Jun 8, 2015 | General
Once you get to my age there are too many days gone by to remember even a small fraction of them. Even the years tend to get lost. However there are always going to be a few that are particularly significant. I suppose they are what we call ‘red letter days’. I don’t much like red letters….
I remember the day I got my first motorcycle, the day I left home, the day I got sacked and so on. One of the most significant days was in spring 1999 when I walked into the garden of Kevin Willson. That day changed my life beyond all recognition. Were it not for Kevin I would have dropped bonsai within a year and gone back to my motors. I have never made any secret about the fact that Kevin inspired me to press on and that experience still drives me forward every day.
When you have as many plants as we do (currently over 3000) and see as many coming and going as we do every day it’s a little difficult to get excited by the arrival of new trees. However I recently took in THE most influential trees in my entire bonsai career when Kevin asked me to babysit three of his best known bonsai. Now three more plants does not exactly make a difference to anything around here but these are the trees that inspired me way back then. Kevin has had a tough time with moving around and doing a lot of travelling recently and the trees are a little worse for wear, however there’s nothing that cannot be improved. I was all of a dither when I got the call because I love these trees with a passion. By todays standards I suppose they are not so impressive, bonsai needs to be twisted and contorted and awesome, like everything bonsai moves on. However to me they are as significant as a football fan being given the FA cup to keep on their windowsill. These trees are a superb example of skill and creativity using what is, by todays standards, very basic material. These are the trees that did it for me and they still do. I guess in time they will go back but for now I have a good reason to walk up the garden. 🙂
G.
May 29, 2015 | General
Bonsai seems to be influenced by fashion both in terms of style and regards to species that are in demand. However one thing I have noticed is that British native trees remain high on everyone’s shopping list. Our best sellers are always hawthorn, blackthorn, scots pine and English elm. Our little island is a very crowded place these days and since we are now building over our green belt land these trees will become increasingly hard to find. Twenty years ago i knew a dozen different places where I could go and find nice craggy hollow stumps, today I have just one.
A little bird whispered in my ear about these trees earlier in the year and this week I finally got time to go pick them up. I’m not really bothered about selling these, I love elms but I also have bills to pay. I think I might just hang onto the big ‘Grouper’. There were some other natives in the group but more on those later. Meanwhile if any of these take your fancy just drop me a line.
G.
£480
£425
£495
£495
£695
£695
SOLD
SOLD
May 27, 2015 | General
Just for the record olives have to be one of my favourite trees used for bonsai. That’s not because I have some soppy romantic notion of warm scented groves enjoyed on balmy evenings on holiday. I don’t get to have holidays. I like olives because they are tough and get on with the job in hand without whinging or flopping about like so many other species do.
Olives love living in England. If you live in the far extremities of the island you might like to think twice. However I am yet to find anyone (who has a modicum of skill) who has not done well with olives. The trick is to buy the right plants in the first place. You MUST have the tiny leaf wild variety. Those big leaf olea europea sold in garden centres are no good at all and generally fade away after a few years. The small leaf wild variety is as tough as a scrap yard dog.
We pretty much pioneered using olives for bonsai in the UK and have had them on the nursery for 15 years now. To read more about olives as bonsai see…
Heart of the Mediterranean the Olive Tree as Bonsai
Finding good olives is a mine field. Avoiding dodgy shysters, crappy stock, recently collected plants with no roots, the list of pitfalls is longer than you can imagine. We recently accomplished this feat and turned up a bunch of stunning little trees, all very well rooted in their pots, in good soil and ready to sell right off the bat. Prices are pretty good too for this quality.
These will be making their way onto our web site soon but in the meantime here are a few snaps. Prices range from £165 to £450 including VAT.
G.
May 20, 2015 | General
This week we had a delivery of trees which bought us a special little piece. Not so many years ago getting hold of quality Japanese bonsai was a work-a-day thing. However since the recession hit, our currency devalued and the Nazi party took over policing of plant imports, such things have largely come to an end. After all who is insane enough to bring one of these in whilst the lunatics are warming up their bandsaw? However I was lucky enough to stumble across this very unusual trident earlier in the year. It came into Europe several years ago. As with all maples it looks pretty poor with leaves on but I was particularly impressed with the branch structure on this one. Normally such trees have spindly immature structure but not this one. The trunk is quite unique too and great bark quality. It’s only really possible to get bonsai with this level of maturity from Japan, simply because it takes so long to develop and European bonsai, by and large, has not been under way for long enough. With a better pot this tree is ready for the show bench and could quickly take you to events like the Noelanders Trophy.
Price including VAT but not delivery is £2475. Not negotiable but we do take trees in PX. If you are looking to add a special maple to your collection I doubt you will find another like this one, its a nice departure from all those massive triangle trunk tridents that were so popular a few year ago.
In the meantime I will be happy having this beautiful tree on my benches, one of the perks of the job 😉
G.
May 18, 2015 | General
I get a million phone calls and emails every day from beginners who are struggling to get their arms around keeping bonsai. Just last week I heard from a guy who told me he had started his bonsai collection, he had planted 70 bonsai seeds :-0 After some discussion he told me I was wrong and that growing bonsai seed was the only way to make bonsai. Another instance involved a maple we shipped out. The recipient was not happy because it had leafed out red when it was supposed to be green. I tried to explain that green maples often leaf out red in our cold climate but was promptly shot down. Another guy bought an indoor bonsai which died within a week. Despite admitting to not watering, it was still my fault and I was called some very unsavoury things beginning with F. Another felIow called up furious because after several weeks his bonsai looked all shaggy (it actually managed to grow). I can’t even begin to recount the endless tales of woe and incomprehensible nonsense I hear every single day. The tide of bullshit is simply inexorable. I just want to go and work on my bikes, people there are so much more knowledgable.
Back in the early nineties when I started bonsai things were much simpler. I went to the library (remember those!) got every book I could find and ordered every book they had listed. I read everything, got a bunch of plants and had a go. I failed a lot and the more I failed the more I learned. My failures were not ‘somebody else’s’ fault, they were the price of an education. I tried things I should not have tried and made some visually offensive trees. I killed a lot of plants, carved some to death and generally worked my trees into oblivion. That’s how you learn. Nowadays everyone lives in abject terror of making a mistake. Someone once told me the man who never made a mistake never made anything. I think safety nets are for spineless wimps.
I am an old fart now but I keep hearing we live in the “information age”. That being the case how come bonsai folk are mired in unfathomable ignorance? Because you are on my blog in the first place and have got this far I assume you want to know what I think. Firstly we seem to have developed a real aversion to risk, modern society is all about keeping us safe right? There is only one activity I know of that is entirely devoid of risk, being dead. What I love about riding bikes is that at any moment I could find myself all dead, a little excitement in an otherwise fairly dull existence. In an attempt to avoid the risk of failure many folk turn to the the ‘web of lies‘ for advice. Here anyone and everyone who has an opinion is free to express it. However in bonsai nobody has to qualify to have a voice, that’s why someone who discovered bonsai a week ago can call me a ‘dick head’ with impunity. The net result is many beginners and a few who are not beginners are in an absolute daze over what to do about anything and everything. I am yet to see an exposition on which end of a bonsai to put in the soil but I am certain it’s on a forum somewhere!
So what can be done? Bonsai clubs? More forums? Bonsai books? Workshops? Absolutely not. Here are my recommendations based on painful experience.
1. First and foremost, unless you love plants DO NOT get involved in bonsai. Bonsai is 95% horticulture not some poncey highfalutin esoteric art.
2. Get some plants, preferably native to your area. DO NOT buy bonsai, anything alive with roots is good. Get a LOT and set about working with them. Once you have killed the majority you will be getting somewhere.
3. Go get an RHS certificate in horticulture.
4. Buy a copy of “Principles of Horticulture” published by Butterworth Heinemann. read it cover to cover at least once a year.
5. Spend a small fortune tracking down ancient trees in your country. Visit them, sit quietly with them, photograph them and develop a love for them akin to what you might have for your mother.
6. Be prepared for a long haul with painful disappointments and a few highs. Bonsai is a way of telling a story and unless you have the correct experience and attitude towards those experiences you won’t be able to recount the tale. Bonsai is not something we own just to show of to our mates, it’s something we have to live. Given time bonsai becomes as much a part of us as our hair, which i am losing.
By way of a little encouragement I thought you might like to see some of my first trees I considered worthy of a photograph……
G.
May 5, 2015 | General
I have been around this game a long time now, about half my life in fact. Who knew little trees were so engaging? One thing I know is that, much as in other areas of life, there is a lot of crap out there just sold to get your money. As a practical old fashioned bloke I do like tools but there are two things I hate. Cheap crap tools and useless tools. I own a lot of stuff but only have a small place (relative to what I own) and having stuff around that I don’t use is not an option. My wife has one of the largest collections of kitchen gadgets in Britain which for someone who does not really cook in and adventurous way is a little beyond me. Still ????
Over the years I have been in bonsai I have owned every tool there is and even a few that there aren’t. One thing I know from experience, you get what you pay for, cheap is cheap. I don’t understand the mentality of a lot of bonsai folk, everyone bragging about how cheap they got everything. I was raised in a world where life was a ‘pissing contest’. As kids we made up spectacular and implausible nonsense about what we payed for everything, thus gaining a degree of gravitas in the eyes of our compadres. But I digress, a very great deal of what is out there is not of much use. However everybody works in a different way and I have never seen two folk with the same tool kit. Therefore it is possible to justify the existence of most of what is available. What you need and what you want are rarely the same thing and in my experience a bonsai toolkit needs only about seven items to allow 98% of all work to be done in a very professional way. Having said that I have used about a thousand different tools before settling on my little kit that fits in my back pocket, providing I am not wearing my spandex 😉
Of my seven ‘go to’ tools two are wire cutters. My most expensive tool is a Masakuni wire cutter (£275.00 wholesale price). That sounds like a lot of money but I have never regretted buying it. Cutting wire is easy enough when applying it but cutting wire off a nice tree is a demanding task. The other wire cutter looks to be on it’s way out now. It’s a rare day a new tool comes along that is worthy of the name and I was certainly sceptical about this new WIRE CUTTING SHEAR. It sat on my desk for several weeks before I put it to use. I have to say I was VERY impressed.
This is a wire shear, the blades cross. Suitable for light to medium gauge wires.
Bonsai wire cutters are different from other wire cutting tools. They need to cut right to the tip and so most have short jaws to allow good leverage. However they also have to allow good access. Cutting wire off a roll requires nothing special but poking around in the canopy of a mature bonsai does. A tool needs to provide sufficient power to cut with one hand, or two fingers. It needs to cut cleanly without twisting or folding the wire. Consider also the fact that we use wire from a half millimetre right up to six millimetres. A lot to ask and the reason why you cannot buy one tool to do the job. There is a lot a good bonsai wire cutter needs to do and that’s why it is the most expensive tool in my kit.
This is a plier style wire cutter, the blades butt up to each other. Suitable for heavier gauge wire.
Wire cutters can be divided into two categories. Plier type tools have jaws that butt up or barely appear to cross and are used full in the hand. These are normally stout tools and allow the cutting of heavier gauge wires. Then there are the shear type tools where the blades cross. These tend to be made as a heavy type of scissor with finger loops and are best suited to lighter cutting. There are a few tools that combine elements of both designs but there is not a single tool to do everything.
These new shear type wire cutters bridge the gap between heavier tools and the fine long handle wire cutting scissors. I have big fingers and the little scissors are not nice to use. This new tool allows accurate removal of light to medium gauge wire, cuts very cleanly without twisting and only requires a minimum of effort to cut. The length allows unhindered access in awkward areas and the tool is very nice to use. This design does not require a SHARP edge, the cutting ability is in the geometry. So long as the pivot is oiled regularly (as with all tools) this should last a very long time and I predict will become one of you most important ‘go to’ bonsai tools.
We have limited stock at this time but more are on the wing as we speak. You should get one, you will very quickly wonder how we ever managed without them.
G.
