Aug 18, 2021 | General
This week I had several tons of Bonsai pots delivered. The experience got me thinking about where we find ourselves and what to expect going forwards. If strong language offends PLEASE do not read further. If you are a bone-idle tired hands please do NOT read further.
First pallets of bonsai pots hot off the boat.
At some level the past few months have been tough for most everybody. The last thing you need is for me to start griping about how tough my life is. For sure some folk around the world are in a struggle for their very existence, by comparison our ‘first world’ problems are petty and inconsequential. However, for any number of reasons, there are some storm clouds on our horizon that are beginning to rain toast crumbs into the comfy bed of our lives. The world is awash with hyperbole about ‘the new normal‘ and using our current straightened circumstances as a springboard towards a ‘new’ start.
I have some very strongly held opinions on what’s going on but to be honest nobody gives a shit so I will keep that to myself. Suffice to say much of what is wrong today is the idea that we need to change everyone else in order to make a better world. Protesting is rife and anger is on the streets. In my opinion and experience there is only one person we have a legitimate right to force change upon and that’s ourselves. There is no way to change the world by telling everyone else they are wrong, trying to do that just makes matters worse. All we can really do is stay home and work on being the best person we can and doing the very best we can in relation to our own work and contribution to the rest of humanity.
I have written many times here about folk NOT doing their jobs. A lack of care and consideration and blaming everyone else is bringing our country to it’s knees. Here’s a recent example….. I had five tons of Pumice arrive from Italy. It was dropped off at Dartford and was due for delivery a couple of days later. I got a call and headed for the warehouse. We don’t have a fork truck so rely on tail lift drops which was made plain when booking the transport. So this guy arrives with five big pallets over 6′ tall and a thousand kilos each. A hundred and twenty mile run one way just for this drop. Upon arrival he refused to offload because his lift was only rated for 500Kg. We offered to jump up and reduce the pallets in size but apparently letting us on his truck was more that his job was worth. So getting arsey with us I told him to GFYS and left. The pallets then went all the way back to Dartford before the following day coming all the way back to my freight agent 25 miles away and he dropped them off as we had requested the following day without incident.
That’s a lot of pointless waste considering we have done this job multiple times with the same operators. That’s at least 240 wasted miles at an average of 8 miles per gallon, 30 gallons (136L) of juice up in smoke and about £200 plus 2 working days. When someone fails to do their job properly the repercussions are far reaching and the most insignificant detail can cause total chaos and cost a lot of money and resource. There are people everywhere that do the bare minimum in their work, just enough to get paid and not get sacked. Whatever happened to pride in a job well done?
I have based my entire business philosophy upon doing the best we can. That’s not to say we are the best and I would be loathe to make that assertion over something that’s a matter of opinion. However we do the best we possibly can all things considered. If that involves going the extra mile, getting up early, staying late, working weekends or missing meals we are all happy to do just that in the pursuit of customer satisfaction. For me it’s all about the pride in a job well done and delivering my very best. Some folk will never be satisfied but they get short shrift from me. Nobody is perfect but that’s no excuse for not bothering.
That philosophy has also driven my bonsai since day one. I do bonsai for myself and I simply do not care what anyone else has to say. My bonsai, my work and my appreciation of the result. I know if I have done my best and expended appropriate effort and that’s ALL that matters to me. I can’t help thinking the world would be a better place if we could all muster the energy to do our best. As Vince Lombardi said… “I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfilment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”
So, back to those toast crumbs. I have been warning for a long time a change was coming. There is too much demand in the world and not enough supply, of anything. In a bonsai context bear in mind most of what we use comes from small specialist cottage industries. There is no ‘economy of scale‘ enjoyed by more mainstream pursuits. Akadama is pulled out of the ground by a few guys, a loader and some open ended poly tunnels. Tools are made by a dozen guys in a unit with some archaic machines. Nothing is mass produced and it’s only thanks to the passion of a lot of dedicated folk that we have anything to use at all. Trust me nobody in bonsai is getting rich.
Covid has turned the world on it’s head. It’s been the catalyst for a lot of change. Ever since the early eighties, we Brit’s have been enjoying increasing prosperity. A lot of that has come from falling prices relative to earnings. In the late 1970s, one pound in every four spent, and nearly one pound in every three for pensioners, went on food. That is now down to less than 13% for those of working age and 18% for pensioners. In 1977 56% of households had one or more cars by 2010 that was 75%. Basically we got wealthier to some considerable extent thanks to the relative decrease in the cost of manufactured and farmed goods. Thanks to efficiency and mechanisation and the ability to cheaply transport goods from low wage parts of the world we all get more for less.
If you earn £20,000 a year in Britain today you are in the top 5% of the worlds most wealthy people. However it does not feel that way thanks to the cost of living. A person earning less than a quarter of that in another less developed part of the world could easily live a millionaire lifestyle. Still, for most of my life we have been enjoying ever-cheaper consumer goods when compared to our forbears.
As an example when I started out in bonsai at the turn of the 1990s a bonsai branch cutter cost £30. For me at the time that was about 13% of my weekly wage. Today 30 years later that branch cutter costs £33.50 which is actually £32.80 adjusted for increased VAT. I earn more than I did back then, I’m old, so let’s take my son-in-law Richard’s earnings as an example as he’s not far off the age I was then. Our branch cutter will cost him 9.4% of his weekly take home pay. For the same percentage as I was paying Richard could get the same branch cutter and a pair of very good scissors which, from a certain perspective could be viewed as free. We like to bitch and moan but I recon we are, by and large, doing okay.
The media have been slow in pointing out the problems our reactions to Covid have caused in global shipping though as the effects feed through it is making secondary headlines. Most of us know there are a lot of shipping containers in the wrong place. According to my freight agent our government has 15’000 containers of (rapidly going out of date) PPE sitting in a field in Essex. That’s a lot of landfill and a lot of tied up boxes the world needs.
This is happening everywhere so a lot of the initial problem was simply a shortage of boxes. However underlying that was a shortage of container ships. Bear in mind that 90% of the worlds non-bulk cargo is carried by these behemoths of the sea. Because shipping rates have been so low for years now I guess buying container ships has been less than attractive considering the hundreds of millions involved and many industry experts agree that a lot more capacity is required. They also agree that current record prices will continue in the medium term.
These things don’t come cheap. Our pots are on there somewhere.
So what does this largely esoteric information tell us? Bonsai is overwhelmingly dependant upon import and rising costs there mean rising costs for our stuff. Because of employment conditions and business costs imposed upon us here it’s largely not possible to manufacture goods at a reasonable, let alone competitive cost. I recently negotiated with a UK manufacturer to have Copper bonsai wire drawn and processed. The cost was 2.5 times more than I can source it offshore. The minimum order was massive, I had to stump up five figures with the order and the lead time was in excess of three months. These guys call themselves wire manufacturers, seriously?
I really want to support the old country. I am constantly trying to find folk to make stuff for us. However I bought my copper in China. No up front money and it was on the port within two weeks, even adding all the rip off port and customs fees and charges it ended up costing me well under half the UK manufacturing cost. We currently charge £12.95 a 1/2 Kg. For a UK sourced product that would rise to about £25-28. How patriotic are you now? I’m not, sorry.
Just yesterday I was notified a shipment price had risen by 500% since October last year when we previously ordered. This week we had tons of pots arrive from China for which I was quoted £1200 door to door. When the shipping invoice arrived there was an additional fee of £2600 levied by the boat owners on top of that. As it stands these record high prices mean record retail prices because little guys like us have no choice but to pass on the cost to our beloved customers and that really SUCKS. Anyone seen the price of Akadama recently? Even at that price I guess we should be grateful that at least we can still get it because that simply is not going to be the case with a lot of things. Going forward stuff will cost more so lets just value what we have and take care of it just that little bit better.
Safely stashed away. Just glad we have something available for ya’ll.
So, my shipment of pots cost exactly double the FOB price thanks to all of the above. What adds insult to injury is the fact we get such high losses simply because some tosser could not be bothered to pack stuff properly despite the fact we paid a high fee for them to do so. That’s just how it goes and I have to suck it up. However in light of my frustration at everything that is conspiring to thwart our efforts I have to highly recommend the cathartic activity of destroying (previously broken) bonsai pots. Once I got past the disappointment busting this lot up was an absolute joy.
To all those folk that spend their lives doing the bare minimum to keep their jobs FUCK YOU!
So next time you are minded to question the price of something try to consider what might be happening behind the scenes and give a fellow a break. In the words of my hero Forrest Gump “That’s about all I got to say ’bout that.”
G.
Jun 16, 2021 | General
I sat down to write a diatribe expounding the virtues of defoliation. As usual I got off the subject and never got back. However what follows has proven to very cathartic. Please forgive the self indulgence but rather than consign this to the folder of a thousand unpublished articles on my Mac I am hoping it will help someone who just might be losing their way as I have of late.
What’s more stressful, having too much to do or not having enough? I always thought I was stressed out by being so busy, particularly over the last few years. Now, and I am thankful for this, I don’t really have enough to fill my days in the way I have for years past.
Everyone at KB is really busy and earning their keep but old Pott’s here is at a loose end. It’s not that I don’t have anything to do but, because I don’t have folk shouting down the phone or strafing me with caustic emails and because our Richard is doing such a sterling job getting orders out the door a lot of the day to day pressure is off me and to be honest I really can’t be arsed to do much since that pressure has lifted.
A creative person can never be bored and a working class lad like me cannot afford to loaf about too much but I guess any of us can fall foul of disinclination. I have never really had a lack of enthusiasm before. At least not since I was a teenager and my mum was trying to get me out of my nest in the morning to, as she though, go to school.
Kaizen Bonsai have been among the winners of the pandemic that has caused hardship to so many. YOUR support has been utterly amazing, thank you! Hopefully we have in return provided what ya’ll needed in a stress free and timely manner. It does appear however that our difficulties are beginning to increase thanks to, literally inconceivable, government interference and the utter chaos in international shipping, manufacturing and a whole host of situations that could close us down in pretty short order at any moment but, for now all is good and I suppose I have to be positive with regards to the future.
I am a resilient fellow, we’ll all be fine. If you follow my posts here you will be familiar with some of the more amusing hurdles I have cleared in the past. It’ll take more than a bunch of feckless public schoolboys and workshy upper class twits to trip us up. Having been so busy these last few years I have, sadly, been somewhat removed from what bought me here in the first place, BONSAI.
Over the last few weeks, since I have had time on my hands I have been spending more time in the garden with what is left of my nursery. I currently have over 800 fewer trees than at this time last year which is distinctly un-nerving. However all the BEST stuff is still here so don’t feel too sorry for me. It’s been very odd having time to even think about bonsai again. Nothing really went away but I am definitely re-connecting at some level. Having been distracted for so long my return has been accompanied by a new insight I never had before. A whole new understanding of the interaction of time and technique make me feel like I just took off sunglasses on a dark day.
For many years now I have, of necessity, bought and sold vast numbers of plants. Probably in excess of twenty thousand in the last twelve to fourteen years. I have sold the best trees I ever owned over and over again. Not much has stayed with me for the long term. In fact I only have one tree that goes back to my first or second year in bonsai. I spent well over 20 years perfecting that tree from the nebari up. I then sold it in a moment of hardship. The new owner totally trashed it in three years and so now it’s back and I hope to be able to restore it before I die. Otherwise everything is pretty recent.
I have spent more than twenty years teaching bonsai by dint of workshops. Many of those folk involved have become good friends. After a few years I began to realise those guys trees were looking good, often very good. At the same time mine kept leaving, all my hard work and vision was constantly going out the gate and I was left having to start over.
Fulfilment is defined as “satisfaction or happiness as a result of fully developing one’s potential”. With an active imagination I can see well into the future. It makes no difference to me wether it’s bonsai material, a rusty old car, a derelict garden or a battered and abused motorbike. I can see clearly what it can be and having done enough projects in my life I know I can get there sooner or later if I apply myself.
I don’t suffer from envy, especially where bonsai is concerned. I have no interest in owning the ‘best’ bonsai. I also know there is not a finish line to cross, Dave Prescott taught me decades ago ‘it’s all about the work’. Bonsai is not a competition.
For me bonsai is about the fulfilment of something I see in my imagination. What I see becomes the inciting incident that puts the whole creative process in motion. After thirty years my expectations are high, I know what quality is. I am not prepared to settle for ‘smoke and mirrors’. I am past the intoxication of ‘wire wonders’. To achieve the sort of quality bonsai I expect of myself I anticipate a journey of ten years plus. Then, after that ten years has passed I will have a much deeper appreciation of quality and so the path will stretch out before me ad infinitum.
There’s a motorcycle t-shirt out there that states “It’s not what you buy, it’s what you build”. My fulfilment, and therefore motivation, comes from the challenge of how to create what I see in my head. Building something from nothing has been my motivation since I was a kid. The more unlikely my chances of success the greater my resolve to be successful. I have NEVER got any joy from just buying and owning something.
As an example, back in the eighties I bought a brand new motorcycle for August 1st registration day. I was proud as punch, a seventeen year old with a brand spanking new shiny big bike! By the end of the first week the shine had worn off and by the following August 1st I had traded that in for ANOTHER new bike TWICE. Three new bikes in one year.
After that I discovered something about myself. I find NO satisfaction in just buying something no matter how good. I sold my last brand new bike and bought a POS (piece of shit) Honda. A ragged to death old dirt bike held together by willpower and electrical tape and through hard work, imagination and bloody knuckles (I was skint by then) I turned it into something very special and I loved it for several years.
In the late 80s I bought a stunning sports car. This one had no floors. A foot of grass growing out of the seats and big holes at literally every single corner. To a man EVERY single person laughed in my face. The guys at work saw a picture and the derision was excoriating. My mum held her head in her hands and my dad was left speechless. What made it worse? It was a Datsun (240z). It ended up as a 250bhp 150mph V8 engined monster (this was around 1991) that won every competition I entered it into and featured in loads of national magazines. It’s still on the road today and looks just as beautiful as it did thirty years ago.
In writing the above it has become plain to me that for the last several years pretty much all of the bonsai I have been doing here has been commercial. In order to make a living and pay the bills I have been adding value wherever I can. Once any piece of raw material has it’s bones put in place and superfluous parts removed and a little carving complete it goes up in value. Again once that plant goes into something with the proportions of a bonsai pot the price goes up. It works too. Without exception every tree I work sells, often within minutes of going online. Looking back many were too cheap but who values their own work?
The trouble with the above is that I really never get much of a challenge, neither do I get any fulfilment. Nothing ever gets to develop, it just sells leaving me with a full pocket and an empty heart. It’s a bit like a world class snooker player spending his time in a local club playing the yokels. Sure it’ll pay but our man is going to lose his soul without the challenge of other players of his standard and above to apply healthy pressure. I am sure there are folk out there that can spend all day alone on the baize sinking 147 breaks. That’s never easy at any level but where is the challenge? Where is the soul, the passion, the reward and the fulfilment. A Michelin starred chef flipping burgers at McDonalds would be able to pay his bills but what a tragic thought.
As I already said, bonsai is not a competition. Anyone in this for public acceptance, to impress their peers, to win the ‘trophy’ or be the best just might ultimately become disillusioned, disappointed and not a little sad. I firmly believe the ONLY challenge in bonsai worth pursuing, once you know how it’s done, is to become the best that YOU can be. I am the only one that can tell if I have done my best work. What anyone else thinks is immaterial. I have to be honest, and a little critical with myself but hopefully come the day I will know.
You can pretty much go all the way these days by being a bit above average, there is absolutely no need to ‘be the best’ in order to get along in the world. It’s not hard to impress 98% of people and it’s only necessary to be better than most which is a long way from being the best. My old mate Blacky always said “ Bullshit baffles brains”. I have seen so many dog and pony shows over the decades it physically hurts. That’s why I don’t get involved any more, I consider a lot of what goes on to be fundamentally dishonest, well meaning perhaps but dishonest and at some level, misleading. Jesus said “If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” As far as bonsai goes I have, and do, see a lot of that.
I was watching some coverage of the snooker world championship recently. I believe it was Stephen Hendry discussing how few young folk of weight are coming into the game and what a threat that poses to the future. The reason? “Snooker is really hard”. He went on to explain just how hard and the commitment necessary to become THAT good. Along the way he said something to the effect that it takes two years just to know which end of the cue to use. I maintain many folk who have been doing bonsai for a couple of years still don’t know which end of a tree goes in the soil.
In bonsai many people refer to those of us who can put a green triangle on a bent stick as ‘gifted’. The definition of the word is …
– a thing given willingly to someone without payment; a present.
The reason we like the idea of someone especially or extraordinarily talented, being gifted, is it creates a great excuse for our own callow efforts. It implies that one can never be as accomplished as an ‘expert’ because we were never given the GIFT. However for those of us that get referred to as gifted (yes it does happen, even to me) it’s a bit of a slap in the face and could be taken as a suggestion we didn’t work for our skill.
Of course there has to be a multitude of elements that need to come together in order for anyone to become successful. For example Bill Gates would not have been successful in the way he did had he been born five years earlier, or later or not had the family and geographical benefits he did. As an example of good fortune J.D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, William Vanderbilt, Andrew W. Mellon, Henry Ford, Cornelius Vanderbilt and others were all born within the same nine year period. In fact of the worlds 75 richest people of ALL time fourteen (19%) were born in America between 1831 and 1840. That meant they were the right age to benefit from the greatest transformation of human life in our entire history. Those born in 1840 missed the boat. We all need a bit of luck or good fortune if you will.
To do well we need opportunity, we can’t become a great snooker player without having access to a table. Bill Gates could never do his thing had he not been able to access the computer equipment he did, back when machines were the size of buildings and it cost an absolute fortune just to buy time on one. A bonsai guy can never become proficient without access to plants. However consider two of the most successful bonsai artists of recent times. One had access to his fathers commercial nursery and had soil in his veins from birth. Another lives in the foothills of the greatest collecting site on earth. That does not guarantee success but it’s an advantage very few of us enjoy. The opportunity has to be exploited and that takes effort and skill. The circumstance is a gift, a chance, a leg up or lucky if you will but, opportunity only ever turns up wearing overalls. Success requires work, It requires work EVERY single time without fail but it’s a little easier if you have luck on your side to provide a boost.
Many times I have mentioned the 10,000 hour rule expounded by Malcolm Gladwell in his fantastic book Outliers. Basically nobody will ever become exceptional at anything before they have spent that amount of time developing and honing their skill. Sportsmen, musicians, programmers, engineers in fact every field of human endeavour features bold examples of this rule. That’s a lot of hours and typically means ten years of concerted hard work. Sadly not everyone enjoys the situation to make that possible. Anyone that becomes exceptional at anything will have circumstance that allows them to spend the time. On the other hand those folk also tend to show outstanding commitment to their task, often at the expense of all else.
My advice to beginners, in an ideal world, would be not to expect ANYTHING worthwhile to happen before your tenth anniversary. By then you WILL know which end goes in the soil. From that point on it’s possible to begin doing bonsai…..proper bonsai. There are NO short cuts and for those folk that have reached the status of the ‘gifted’ there is no hiding or pulling the wool over our eyes 😉 However, I do realise that’s going to be a hard sell to anyone flirting with the notion of getting involved with little trees. Sure a good level of knowledge can be reached in a few seasons of experience but that’s not what we are considering here.
Ten years is a long time, 10,000 hours represents a monumental effort but once complete it’s such an amazing position to be in, an incredible jumping off point. I am now beginning to get to grips with developing bonsai trees and now I get to keep what I work on I genuinely feel excited about the future and just how much further this can go. It’s the work that teaches us, we learn by doing, by repetition, over and over and over for a lifetime. In the end it’s the trees that teach us and mould us and allow us to become the artisan of our dreams. My hard work and commitment expended over the last thirty years is hopefully on the verge of coming to fruition. Maybe, just maybe I have finally earned that mythical gift. Only time and the trees will tell.
Here is the defoliation I was going to discuss in process. More on that later….
G.
P.S Thanks for reading, this has helped me out a great deal!
I Got Off The Subject, this what the subject for today.
Apr 17, 2021 | General
This week has been a good one. Having completed more than THREE THOUSAND orders and about TEN THOUSAND parcels since January this year we finally got it all under control and I came up for air, f***ing cold air mind but that’s another subject.
So, I finally decided that we are no longer importing plants thanks to the governments ludicrous requirements. I just will NOT bend the knee and submit to their ridiculous Gestapo paranoid bullshit. In the future, should they see sense I promise to go and spend a quarter of a million pounds and ya’ll can fill your boots. Otherwise I accept the death of my thirty year dream and I will be buying old bikes whilst I still can before they F’ that up too and I have to leave altogether.
That was Monday, not a great start. Tuesday I started work on buying for Christmas 2021 and that is the earliest mention of the C word you are likely to get. With the world of international shipping in utter chaos and having lost tens of thousands last Christmas thanks to the governments mis-handling of ports and incoming containers this year i’m taking no chances. Some goods are already on the water.
Wednesday I bought about a million carving tools, some old and some new before embarking on something new for us. The herculean task of buying a container of rather special quality pots. I already have RSI calculator finger and fear I will need new glasses before I get done poring over catalogues. In everything we do now there is no choice but to cut out all the middle men and go to the source otherwise we just cannot survive. Another UK government issue I would rather not recount because I will end up resorting to the bottle and it’s sun up on Saturday morning so way too early for getting shit-faced.
Thursday was a big day. I got to bunk off and go see my mentor and bonsai inspiration. Mr Willson has had a bunch of our trees for a while now and having finished the lot I was excited to go pick them up. A very wonderful day and evening was had and I came home late and smiling.
Friday was bonkers with two of my besties visiting to do some work. It’s been the better part of two years since I did a workshop but with these two fellas It’s always a joy. We did a bunch of re-pots and made a big old kurama pot for a very special tree Kevin has completed for my buddy. Something I have never done before but we were all pretty impressed with the group effort so far. More later.
Saturday looks like being a good one too.
So here’s the all important piccies’.
Graham.
Sabina juniper Bonsai belonging to my buddy post Kevin Willson.
A spruce that has a checkered history finally back to health and good shape. Possibly available for sale down the road.
I tried to sell this at a couple hundred quid for ages but no takers. Now ex Kevin it’s sold in 12 hours for a much more respectable sum.
Another non seller at under £200. Taxus by the yew-master. Sorry now not available.
Collected by me in 2001 and belonging to one of the guys. From a bare stump Kevin did justice to all our patient work as always.
Previously styled by Kevin a stunning scotty in for a pot.
Yamadori oak in for it’s first pot. A serious challenge with it’s awful big roots.
This one was a doddle.
This one not so much but it will live and we will improve it.
My work for Saturday.
Mar 24, 2021 | General
The irony of my life just now is the fact that my bonsai business prevents me from actually doing bonsai. The less bonsai I do the more ya’ll can do because you have the stuff you need. That is unless you buy it of somebody else in which case stop reading at once!
Bonsai as a hobby is in for a major shaking very soon as global forces and political bullshit conspire to drown us in their effluent. I doubt anyone really understands the extent to which we are dependant upon imports. Virtually NOTHING we use is made here in Blighty, even the bark we use in our soil mixes comes from abroad now.
A little point that has not been reported on by the media is the fact that a container, shipped from China to the UK has gone up from about £1600 last summer to about £6000 today, some have been quoted up to £10,000. Also on the spot market yesterday shippers were charging £1000 extra to drop a container in Felixstowe as opposed to Rotterdam, just the other side of the channel. Somebody needs to ask Boris what the hell he thinks he is doing.
That is just one of a dozen simply incredible circumstances that is about to change life in the UK forever. Take Akadama, there is simply not enough to satisfy the world and lead times can be literally months on end, the price is rising and the shipping has increased by up to 500%. For the first time in history our price is over £20 and when new stocks arrive it could reach £30 or more.
Here’s another example. One of our European tree suppliers was charging us under £200 for a massive pallet up to 8 feet high. Pointless customs documentation and delays has now added exactly £250 to that price and by the time I get it cleared through an agent I expect another £125 this side of the water. Assuming 50 little trees that increases the price per item from £4 to £11.50 which is £13.80 including the VAT you have to pay. That’s actually more than the cost of a lot of little starter trees. Add UK shipping and you are up to £21.45. Add a decent cardboard box at £1, a glue slug at 75p and you reach £23.20. I then have to photograph and list the tree, we have to pack it and label the box and at a paltry £10 an hour that adds another £10.80 which brings us to £34 and so far there is not a single penny in there for the plant, it’s all just processing costs and with overheads running at around 40% of sales value………………… F**k i’d give an Asprin a headache.
So gird your loins folks and pucker up there are fun times coming. It’s time to be appreciative of just how much we have and just how lucky we are. It’s time to stop constantly looking for more, more, more. It’s time to look hard at our ‘consumtion’ and it’s time to be very grateful for what we have. Our great grandparents were very happy just to have a roof over their heads and food on the table. May God grant us all the grace to do the same.
Having less plants on the nursery (we dropped our stock by over 1200 plants in the last quarter) has given me chance to spend time on those special little bits and bobs I have been holding back over the last few years. Seeing as it’s spring it’s time for the obligatory flower pictures. So, here are a couple of recently potted trees.
First up is a crab apple, we sold a massive number of these but this one had to stay. It’s only three years out of the ground and will take at least another ten years to turn into bonsai but if you squint at it through a drunken haze it looks pretty good.
Secondly is my mahaleb. Collected in southern Italy just 3/4 years ago I offered this for sale at around £500 before thinking better of it. Work has been focused on creating substantial primary branching in keeping with the trunk proportions. I didn’t do the carving, that needs work. This is it’s first pot, it’s vital NOT to put trees into bonsai pots too early in their development but now IS the time for this one and it’s a nice Tokoname signature pot I had cluttering the place up.
G.
Crab apple in it’s first bonsai pot. An old Chinese pot I have had for 30 years.
From southern Italy and just 4 years in development from a bare stump. Early days but happy so far.
Not my carving work but the branches are. Another 10 years and this will be good.
Compulsory spring flower picture. Prunus mahaleb.
Mar 16, 2021 | General
I was speaking to one of the countries largest manufacturers of commercial compost products just last week who told me they were busy, busy, busy, he had never known anything like it. “It’s like the whole world has gone gardening!”. I would concur, since January 1st we have processed nearly 2500 orders and unusually they are big orders too, especially considering we are coming to the end of selling trees.
Saying that, I sound like a broken record I know but the logistics of shipping a hundred parcels and three quarters of a ton of product daily with only two folk packing boxes, hauling goods, mixing soils and the million other frustrating little jobs involved is no laughing matter. My staff don’t take lunch breaks and work late most days and we even work Saturdays too. Catherine and I do 6am to 8pm every day and have resorted to asking her brother to come and cook for us just to get a decent meal once a week, he is a chef though 😉
I doubt anyone will really appreciate what it takes to do this unless they are running a small business just now. Just finding enough cardboard boxes is exhausting (and expensive). No washing gets done, no cleaning, no gardening, no house maintenance (i live in an old house). Cars don’t get washed, bikes don’t get ridden, dogs don’t get walked and I sleep 5 hours a night. There is CERTAINLY no time to do bonsai.
With the government busting their hump to destroy commerce in the UK and with the EU determined to try and make an example out of us for leaving their club not to mention Covid and the VERY serious situation regarding global shipping and looming oil price increases this time next year is going to look very different indeed both for the bonsai community and the country as a whole. There are some very dark storm clouds on the horizon for us all, life is NOT going back to ‘normal’, trust me. I can’t believe the ‘media’ are not covering these stories…..but then perhaps I can. I’ll explain more later.
Still, lucky for me we are on the back nine and nearly done. Of late I have managed to largely clear my garden of stock leaving, by and large, just my own collection of trees and I feel good about that, the stress has lifted off me and it feels wonderful. I have not done any bonsai since Christmas and my last video so Sunday night I got to pot up something nice.
This hornbeam came in about 18 months ago. The variety grows incredibly slowly and unusually a big pot does not speed that up so a bonsai pot at this stage is entirely appropriate. I found the unusual pot lurking under a bench covered in years of crap and spiders web, I kind of like it but at this stage it maters little what it looks like.
This hornbeam has had no styling work, just a few unnecessary branches removed. I would guess it’s been 2/3 years since collecting. In my book that makes it good yamadori and once I put ten years on top it will be a great and unique bonsai tree.
Now, off to pack boxes……
G.
Hornbeam yamadori in it’s first bonsai pot.
No work here just the magic of nature.
Feb 17, 2021 | General
I don’t get out much, I just work. These days it’s even hard to get out into the garden during daylight hours. Once you know bonsai well winter is largely THE best time of year. All is quiet with the trees resting and displaying their magical winter appearance.
One of my favourite trees this time of year is Chinese elm that usually finish dropping their leaves in February. The biting east wind of last week certainly did it for this lovely old elm.
I featured this tree on my blog previously –
So now without leaves it’s easy to appreciate the time spent on it’s development. It still has a lot of potential for further development but at this point i’m happy.
G.
Magical Winter Appearance. Chinese elm.
Chinese elm branch structure
Chinese elm, mature craggy bark
Magical winter appearance. Leaves just spoil this beautiful old tree
