foliage mass I need to style the tree, all the foliage is piled up directly on top of the tree, I have back buds on 1/2″ thick branches and the needles are less than an inch long even though I feed the tree extremely well. At no point did anything happen to stress the tree or reduce it’s energy generating abilities.
THAT is how we get the foliage and development we want whilst giving the tree what it needs. THAT is what bonsai IS. It’s got nothing to do with any high faluting notions of art or oriental culture. The art is in managing the life processes of the tree in order to help it thrive and mature and that is where the beauty comes from. We are not trying to grow something that looks like a little tree we ARE growing a little tree and the only way to do that is to cultivate the plant in exactly the way a tree grows in nature. Once we get our arms around the process all the pushing and pulling stops and we are able to simply allow the plant to become bonsai, an old mature tree in miniature. And what a journey that is!
G.
Jul 15, 2015 | General
It’s been said many times that I have the best job in the world but I am a ‘glass half empty’ kind of bloke and find it hard to get too excited about what I do. I typically spend 7 hours a day in front to a screen, a business this size requires a lot of admin’ and I despise every minute of it. I spend about 2 hours a week doing bonsai. Back when I worked for a wage I got to spend a minimum of 6 hours a day, seven days a week working on bonsai. The demands on my time have become critical of late. To parody an old Fast Show sketch, this week I har’ mostly been answering stupid questions.
I have been teaching bonsai professionally for close on fifteen years now. In that time I have been privileged to travel to a lot of cool places and meet a lot of motivated people who love their bonsai and do whatever it takes to help them thrive. It has been a double edged sword. On one hand it is my greatest joy in life to open the door for someone who genuinely learns and goes forward with the kernel of an idea and combines it with their experience to do greater things than I have managed. On the other hand I tend towards self harm trying to battle the overwhelming tsunami of ignorance that assaults my inbox and telephone every day.
I am no technophobe or luddite (maybe just a little). Technology is a tool like any other, it helps us do a job like me running my business. However what I do absolutely hate is the pointless integration of technology into our lives in order to take up our time doing things that do not need to be done. I get a lot of very angry folk chewing my ass because I don’t use Facebook. I have had an outpouring of hatred thrown at me because I do not use Twitter. It honestly beggars belief how ugly people can be. I am not as thick skinned as I would like and these things hurt. All I wanted to do was have a few nice bonsai sitting around my pond.
I have a perennial problem: as a business owner I need to have my business in the public eye but on a personal level I am a socially inept clodhopper, my greatest joy is to be on my own. I get calls from prior to 8am to gone 10pm and Yanks calling me up at 2 or 3am asking for my advice. We have no social or personal life as a result of this continual intrusion. When I stop answering the telephone the outpouring of vitriol on the answer machine is very upsetting, working from home sucks ass!
ANYHOW! Having got that of my chest here is the point of this diatribe. For the last month I have been inundated with emails and phone calls from breathless people panicking about their bonsai dying fast and ugly. Now, first off, in 25 years of mucking about with bonsai i have NEVER seen a tree die quickly without help. Everything a plant does happens slowly and not without warning. Because folk spend too much time reading unqualified opinion on the web of lies most have absolutely no ability to read their plants. All plants are extremely expressive but I have only ever met a few individuals that are capable of speaking ‘plant’. Way back in the early days I would just sit in my workshop for hours doing nothing other than being with my trees. I would get up in the night and go sit outside with my plants, smell the air and feel the wet grass under my bare feet. Over years I learned a massive amount about plants simply by experiencing what they experience. There is more to be learned about soil by feel and smell that your eyes will ever give you. Everything we need to know about bonsai is written in the world around us, they are just plants. There is no artistic or cultural element of bonsai that cannot be learned from observation and experience of the world around us. The trouble is there is too much noise in the world today and the really important elements of life are simply overwhelmed and drowned out by the cacophony of white noise.
My point is that if you turn off the noise and learn to love and experience your trees you will not have the stupid questions or need to seek the obvious answers I am being badgered for every day. By listening to the nonsense and bullshit, folk spend all day reading and understand less than when they started. Everyone ends up so bewildered they come to entirely ridiculous conclusions on what needs to be done to their poor suffering little trees. I have been swamped with requests for soil this summer and with questions about re-potting bonsai. Now for some evergreens summer is the prefered re-potting season but for broad leaf trees it’s almost certain death.
Everything we do in bonsai is done for a reason but before applying any technique it is important to decide exactly what it is we want to achieve in the best interests of our tree. I have lost count of the number of people stating their tree ‘NEEDS‘ to be re-potted because the soil is not draining. NOT ALL BONSAI NEED FREE DRAINING SOIL. In fact free draining soil can be very counter productive. Encouraging rapid growth in raw material requires open soil and a lot of it but getting the ultimate level of refinement on old bonsai means learning a higher level of care and skill with dense root systems and NOT re-potting very often. A few years ago I sold the most beautiful Japanese maple to a guy I know that has close to 40 years growing bonsai. This was a very old bonsai from Japan cultivated for decades in a tiny pot. The tree had THE MOST stunning ramification which all naturally turned up to the light. A tree in the quite of life just happy leafing out every spring and being beautiful. The first thing the new owner did was decide it needed re-potting and ripped off 10 years of impossibly important root development and put the tree in a larger pot with free draining soil. In the last few years that beautiful old work of art has been converted into raw material. All the breathtaking old ramification has gone. The tiny internodes and lace work of twigs have been replaced by 2 and three inch internodes, leaves the size of beer mats and the tree is ugly with no hint of it’s former magic. The term ‘Bull in a china shop’ is very appropriate. Everyone who buys a tree just ‘has’ to change the soil and piss about all the time. When you get a new tree have a little respect for those that came before you, keep it a year or two and just watch what happens, learn about the tree rather than just storming in.
Most of the tale of woe I have heard these last few weeks have been the result of chronically over wet soil. So everyones IMMEDIATE reaction is
“I HAVE GOT TO REPOT, TODAY!”.
I am very well aware of the problems of poor soil, we move close to three thousand bonsai a year now, it’s nothing new to me but here is a news flash….
If you tree’s soil is too wet don’t water so often.
Why do we assume that if the soil is wet we have to change it. Just put in a bit less water or leave longer between watering, it’s not rocket science folk!
There is a point at which we need to re-pot, obviously, but not at the wrong time when it will endanger the plant. A little common sense (not so common) goes a long way here. It is perfectly possible and sometimes even desirable to leave a tree in very poor soil, for instance if the tree is weak, for a long time in order for it to gain strength before re-potting. However we have to manage that soil in order that its poor condition is not of detriment to the plant. One way in which this is done is frequency of watering.
In all my years of being around bonsai i have only ever met two folk who know how to water properly, I won’t tell you who they are and the detail is for another day. Suffice to say if you do not water properly you will NEVER, in a million years, be successful at cultivating bonsai trees. SO, here is the secret, the golden rule and the single most important element in bonsai success….
Bonsai trees need to be allowed to dry out JUST a smidge between waterings. Understanding how to do this is the work of a life time but here is a little cheat that will solve ALL your watering issues. Grow a little weed in your bonsai’s pot. When the weed wilts it’s time to water. If you have conifers like pine or evergreens like olive water 12 hours after the weed wilts. Once you master this it will not be necessary to re-pot, often for years on end but your bonsai will just get better and better. Re-potting is only required when the plant has filled the pot with root and the situation becomes critical. The degradation of the soil medium is NEVER a reason to repot bonsai!
G.
The most important tool in bonsai cultivation!
Jun 24, 2015 | General
Thought you might like to see the progression of this oak tree.
Collected 3 years ago and arrived here in March (first photo). Did the first styling at a recent demo’. This variety (quercus faginea) develops quickly and grows fast. It’s early days for this tree as bonsai but not a bad start I think.
G.
Jun 15, 2015 | General
Persuading me to leave home isn’t easy these days. I like it here and have everything I need. Just the thought of getting on a congested motorway brings me out all maudlin. However a couple of folk have been quite persuasive and there are a couple of trips coming up.
I will be at The Bonsai Group Enfield Tuesday 23 June. I will be discussing and demonstrating the process of styling a tree in relation to exactly how we decide what to do and what to put where.
Just a week later, 1 July, I will be at Bedfordshire Bonsai Society looking at the process of developing deciduous trees. This will be an interesting evening and will challenge a lot of what we think we know about the subject.
18 July I will be at the Ipswich Bonsai Club annual show at Bypass Nurseries during the morning. I went to this event last year and it was a very nice set up with some good bonsai on display. I will judging during the morning.
Please support these events if you can, folk put a lot of effort in to make them happen.
G.
P.S A couple of cool pic’s worth sharing.
