Sep 23, 2015 | General
I have been very good all summer. I kept my hands in my pockets and didn’t buy any new trees. We really do need to reduce our inventory to some degree and have in fact managed to relocate a lot of stock. I am pleased to say I am now in full relapse and buying again. 7am this morning we took delivery of the first shipment of yamadori, several are on the way.
Once I get this lot sorted out it’ll be hitting the web site. For now you will have to make do with these few snaps.
G.
Sep 16, 2015 | General
If you live outside the UK the following post might not be relevant to you, especially if you are lucky enough to live in a warm climate.
In my own head I am about as patriotic as it’s possible for a guy to be. Unlike certain ignorant beardy weirdy political figures I will stand up and sing our national anthem with pride. I love what my country is and what it stands for and will fight to the death those that seek to bring us down. One of the things I love about us (Brits’) is the spectacular fashion in which we embrace mediocrity. Modern Britain is no place for extreme views, plain speaking or being too good at anything. Over the past two hundred years Britain has given the world some of it’s most significant technological advances right from the steam engine to the most advanced semiconductors. We come up with incredible advances in every field and then, by and large, lose interest and go do something else. Unlike the Americans who manage to monetize everything in every conceivable way and produce unprecedented wealth as a result we daft Brits’ just give our stuff away to the world (says me sitting here writing this for free). The action avoids the awkward situation of having to ask for money which is always a little hard for us. It also avoids the problem of having too much money because that what would we do with it, we hate a show of wealth and as soon as a person or company amasses too much we turn on them in pretty short order (Tesco?). We love to back the underdog so long as he does not end up doing ‘too’ well. I noticed during my time in America they love a winner, everyone will back a success and want to be a part and share in the glory. Brits love to get close but not too close because it saves all the embarrassment of having to stand in the lime light being the focus of attention. Success is good but too much is vulgar. There is a certain comfort in mediocrity that we revel in and are proud of, we are good at being average and are proud of the fact.
Another thing about Britain that is mediocre is the weather. It’s never cold, it’s never hot, it’s often wet but not too wet (like a monsoon kind of wet). There is not usually much difference between spring summer or autumn. The winter is a little colder and very dark. Considering we are on the same longitude as Goose Bay, Canada which is a “borderline subarctic climate” experiencing close to 170″ of snow a year and an average temperature of -5 Celsius I guess our weather is pretty good. However consider this, Goose Bay gets 10% more sunshine than us which brings me to my point….
The weather is the central preoccupation of most Brits. Ask a Brit how he’s doing and the answer will be a ‘fair to middling’ kind of response. Stand next to us in a bar and pretty soon a discussion about the weather is imminent. Moaning about the weather is another way of grumbling about our lot in life. It’s rude to burden others with your problems so we deflect by pissing and moaning about the climate instead, it’s really complicated being from here.
If you grow bonsai the weather plays a vital role. If you can’t rely on the weather you never know where you are going to be at any given time. Many years we bust our humps to get trees ready for the summer growth period and put in endless hours to set up our plants for a big leap forwards and then, like this year, summer entirely passes us by. This year there was a week of real nice sunshine in June where, even here on the coast, we saw 30 degrees. The following week we had single figures. The spring was nearly two months later that the previous year and August was again back to single figure temperatures and days on end of cloud locked skies. This year I managed as much growth in the entire season as my friend in Spain achieved in 10 days. Where I can grow an average of 12″ on a tree outside he can grow 12′. The logical conclusion is to give up and go fishing but as a Brit I am a sucker for a lost cause.
Our lack of warmth, summer sunshine and light just highlights the need for exemplary horticulture. It’s a mistaken belief that plants get their energy from the soil, probably bought about by calling fertilizer “plant food” which it’s most definitely not. Plants ONLY get their energy from the sun, a lack of good light weakens a plant severely. In the UK plants compensate to some degree by making more chlorophyll thus plants appear greener than their southern cousins and probably gave rise to the collocation “England’s green & pleasant land”. We need light for plants to make energy and when it’s warm that traverses the plant structure faster and cell division happens much more rapidly. More rapid growth means bonsai trees improving in quality much faster and seeing as none of us are getting any younger that can only be a good thing.
So, we need good horticultural technique. We need a larger root mass compared to growers from sunnier climes, a bigger pot works wonders every time.
We need good soil quality designed specifically for our weather conditions and selected to suit the needs of the plant as well as the type of growth we are looking for.
We need to control the moisture content of the rhizosphere in order to maintain oxygen levels and temperature. This may mean protecting a plant from excess rain, even in summer.
We need a good steady supply of nutrients in the form of fertiliser. The daily needs of a growing plant are best served using an organic product like Green Dream Original.
And finally we need a strong source of direct sunlight and if you live where I do that’s a problem. Put simply light intensity is measured in LUX. Even on a clear sunny day here in blighty the light intensity can be half of what it might be in Spain and it’s ilk. At either end of the ‘summer’ light can be in pretty sort supply. We don’t really notice the difference but our plants do. Just a pane of clear glass can cut down light by 50%. To the human eye it looks the same but not to your green friends. Half the light means half the photosynthesis which means half the growth. So, more light is better. The problem is just how to increase the light a plant gets without bringing the national grid to it’s knees.
There is an ever increasing section of society that has this problem licked but our plants are in general not worth what theirs are and justifying electric lighting is tough for bonsai growers. However there is one element our growing compadres use that we can employ at very little cost.
This week I had to empty the poly tunnel in the process of cleaning up and moving trees into their winter quarters (a month sooner than normal). In doing so I took the opportunity to cover our benches. I have been using this silver foil insulation product now for a couple of years with excellent results. The benefits are significant. Firstly it increases light around the plants by up to 50%, I know I measured it with my light meter. Secondly it keeps the wooden benches dry thus preserving them indefinitely and finally it stops all the crap falling through and seeing as I have thousands of pots under my benches saves a very tedious clearing up job every few months. Over time the light transmission benefits do reduce but even after a year or two it’s still making a difference. It only cost about £70 to do all the benches in our 70′ tunnel so the average 8’x 10′ will only cost a few pennies. Well worth the effort and a little leg up for your bonsai that need all the help they can get.
I bought the foil product in B&Q for £8 a roll.
G.
Sep 4, 2015 | General
I write long. The trouble is an idea comes into my head and in an attempt to capture it I write it down. A new idea or notion combines with an old one and before I know it I am off on a tangent to who knows where. Being immersed in bonsai all day every day and talking to people all the time and giving advice is fertile ground for new ideas to sprout, weeds too. I have hundreds of pages of text on my old MAC now and sorting them out is a bit dull, at least to me. Earlier in the year I sat down to write an article on how to really get bonsai growing and developing. I obviously started in the wrong place but the resultant first couple of pages turned into a waffle about how to learn bonsai. Thinking about it here perhaps this SHOULD be the precursor to an article on growing plants. Sometimes we have to part company with poor ideas in order to progress. I will let you judge….
In the first paragraph I refer to an ‘old fellow’. I was heart broken this week to discover he died recently. This grumpy old man really helped me into my bonsai life and belongs to a very few other ‘old fellows’ to whom I owe a great debt. Treasure the old folk!
Back in my early days of discovering bonsai I was lucky enough to share the company of an old fellow who had been around then for as many years as I have now. We were off on one trip or other and discussing his route to enlightenment. Years before he had been lucky enough to spend a considerable amount of time with, what would now be considered, one of the Britain’s founding fathers of bonsai. After much discussion and recounting tales of daring-do my friend pointed out it was not all it could have been. In a flippant but poignant moment his mentor had let slip “ Of course I only pass on what I want you to know, and don’t expect to find out what you really need to know in my books either”.
At the time this made me very angry. After all my friend was spending large gobs of both time and money in good faith in order to further his bonsai skill and knowledge. However, having spent twenty five years in the saddle now I am a little more understanding but I still think the position the teacher took is on one hand abhorrent and on the other very sad. Bonsai is not a competitive sport, it’s a quirky pastime largely enjoyed by a few ‘special’ folk. However at the moment bonsai becomes a matter of pride and the need to ‘beat’ others takes root in our soul the writing is, by and large, on the wall. I have seen more folk lost to bonsai because of a need to be better than others than for any other reason. The problem being that no matter how good your bonsai are there is always going to be someone out there with better. This will sow a seed of dissatisfaction that will, in time, grow up to strangle our love of bonsai. Ambition and the need to compete is a strong emotion in most of us but, as with all emotions, if not held in check it can eat us alive.
People fail in bonsai for any number of reasons. Number one is because they lose trees. If you have ever spoken to the public about bonsai you will have heard “Oh! I had a bonsai once but it died”. My retort is always “It didn’t die you killed it”. Which gets a stern face in reply before I explain, as I have a thousand times…. Bonsai are just plants and have simple needs. Light, air and water provided in the right proportions under the right conditions. How hard can it be? The simple answer is NOT HARD AT ALL. However humans have an inane need to complicate everything and it is destroying us. I am old enough now to remember simpler times. I do have to wear spec’s now for reading but they are not rose tinted. It’s a fact that in the past life was much simpler and folk were much happier as a result. If you weren’t there you won’t know. In spite of our ridiculous thrust toward ever more complicated and busy lives some things do not change. People remain the same bumbling, stumbling, farting and shitting silly meat sacks we always were. Sure we can make a few cool things but underneath we remain the same with all our basic needs, worries, cares and insecurities shared by our ancestors of a thousand years ago. That’s what so many people love about bonsai, it remains the same. Sure we refine a few techniques along the way but fundamentally we remain a little child who has performed the magic of shrinking a special old and magical tree into a little pot that we can carry around and care for.
The big issue today is simply too much unqualified information. As soon as a yellow leaf appear folk hit the web and start choking down great gobs of information. In my experience the ideas we pick up in the first few months of our bonsai journey take root like Japanese knotweed which is good if those ideas are sound but if they are erroneous or ill informed most everything that comes after will be on a shaky foundation. The internet is a great resource but unlike times past anyone and everyone can get their ideas published and out there for all to see. Previously you needed to use more expensive mediums to get your voice heard and because those channels were expensive folk putting up the money made sure, in general, those doing the speaking were at least qualified to do so. As an example…. Over the years I have been fanatical about growing mediums (soil) for bonsai. There is not any product or combination of ingredients I have not tried. One thing I know as a fact, using straight Moler without any other elements for growing bonsai in the British climate will not work well. There are a large number of factors why but I will not go into them here. Some time ago I saw on a forum a post extolling the magic of Moler as a growing medium and advocating it’s use straight from the bag. The writer sited improved growth and ease of watering as his primary reason for recommending the product. There was no information about the trees involved, their history or even species. There was no information about pots, growing conditions, fertilisers, water quality or any other very significant factors. An unqualified random experience of an unknown grower without any context, presented over just one season. I can be supremely confident, assuming the fellow continued in bonsai, that the soil mix he is now using has changed. However for anyone with very little experience, reading a post like that confirms the use of the product in that way and with little experience or a wider understanding of horticulture failure is imminent. I am sure the writer had the best of intentions but I am also sure he never picked up the thread again down the road and told everyone he got it a bit wrong.
If you are sick you go to a doctor. The doctor is qualified in general practice and is educated enough to know if you have a problem. If it’s simple he will give you a script’ for something to fix you up. However if he fears there may be something more complicated you will be off to see a specialist in fairly short order. That specialist will be extensively more skilled in his area than the GP. You would be crazy to go down to the local pub to get a diagnosis. In minutes there would be dozens of nosey beggars chipping in their two pennies worth and I can guarantee by the time you left you would be dazed and confused. Starting to sound familiar? One of my significant mentors in bonsai told me you “Have to judge people by the quality of their bonsai”. It’s not what you buy it’s what you grow. Many folk have the ability to go out and buy trees way beyond their experience and skill level. In the same way we now educate people way beyond their intellectual capacity and have a lot of PHDs that are in fact Post Hole Diggers. My mentor had a classic ‘put down’ “I can’t hear what you are saying because your trees are talking too loud”. Cruel but so often true. The only way we can determine the quality of a bonsai teacher is by the quality of the trees THEY have produced. Even that is not entirely straight forward because in the early days we are easily impressed.
The heart and soul of a teacher and their entire purpose is to pass on information and skills that open doors for their students. The greatest delight for a true teacher is to see their student go on to achieve greater success than they themselves could ever hope to achieve. In my life and my bonsai journey I have been privileged to meet a few of these inspiring folk. Sadly though most of the people I have met have lacked the true heart of a teacher and many are using “teaching” as a means to make themselves look good and feel better about their lives. It’s simple to be a big fish in a small pond, every bonsai club has one. Speaking personally I never quite understood the need to have ‘students’ (the term is often used as a euphemism for allegiance) I know the human race is extremely tribal in nature and I know it feels good to ‘belong’ but, in my experience and observations of the last twenty five years in our hobby the best way to progress is to take as much information as you can from every source available. Learning is an ongoing process and like an alchemist we should take as many elements as we can and then by combining them together with skill and in the light of our own experience we can develop something that is more than the sum of it’s parts. Allying ourselves to a particular person, becoming a ‘student’, means we are destined to go only as far as our teacher but, if our chosen mentor does not have a desire to see us succeed we are more likely to always end up as much less than the sum of our parts. I highly recommend working with as many learned folk as you can, take as much as you can from everyone and then combine what you have learned with your own experience and develop your own blend of bonsai. However do be wary of nailing your colours to any particular mast to the exclusion of all others. Swearing allegiance to a flag is a very patriotic thing to do but in bonsai it’s not necessary.
I say all that to say this. Most bonsai folk fail because of a few mis-truths they got lodged in their heads long before they knew any better. When we are new to anything we soak up information like a sponge, the trouble is later on we have difficulty shedding poor quality information. Be very careful what you pick up in the early days and always try to qualify the source before you add credence to any pearls of wisdom you tuck away. Finally NEVER be reluctant to try new things, maintain an open mind. Always be prepared to jettison old ideas and never stop questioning what you know and what you do. Keep your eyes fixed on the future, accept failure as the price of an education and never stop moving forward. There will be some scary moments (like the time I spent 6 months salary on a single tree) and some sad times but just keep going. There is so much exciting and rewarding stuff to discover it won’t stop until you are dead. If you have become bored with bonsai, frustrated or disillusioned it’s because you have stopped learning. As another old fellow once said “If you try you might fail but, if you don’t try you are guaranteed to fail”.
G.
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.
