I’ll be brief today, the sun’s out, it’s warm and I do not want to be inside slapping this keyboard. It’s been an insane week here at KB world headquarters but as of this Friday morning it’s mostly worked out okay.
The Harley Davidson Softail Slim CVO, she’s a bit loud. Oak tree for good measure.
It all started so well, Sunday saw me off bright and early in beautiful warm sunshine, destroying the early morning peace of the county as me and my Softail headed to the flatlands of Cambridgeshire to do a deal on a vintage Harley. That went very well.
Back in the beginning of September we had a bit of an issue as the Plastic Hoop-house of Bonsai Dreams (my poly tunnel) opened up like the pocket of a cheap suit. We had a 20′ opening in the roof which, if you’ve any experience of such things, you’ll know is almost impossible to patch, even temporarily. I’ve been dreading the day but it finally arrived.
I assembled our tunnel way back in 2008. I bought the very best materials available, took my time and did a proper job and as a result the cover (known as the sheet) has lasted all these 17 years. Now covering a tunnel’s not hard but after all those years it was so completely packed inside and built up around the outside to the point it has taken Richard and I over a month to empty it out and remove all the surrounding benches, screens, fencing and undergrowth. There’s about 2 tons of concrete blocks and almost that in railway sleepers and of course everything has sunk into the ground a bit too. The undergrowth, ivy, bindweed, brambles were nearly 2 days work alone.
Then, as is the way with greenhouses, i had amassed hundreds and hundreds of used plastic plant pots and the like. There was a 1000L water tank and crap I had forgotten entirely. Almost all of that was given away thanks to facebook. Then I had to remove nearly a ton of bonsai pots that had been squirrelled away under the benches, found some utter shite alongside a few gems. The spiders were a force to be reconned with. Then the benches all had to come out and their blocks, even the famous green filing cabinets are on the move.
So after a month of being a sweaty dusty old man we were finally ready for the guys from First Tunnels to come and refurb’ the whole thing. They were booked for Monday but called to put me off until Wednesday. They arrived Wednesday lunch time and left Thursday late morning. If you need anything to do with poly-tunnels get a hold of these amazing guys. It’s NOT often i’m impressed but credit where it’s due. Incredible work, service and priced just right. It was a bit weird looking down the garden and not seeing my hoop house for a couple of hours there.
So now that sheet’s replaced (lets hope this one goes 20 years) the real work can begin, everything’s getting renewed, replaced or upgraded, i’m hoping to be done by Christmas. We’ll see.
The old and busted hoop-house, I wore it smooth out.
Long overdue for replacement.
Concrete blocks piled up everywhere.
Gone! Very strange to see it not there.
Nice shiny new sheet in place. The rebuild begins.
With all that going on we have also been wrestling with Baxter the puppy (pissing machine). He’s a Patterdale and an instinctive ratter. That means he gets into every tiny crevice, sticks his nose into every hole, digs, chases, chews and generally makes an f’ing nuisance of himself and once he’s done that he sleeps. He’s loved the tunnel work and has been constantly covered in cobwebs and worse. Still, at least he’s not been in the pond again this week.
Baxter. Honestly he can be a little bastard.
Catherine has been buried in VAT paperwork and I have been continuing to bang (literally) my head against a wall over a customs issue that’s been loosing me sleep for six weeks now. I have also been moving goods from all over and next seasons pots (at least some of them) are now on the water. I have been busy listing lots of new Japanese goods this week too after a troublesome time, again with customs reg’s and inefficient tossers in Broken Britain. We’ve also been busy getting your orders, for which we are extremely grateful, out the door in a timely fashion. This running a business malarkey’s not for everyone I know and increasingly I wonder if it’s for me either.
Bonsai pots are finally on the water.
So, overall a successful week, at least the tunnel’s now secure and dry and the refurb has begun. And then, to top it all off I have a blog post and a new short video to share too. Not bad for an oldun i recon. Of course I could not do any of this without YOUR support. THANK YOU!
As it happens I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs waiting on three imports. We’ve goods coming from Japan, China and Eu and so I have had opportunity to complete yet ANOTHER bonsai video.
Just before you go off to see that let me get this off my plate….
Trigger warning! Don’t read the following if you are a Trigger, you may be offended. My apologies to any RM or PF employees.
For one reason or another these imports are all being delayed, nothing ever seems to happen on schedule any more. For instance…. Just getting a parcel delivered by……so called PARCELFORCE (always sounds like the name of some shit superhero to me) is a task.
Just last week I had to take a half day out and do a fifty mile round trip to pick up a parcel they were incapable of delivering. Just to make matters worse I also got a flat tyre which cost me a ton to replace. I couldn’t park within a half mile either. When I eventually got to the counter the guy glibly threw my way “You could have done this online you know, would have saved a trip.”🤬
Just to fill in the blanks Catherine (she’s expert at this stuff) had, to that point, spent more than 12 business hours trying to resolve their incompetence. Businesses charge clerical work at £30-40 an hour so that sucks. I then lost a whole morning and aforesaid tyre alongside another score for diesel. I won’t tell you what I said to the meathead behind the counter. To be fair I think I woke him from a nap.
Now I remember (as I understand it) when so called “Parcelforce” didn’t exist, we used to call it Royal Mail* before some bright spark decided to split the parcels operation from letter post (1986). No doubt there were some handsome rewards for the creation of this new wonder of the modern age. However, following a spectacular ‘oversight’ someone failed to consider falling mail volumes and how the world was changing. That and some other factors led to Royal Mail letters division basically going broke because their remit is almost impossible to fulfil profitably without the parcels business, especially as bulk trunking services were also contracted out to third parties leaving the poor old RM with the so called ‘last mile‘. What we might colloquially call the shitty end of the stick.
Again as I understand it the gov’ has a legal obligation to ensure a daily postal service to every home. However they don’t want to pay for it but the money we pay barely covers operating costs (which of course are too way to high). The business had it’s hands tied by that same gov’ because people like the idea of cheap stamps leaving the RM incapable of controlling either it’s charges or to some degree it’s costs. And so the two are now merging again, as it turns out, with typical British incompetence.
Parcels are profitable, letters are not so here’s an idea…..why don’t Royal Mail do both…………………………………… as they used to. Like my mum used to say ‘Put it back where you found it!‘ The whole story stinks to high heaven IMHO.
The reason my parcels (there are 30 of them in total) vanished is because both companies are using different systems which do not communicate, nor do the people and there is no person to person contact in the system and nobody to call or mail. Catherine spent FOUR hours on hold calling these f***wits only to be told you can “do this online” WHICH YOU FUCKING WELL CAN’T!
Add to that customs randomly taking items out of the system for weeks at a time and failing to make contact. The whole system then seems to rely upon a little card dropping through our door. There was one for each box, only about 7 turned up, the rest were either never sent or lost. If the parcels were not claimed they are dumped (i’ve over a grand in each parcel). So far i am £980 out of pocket (we’re not finished yet) directly and then I have to add all of my own costs. Thankfully Catherine is brilliant, she knows how to get this shit done even if the folk doing it don’t.
The above account is accurate for my part, my knowledge of the actual events historical and otherwise is limited. Pissy comments will be ignored. I am quite simply beyond giving a Scheiße any more. Thank you for hearing me out lovely readers.
Now, i’m off to lay in a quite dark place. Enjoy the movie 😄
Graham.
*1516: Sir Brian Tuke is appointed the first Master of the Posts by Henry VIII, establishing the initial postal system for royal use. 1784: The name “Royal Mail” is officially given to the service during a period of increased use of mail coaches across the country.
With Christmas madness about to descend upon us all I guess it’s that time of year when tossers like me who conceitedly write blogs have to take stock of the year all but passed. 2024 was a year of milestones and some bonsai videos too. Growing up my family weren’t ones for making a fuss, birthdays, Christmas etc’ would come and go with relatively little fanfare. So forgive me for not being overly effusive but it seems appropriate to at least mention a few significant milestones that both I and we here at KB passed over the last year.
I have never been one for celebrations but seeing as I passed the grand old age of 60 in September I thought it would be nice for once to stage a celebration with my besties. However by the time the day arrived I had scaled back my plans to virtually nothing and so mostly the family got together for the evening and that was pretty much that. My first birthday celebration since I was a kid!
Another big mile stone that went by without a thought was the 20th anniversary of my full time employment by Kaizen Bonsai. YES it’s now more than 20 years since we bought Colin Lewis’s Bonsai Mart and dear God has that been an experience. Looking on the bright side we are still here, just about. Hanging on by the skin of what few teeth I have left thanks to the British, so called, ‘government‘ rogering us with a toilet brush every time we try to do something. Back when we started it was so much easier but nowadays the price of everything makes my eyes water and the margins are just too small. I’m committed now so we have to carry on but if you were to ask me, as is traditional at these moments of reflection, if I would do it all again my reply would be “Absolutely not!”.
What would I have done 20 years ago assuming I knew then what I know now? Think Budd (Michael Madsen) from the film Kill Bill. My ideal life would be just that, less the ignominious end of course. I now know all I need is a shitty trailer home in the desert, a pickup truck and a Harley shovelhead, possibly a little dog with attitude and a shitty job. My sister went to the US back in her teens and never came back, it broke my mothers heart and I just couldn’t follow her but there’s rarely a day I don’t wish I had.
2024 was also the year I lost my mother-in-law, the mother of my first lady who I lost to the big-C thirty years ago. Whilst we were never close, she was a unique sort of person, her passing reunited me with Tina’s brother who I had not seen for decades. Shane’s reappearance has been a fantastic and enriching experience for the whole family, it’s like those intervening years never happened. This whole business and a funeral bought back some very powerful memories for me and what we had to endure back then and that’s all I have to say about that.
I have been exceptionally blessed this year to have acquired several large bonsai collections. Once upon a time these would have come and gone within weeks. However now that the movement of trees is more difficult than moving cocaine or illegals around I keep everything I get. For decades now every time a tree started to look good it was sold. As a result I have been denied the joy of seeing my bonsai develop and mature. Thankfully now that’s not the case and I’m able to make plans and develop my lovely bonsai without being concerned they might disappear at any moment. As it turns out I do have some skill and the trees are making sterling progress.
I was particularly excited to obtain the collection of Harry Nicholl. A stalwart of the Scottish bonsai scene for many decades. We met at a shitty motorway services on the A1 in the depth of winter and loaded his beautiful trees into my van. Whilst I only spent a half hour with Harry (in his eighties) I took to him instantly, what a lovely man. Imagine my horror when three months later I learned he had passed quite suddenly. I had been so looking forward to telephone conversations about the stories and techniques behind those trees. I don’t take to most people, folk scare the shit out of me and because I lack almost any social skills i’m best on my own. To meet a gentleman like Harry and instantly take to him, for me, never happens and I’m so sad he’s gone but I love his trees that I will cherish for the rest of my days.
Talking of being social…. This year I was equally pleased and apprehensive to be involved in Peter Chan’s Bonsai Journeys event in September. Were it not for Kevin Willson’s intervention I would NEVER have done something like that. In the end I had a great weekend, met some interesting folk and came away with a little more understanding of how you lovely folk appreciate what I do. It’s a bit odd to be held in high esteem by so many people and something i’m just not really aware of seeing as I don’t go out much these days so, thank you all so much and please, don’t be afraid to send me compliments at any time. Also please do pick up the phone once in a while, apparently it’s good to talk.
Other notable events in the last year include a second grand-baby Eveline (no 3 is in the oven). My 29th anniversary married to Catherine without whom I would be utterly useless. My parents 65 odd anniversary and its been 25 years since I first started working with Kevin Willson. Then just for good measure I lost a bunch of weight which has been utterly miserable and continues. Sadly something had to be done, too many good men have been lost in my life these last few years which makes you think. ALSO I was having trouble riding my sportier bikes so the gut just had to go. I’m much more interested in crafting the perfect high speed cornering manoeuvre than I am eating or drinking. Trouble is I’m still wearing all the same clothes so I look like a sack of shit tied up scruffy most of the time.
2024 presented bonsai growers with a shitstorm of weather, at least it did on the east coast. Hand on heart we did not have a warm day here until the latter part of June. I spent less time watering between April and July than I did over last winter. In 35 years I have never known such a piss poor summer. My maples were so late many only finally let their leaves go in the last three weeks. Some trees loved it though, i have never seen so much growth on larch, juniper, spruce and mugo pines. Those mountain trees really don’t like heat so they were right at home in the wind-cut chilled expanse of my Norfolk garden. Bike riding was also seriously curtailed and i’m still not over that.
BOF the shovel. All I need for my mental health therapy. Fucking broke down and was off the road for most of the summer. Now all fixed 🙂
September 2024 also saw the launch of our new web site. This whole e-commerce business is a PITA. There are so many rules and regulations these days and of course staying up with all the latest trends, giving customers so many options, payment channels, functionality and security across so many platforms/devices just never seems to end. This latest iteration is by far our best, it took nigh on two years to achieve and costs a shit load of money both to create and run. For all this I have to thank Sarah who you don’t know, she’s the absolute foundation of KB and without her we would be gone.
Like a good few of our customers I look longingly back at those days 20 years ago when I spent July and August compiling our paper catalogue. November was always a throwback to my printing days when we spent the month addressing and stuffing envelopes with crisp fresh glossy print and the whole house smelt of ink and paper. Unlike our first web sites, those paper catalogues still bring in orders. It must be close to fifteen years since I last mailed out a catalogue but some folk are STILL ordering from them.
20 years! Where did that go?
Sadly my annual Christmas holiday break will be interrupted this year thanks to the arrival of several ton’s of bonsai pots this week. These will all need to go onto the website pronto as so many canny folk are getting their spring supplies in early. For the first time I am aware of in the UK we have supplies of BIG high quality glazed pots up to 27″ in a multitude of styles, shapes and colours. We also have hundreds of exceptional exhibition quality shohin pots never seen before. This will appear alongside our extensive range of quality Japanese glazed and unglazed pots now all fully restocked. If I had to guess we probably have 7-800 pot options available and about 15-18 tons of stock.
Lots of big glazed pots available from stock. They’re NOT all just blue or green but that’s what I had to hand.
We have also had shipments of all varieties of bonsai tools, carving tools and 2 tons of Japanese fertilisers like Biogold etc’. There’s over 50 tons of soil products and two tons of wire so whatever you are likely to need chances are we have it in stock right here. It’s safe to say I have never held so much stock of everything but that’s just how this business has to operate these days. Gone are the days when we could pop over to a wholesaler and buy a few odds-n-ends.
And finally I thought I would bend to the endless cries of my adoring supporters. It’s new video time folk (bottom of the page) and this time I have made a throwback to those heady days over 15 years ago when, largely for the first time Youtube got to show proper bonsai in the making. Yes! We have made another Crappy Taxus video. I really didn’t want to spend a week (on and off) in mid-winter doing a tree like this. These days the call of an open fire, the Chesterfield, a very large JD (or 2,3,4) and slippers is strong during these long dark days. However it turned out okay and i’m very pleased I did get off my ass. I managed 9 videos this year which is the best for a long time. If there’s something you think I need to cover in a future edition I would like to hear from you though I can’t promise anything.
For next year Kevin’s been stitching me up again so now I have to make another public appearance at the newly planned Bonsai Fest in Newark or some such next March I believe. I’m looking forward to that, and not, in equal measure but for now I have to go and move this mountain of pots.
Sam, Kevin, Myself & Mr Fest’ Booty.
So, all told, election results not withstanding, 2024 has been one for the books. Not everything went to plan but I didn’t fall off a bike, loose any good bonsai, go broke or die so I recon that makes it a good one even if the summers tan has long gone. I’m happy, the family’s good and business is sound, BOF the shovel is now working 100% and ready for next summer and my benches are full and as we say around here “At least we don’t have bombs falling on the roof” for now at least.
I sincerely hope you have had a good year on balance. The world’s a crazy place right now but even so we have a lot to be thankful for and those little trees work hard at keeping many of us on the right side of sane. From all of us here at Kaizen Bonsai we wish you a very merry and hospitable Christmas and lets all just chill the fuck out and get along.
Over the last few years I have been buying up a lot of bonsai collections. As a result I have obtained some previously unknown or unseen Great British Bonsai. Typically when that happens I buy everything, we buy live trees, a few dead ones, the benches, old pots, tools, books lock stock the f***** lot. This makes folk very happy to know that what is often decades of their hard work is assured a good future. I don’t sell these trees to just anyone, in fact I mostly don’t sell them at all. It’s sad when we have to part with our trees but that’s life, in the end we leave it all behind.
Sometimes folk have left it a bit too long and some of the trees can be in less than perfect condition, sadly on occasions they are hanging by a thread. These days I spend a great deal of my time restoring and rehabilitating these old soldiers. I have always said that in order to produce significant bonsai long term one must be a gardener first and foremost. You’ll never show if you can’t grow. It’s impossible to create a bonsai tree from a plant that is not growing vigorously no matter how skilful one might be with the wire. Thankfully over the last 40 odd years I have honed my gardening skills somewhat. Within the constraints of the British climate I can grow most anything these days.
The great thing about collections is the discovery of interesting and unusual varieties and bonsai that sometimes have an interesting or long history. I have some very odd plants in my garden and even though they may not be classical beauties I love them. Often the original owners don’t know what they are. 2022 I bought what I was told (and thought) was a massive cascade juniper with strange coarse foliage. This had been in the hands of a gentleman since the 1970s. Nobody who visited could place it but just last week, after it had been here a couple of years I suddenly realised it was cupressus, as in a variety of Italian cypress. Sometimes I’m really slow.
Turns out this was not a juniper at all but cupressus from the 1970s. DOHH!
Not all collections are tired, some are simply amazing. I recently acquired a pair of absolutely stunning Japanese larch, collected in the highlands over 40 years ago along with some old collected Scottys. Most of you hopefully saw the old twin trunk larch growing out of a rock I potted recently and there are a whole host of other amazing old bits here that hopefully I can introduce ya’ll to as time goes on.
Unlike some parts of the world, bonsai is a fairly recent introduction to our country. Bonsai may pop up around the periphery of British history prior to the 1970s but these were little more than glimpses of oriental culture and curiosity. Back when I started bonsai there were a few books and Colin Lewis had not long since begun publishing Bonsai Magazine here. A far cry from today indeed. There were few professional bonsai artists working in GB back then and a bonsai show was typically a niche event hosted by a fledgling bonsai club within the confines of a larger horticultural event….with very limited exceptions.
Let me interject with something i’m pretty sure I have recounted here before about Mr Doubleday. He was the first person that I met in the bonsai world and inspired me to take up my life’s work. A third generation nurseryman who produced roses from his little nursery on Walnut Hill, deepest Norfolk. He lived in a caravan without electricity, wore tweed, a brown felt hat and hobnail boots and had hands like ancient gnarled branches. His father had seen bonsai in the far east during the war and decades lated Mr D was still practicing the art. Andrew had trees he and his father cultivated together from the end of the 1940’s. I still have a couple of those trees but I can be sure nobody but a couple of local old hacks and I might know him. Mr D would be well up in his nineties by now assuming he’s still about but a little of his work lives on here.
In my experience bonsai clubs typically frowned upon “check book bonsai”. My own local club banned showing any tree one had simply purchased. Hoping to encourage home grown talent though with limited learning opportunities i’m not sure how that was supposed to work. That’s all a little bit off IMHO.
As I have said many times, when buying a bonsai tree or raw material all one is doing is shortening the timeframe involved. Now if you buy something nice it’s not right to go and claim credit for the work that went into producing it but one can be happy with the pride of ownership. If after several years one has significantly improved your charge then a degree of credit can legitimately be claimed. I often wondered what my club hoped to do with those rules. In the end it largely discouraged good bonsai and ensured mediocrity and might go some way to explain how membership fell from 70/80 in the early 2000s to a typical attendance these days in single figures but I digress.
With very few notable exceptions there were few ‘names‘ producing great bonsai back in the day. In time some trees did get here from Japan but mostly finding something special was akin to a blind squirrel looking for nuts, one had to get lucky. And so, we have very few trees from the dark ages* that one might perhaps call heritage bonsai or some such. In the past I have owned some famous bonsai like the yew that launched Kevin Willson’s bonsai career commonly known as ‘The Upright’, I also owned ‘The Bow’ and stupidly sold both. Now I am older I think differently but then I am not broke like I was back then which makes all the difference. I sold both these for practically no money because I failed to realise perhaps just what I had even though both were a little tired at the time.
Kevin Willsons ‘Upright’ at the peak of its development.
I sold this famous old tree so cheap it brings a tear to my eye now. If you have it, I’ll buy it back!
So, whilst big names with big impressive trees were somewhat scarce in blighty back in the day there was an absolute army of enthusiasts and hobbyists alike scouring every corner to find good bonsai material. Thankfully some of those guys persevered over many decades and as it turned out, produced some pretty good, dare I say Great British Bonsai. Lucky SOB that I am a few are residing upon my benches as I sit here. Some need help but others are special and unique and need a little respect for being simply amazing even if they don’t conform to what some folk think a bonsai should be or look like.
It’s no secret I am a total car crash when it comes to dealing with people. My social skills are by and large non existent. Just a couple of days ago I took Catherine grocery shopping (first time in years) and got a right bollocking simply for getting something out of a chiller cabinet in the wrong (and inconsiderate) way. It’s a long story I would rather not go into. I am utterly hopeless, clueless and entirely feckless with absolutely NO understanding of how these things work. By and large I prefer my own company and work hard at avoiding social contact because I am so bad at it my head hurts. I don’t hate people I just don’t get how it all works and so usually end up with my foot in my mouth. I have tried very hard but Catherine says I ‘just don’t get it’. Apparently i’m too ‘task orientated‘ whatever that is.
So with other folk not exactly big on my radar I find it a little strange to be thinking about the people who’s work I now have entrusted to me. I have been thinking a lot about what little bonsai legacy we have in GB and how to both raise awareness and respect for the old bonsai we do have. Do we have a moral, social or ethical responsibility to keep the history of our trees and the memory of their creators in our sights? I am finding this new dimension to bonsai I never had before but is that just because i’m getting on a bit or getting soppy in my old age? Should we treat these old bonsai with deference and give respect to their former owners? Or perhaps we forget all that touchy feely crap and just bulldoze over our forbears in the interest of self-aggrandisement.
For once I don’t have an answer but, dear reader, I would like to know your CAREFULLY CONSIDERED thoughts.
I would also like to see any OLD (50 years +) Great British Bonsai trees you might have in your care and hear their stories. I would also be interested in the possibility of purchasing some of those trees if possible. Either way please email me stories and pictures to – [email protected].
By way of introduction to one of these old bonsai I have put together this little repotting video of a scots pine that came to reside here last summer. Grown from seed around the end of the late 1970’s I think this is going to be a special tree once I get it back on track. Here you can see the first step in that restoration/refinement process. My No1 rule is always roots first.
Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thought on Great British Bonsai
Creating bonsai takes a really long time. It also takes a long time to figure out exactly how to do it so if you are starting out TODAY assume it will take twenty years to figure out the basics, and that assumes you are busy and not applying yourself in a ‘working from home‘, civil service, tired hands kind of a way.
Having been hammering away at bonsai now for the better part of forty years I might be so bold as to say I figured this all out a while back. I often say it takes ten years to figure out which end goes into the soil. Now that’s not strictly true in a Trumpian kind of a way, it’s not to be taken literally, it’s a figure of speech which illustrates that even after a decade in the saddle one can still be susceptible to chafing. That’s another figure of speech isn’t it but illustrates my point I hope.
Sadly todays society has, by and large, lost the appreciation of things that take time unless that time can be charged for of course. A bottle of Private Collection Glenlivet 1949 74 Year Old will set you back about £35,000 whilst a bottle of Whyte & Mackay Blended Scotch Whisky from Asda comes in at a very reasonable £17.00. I don’t drink Scotch but i know folk who do and they would be very keen to point out the difference of which I would be largely oblivious.
The basics of these two bottles are much the same (a distilled spirit) but the fact is one got left in the shed for a really long time and to a connoisseur who is blessed with a sensitive palate the difference is night and day and quite possibly worth every penny. The single malt had time to develop it’s special unique character alone whilst the blended one was engineered to taste a certain way and always the same way. Long ago I worked as a printer when the use of chemicals was acceptable workplace behaviour and I burned away whatever sensitive tissues I had in my head, my nose has not really worked since and so my ability to taste at all is minimal and as a result I have literally ZERO appreciation of these fine things.
For sure I wouldn’t drink that cheap blended s**t. On the very rare occasion I have Scotch in the house it’s going to be a 15 year old Glenlivet (donations gladly accepted). To be honest my preference is for a single barrel Jack Daniels, donations of which, again, I would be very glad to receive. Leave that blended stuff to the kids getting hammered on a Friday night.
So in this respect I feel I am like a lot of bonsai folk I encounter in daily life. I appreciate, at some level, the difference between good and bad, i know the basics but beyond that i literally know nothing and have no comprehension of the finer points. What I call a good whisky is unlikely to ever touch the lips of a true aficionado who might well look down on my choice as ‘window cleaner’ or some such.
After a lifetime spent immersed in something so deeply and so fanatically it’s impossible not to develop one’s palate and appreciation but it’s far from guaranteed. I know lovely folk that have spent twenty years travelling the world, attending every top bonsai exhibition year after year who see the very best our world has to offer and getting to know all the right people but don’t have a worthy bonsai to their name or a single clue how to make one.
I guess that’s like racing drivers, you don’t have to know how to engineer a car to drive one. If you want to be at the top of the game there’s a lot you need to know about how your machine works, why it does what it does or not. That way you can relay information back to the man that actually knows how it works so he can make it better for you. That’s why racing cars are largely managed and supported by a team. It brings all the best elements together that can never be embodied by a single person and the net result is better.
Seems to me many folk have money, opportunity or both and so have these nice things but can lack the apparatus to genuinely understand and appreciate their true value whilst a lowly person lacking in means but with highly developed senses, acquired through long application looks on in horror at the flagrant waste of true value and lack of appreciation and understanding beyond some notion of smug pride, that ‘look at what i’ve got’ nose in the air notion. Remember Stanley and Pammy……
These days I don’t tend to leave home, i did an insane amount of windscreen time back in the day and unless i am on two wheels I tend to avoid all travelling and stay off the roads. I don’t drag my trees all over the place showing them off and I’m very particular who I let visit my garden. I have no interest in impressing anyone with my work until I myself am impressed and trust me I am very far from that level so I continue to work hard and carefully to improve my results every single day and if I get the time perhaps one day i just might make a good bonsai in much the same way a blind squirrel might find a nut.
Going back to my analogy of a motor racing team it has always struck me that working together is best. However finding someone I can work with has not been easy. Most bonsai folk, certainly those I might choose to work with are a very long way from me. Just nipping over to Milan to work with Salvatore or Marco is not entirely practical. I’m also what one might call a ‘rummun‘. Hard to get along with, opinionated, largely oblivious to the feelings of others and determined to do it my way. Finding anyone to work with therefore was always going to be a challenge but lucky for me I know a guy….
Thankfully that guy lives not too far away, about 40 minutes on a well sorted Shovelhead. On paper Kevin Willson and I should not get on, we should fight like a cat and a dog but somehow, after 25 years, turns out we can actually work together fairly well. Mutual respect goes a long way and as they say ‘two heads are better than one’. Considering our advanced age and history of ‘substance abuse‘ I might say that two ‘half heads‘ make one properly functioning one but that might be unfair on my buddy. Whatever, between us we can knock up a half decent tree when we combine our skills despite our differing ideas on how that actually happens.
I guess we all have bonsai trees that have spent decades on our benches. Some become special to us whilst some are just bulk in our collection. This scots pine was one such for me. It came here from Norway perhaps fifteen years ago. Surprisingly it survived and I even styled it and made a video of the process though that was never released. Ultimately I got bored with it. I tried to sell without success and in time it started to suffer a little from neglect. I just could not bring myself to love it and having spent so long looking at it, as it was, I had absolutely NO inspiration to do anything with it at all.
Sound familiar? You got one on your bench?
Nowadays I stopped selling trees like we did at one time and am just rediscovering my love of bonsai work. I really don’t want anything in my garden that’s not special. So this pine stuck in my craw, can’t sell it, too much heart to dump it and no inspiration to reinvent it. As they say I could not see the wood for the trees. So what to do?
I’m a firm believer in letting folk do what they are good at. I don’t do any book keeping, banking or accounting because I have absolutely no head for numbers, absolutely NO clue whatsoever so I leave that stuff to professionals as I do web site stuff and lots of other things. Now when it comes to reinventing a bonsai tree there is only ONE place to be and that’s 40 minutes up the Norfolk coast and so it was I dropped this pine off on my unsuspecting mate last autumn.
I can’t imagine anything worse than having to create a bonsai tree from another artists work for that very same artist. Especially when you know it’s all going to end up online for the world to see in glorious Technicolour. That’s pressure right there but thankfully my raffish mate has a cast iron work ethic, a thick skin and’s not really that bothered what the hell I think. But then I did tell him to do whatever he wanted with my long suffering scotty.
As anyone who has had a tree worked by Kev’ will know, chances are when you get it back it’ll be tipped up on it’s side. No1 item on the agenda is finding the best trunk line and inclination. After that it’s just the technicalities of how to get the branches in the right place and with a good trunk line that’s usually pretty easy. But, this tree has a problem, one I failed to deal with decades ago and now I have no choice but to bite the bullet.
Norwegian scots pine 2017. To date lots of work has been completed in getting this established and ready to work.
2017 Same tree after Rammon and I worked on it. Nothing then happened until 2023, other than a few weak branches dropping.
Now when I first got this tree it was recently collected and I vaguely remember it was a planted in a long thin wooden box that was about a foot square and four feet long. It had been growing in a crack and had a long V shaped rootball with a good couple of feet folded back on itself. The growth was pretty much non existent. Come August Rammon helped me get it out of the box with the intention of sorting out the roots but that long hard V shaped root ‘ball’ was rock solid and mostly composed of wood in the form of big thick roots. The only live root ends I could find were insufficient to fill a teaspoon. I was entirely disgusted with the whole affair and intended dropping it in the bin but Rammon was insistent we give it a chance and so we broke up the rootball as best we could, cut away a load of dead suff, shortened it all as much as seemed safe and stuck it in a plastic pot with all that ugly wood just squeezed into the rectangular pot corner to corner. Miraculously it survived obvs.
So, as soon as I got the restyled tree back for Kevin my heart sank because I could see there was no chance of potting it at the appropriate inclination. Come last weekend and with buds extending i decided to bite the bullet. I would not normally repot a newly styled tree and I certainly would not recommend it but over the years I learned a few things that make a difference and create possibilities where there was none. Sometimes we just have to pull on the big boy pants and step up. Back in the day I would have done this without thinking but nowadays I don’t kill trees because I learned the finer points and have ‘developed my palate’ somewhat.
In conclusion working together, with someone of weight and experience really is the only way to create special bonsai trees worthy of the title. However finding that person’s not easy and if you are lucky and find one in you life hang onto them for all you are worth. Just last week my one and only bike riding mate of fairly recent acquaintance dropped dead on the way to a football match. Never even made it into an ambulance and I am totally heartbroken to have lost such a lovely positive and special friend.
Keep it real folks! Who knows what is just around the corner.
Kevin had the tree tilted a little more. This is my compromise. Two Half Heads are Better Than One!
Masses of root and deadwood shoehorned into this pot. Beneath the surface is a solid block of wood literally hammered into the pot from corner to corner.
Corner to corner. There are several more like this directly beneath the surface and in both corners.
Those stumps were actually trunks as this grew in a small crack in a large flat expanse of granite.
Long overdue a repot. When you see white root ends like this repotting can take place. Roots will regenerate in a few days.
It took 45 minutes just to get it out of the pot.
And breathe ……. Sadly got the pot feet in the wrong place and it’s not the best of pots but this is one giant leap forward. There’s always next time.
