Bonsai tree: Daisaku Nomoto Bonsai Award

Source: Bonsai Tonight

Daisaku Nomoto Bonsai Award

Bay Island Bonsai was fortunate this year to have Daisaku Nomoto around to help with its 13th annual exhibit.

Daisaku Nomoto

Nomoto, Boon’s senpai at Kihachi-en, wired trees, prepared moss top-dressings, and carried many trees before, during, and after the exhibit. Somewhere along the way, he took a liking to a Western juniper. So much so, it became the recipient of the first Daisaku Nomoto Bonsai Award.

The winning tree – Western Juniper

Nomoto is a fan of trees styled in this fashion. The tree has a somewhat bunjin-gi feeling, but has a more substantial trunk and silhouette than typical bunjin bonsai. The tree is full, healthy, and well balanced. I’ll add that it points to the right.

Having seen the tree develop since it was collected, I can say that it’s come a long way in a very short time. It is a deserving recipient of the first Daisaku Nomoto Bonsai Award.

The award

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Bonsai tree: Weekly Wire: Ancient Bones & the Wheel of Bonsai Wisdom

Ancient bones. I like the way the fresh foliage seems to hang from the tree’s ancient bones (though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a stand so in need of refinishing). This strikingly unique bonsai is one of many excellent trees at Taiwan Bonsai World.

Free Advertising! What if you could advertise your bonsai event for free on a Bonsai Blog with over 30,00 visitors a month? Turns out, you can! Right here on Bonsai Bark. Just put your event (with links please) in the comments below and I’ll take from there.

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Have you seen this issue? Neither have I. My subscription seems to have run out. My excuses for not re-subscribing are that I’m busy and I tend to get more and more of my info from the web. I’m not sure that either of these excuses are very good, so maybe it’s time to re-subscribe. The photo is from the BCI website.

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Winter Cold & Tree Roots on Crataegus Bonsai. Once again Michael Hagedorn has placed his shoulder on the wheel of bonsai wisdom and pushed a bit.

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Golden Statements magazine. Just got our Jan/Feb issue and noticed that

there are several good looking bonsai events coming up soon:

Bay Area Bonsai Associates 31st Bonsai Exhibit with Ryan Neil. Jan 28 & 29

Golden State Bonsai Federation Mammoth Fundraiser Auction, Sales & Demos with Kathy Shaner and team.

Feb 25 & 26 at the GSBF’s Bonsai Garden in Oakland.

The Southern California GSBF will be holding a similar event the same weekend at the

Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

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A preview of our 2013 calendar? Actually it’s a very old calendar that you can see along with a bunch of other fascinating old images and photos of bonsai (and related stuff) on the World Bonsai Friendship Federation site. It’s a bit like visiting an art museum.

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Tropical Bonsai Riches. This powerful bonsai logo is from Jose Rivera’s Bonsai en el Tropico. You don’t need to understand Spanish to enjoy the vast store of riches contained in this website, but it helps.

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The 3rd U.S. National Bonsai Exhibition is coming! Don’t be left out. The dates are June 9th and 10th (all the info you need is here). BTW: you might notice that Stone Lantern Publishing is a sponsor. That’s a good thing and we are proud to have the opportunity. Beyond that, Stone Lantern will be there as a vendor this year. We are going to bring a wealth of old out-of-print bonsai books (most courtesy of John Palmer, founder of Bonsai Today magazine), some in-print books, our most excellent bonsai wire, some tools and who knows what else (we’ve got some ideas)?

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Little delicacies. These tasty little delicacies are from Horie Bikoh kiln in Japan. I found them on Morten Albek’s Shohin Bonsai Europe (Morten is the author of Shohin Bonsai). In case you’re feeling generous, I’m still accepting late birthday gifts and then there’s always Valentine’s Day.

Monster Tools for Monster Trees. You like to work on big trees? Have you seen our New Monster Tools? Each one is 28″ (72 cm) of tough cutting power.

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Great Bonsai. Crazy links. I like how the stand and the tree on the right just flow into each other in this photo. It’s from Mario Komsta’s website (Mario Bonsai: Wabi Sabi). We’ve been featuring Mario on this blog for a long time, which is another way of saying we like his bonsai. What we don’t like is how what looks like internal links on Mario’s site take you to very unexpected places. If you go to gallery, for example, you end up on generic looking page, bonsaiwabisabi.com that seems to have nothing to do with Mario or his bonsai. Another example is the link ‘blog’ which takes you to an Australian travel blog. Have evil robots taken over Mario’s site?

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This one speaks for itself. It’s a jpeg, so the links aren’t live. Here’s a link that is live.

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Talk about getting a jump. The good news is that you don’t have to wait until 2013 for something to happen in St. Louis.

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The Midwest Bonsai Society’s 8th Annual Spring Bonsai Show will be held May 19-20 at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

American Bonsai Society. Have you seen this? It’s from the ABS website.

“That’s one thing about intellectuals — they’ve proved that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.”

- Annie Hall

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Bonsai tree: Rocky Mountain Juniper bonsai

Source: Bonsai Tonight

Rocky Mountain Juniper bonsai

One of the trees displayed at Bay Island Bonsai’s 13th annual exhibit got a lot of funny looks. It’s a Rocky Mountain juniper, Juniperus scopulorum.

Rocky Mountain Juniper

It’s not exactly “show-ready” as we like to say – the tree is only a few years out of the ground and branch pads have yet to be defined. The tree offers, however, a glimpse of how floppy the tree’s foliage can be and plenty of interesting deadwood. Maybe too interesting. The large piece of deadwood on the left looks like something an undiscerning artist found on the ground and affixed to the first tree they dug. It is, however, very naturally connected to the live part of the tree.

Old deadwood – evidence of an older, larger tree

If you look closely, you can easily discern the old deadwood from the new. The deadwood supporting the live part of the tree lacks the deep fissures evident on the big jin. In the photo below, the upper part of the deadwood is light in color with subtle fissures. This wood has been exposed to the elements for a while, but not for as long as the jin on the left. The lower part of the deadwood is darker in color and lacks fissures. This wood has more recently been exposed to the elements.

Older and newer deadwood

A few days before the exhibit, I cleaned the tree’s deadwood with a water gun and then treated it with a mixture of lime sulfur, water and sumi ink. This helped to even out the different tones of deadwood on the tree. A new pot and some bright moss completed the show prep.

Rocky Mountain Juniper deadwood

Moss

Why so much effort for a tree that’s not quite ready for display? Interesting deadwood, great age, and curious foliage contributed to the decision. Beyond that, the tree offers a great puzzle for aspiring bonsai stylists. In other words, what improvements can be made to the tree? There are plenty of alternatives. It’s the kind of tree I’d like to walk by in the garden for a while before making up my mind. Although I don’t know what exactly is in store for the tree’s future, I do know it will  look quite different the next time I see it in an exhibit.

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Bonsai tree: Eighty Two and Still Going Strong

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a bunjin style bonsai in such a deep pot. You almost always see them in shallow round or near-round pots. No problem though, this one works to perfection; a spectacular tree with a simply lustrous pot. I think the heavy foliage (unusual for a bunjin) helps balance the heavy pot.

Thanks again to Mr. Tea

The photos in this post are all courtesy of Peter Tea, our current favorite bonsai apprentice (nothing personal to the rest of our apprenti in Japan, it’s just that Peter keeps sending great stuff).

Meifu-ten, a show for hobbyists and collectors

It seems like most Japanese bonsai shows are for collectors and professionals, so it’s refreshing to see photos from a show that features collectors and hobbyists’ trees. Here’s some of what Peter has to say about the show: January 14-16 was the 82nd Annual Meifu-ten Bonsai show in Nagoya Japan.  Meifu-ten is the second oldest show in Japan behind Kokufu-ten and this year exhibited over 170 trees.  All the trees belong to hobbyists and collectors.  The average attendance of for the three day show is about 7 thousand (Not too shabby!)…. here’s the rest.

7,000 per day!

In case you were wondering, bonsai is alive and well in Japan.

A very distinctive Kokonoe Japanese white pine. I’ve seen other trees with dominant first branches that seem to break bonsai conventions. but this one really goes out on a limb (so to speak). And then there’s that extraordinarily powerful lower trunk.

Too sweet! It’s a Japanese red pine (in a traditional style bunjin pot).

It’s not that most of the trees in the show are bunjin, it’s just that we’ve got a soft spot for them. This one’s a Shimpaku juniper. All the deadwood action around the base (and perhaps another feature or two), makes for a very unusual bunjin.

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Bonsai tree: Winter Cold And Tree Roots

It pays to read. Not long ago I came across this paragraph in a book on tree maintenance, and thought it very succinct in describing what is going on invisibly inside the tree during times we might think it is fully dormant:

Cambial activity shuts down first at the top of the tree, then in the trunk, and lastly in the roots. Therefore a tree may well have an active root system well after visible growth or leaf drop has occurred. Also, the upper roots of trees in the ground are the first ones active in the springtime.

Makes you think, doesn’t it? Another complicating piece of the puzzle is that the top of the tree is much more cold hardy than the root zone. The tags we see on nursery containers that read ‘Hardy to_’ assume you will plant it in the ground, where tree roots are designed to be. Those cold ratings are for the top only; roots are more tender. Quite a cautionary tale for those growing bonsai. Roots are calibrated to be in the ground, not in a pot.

There are a couple of important lessons here. While light frosts in the fall will ease a tree into dormancy, unseasonably deep cold in the fall may kill the tree because the roots are still active. Spring is the usual time to be careful of hard frosts, but fall must be watched too. Furthermore, if we live in a mostly mild climate with infrequent arctic blasts we should be aware that bonsai may never go fully dormant, retaining active roots throughout winter.

Healthy roots of most hardy trees and shrubs are fine with light frosts in the upper to mid 20′s (F), which helps to ease them into winter dormancy, but lower than that they need better protection such as placement on the ground or in an unheated room, greenhouse, or coldframe.

Those bonsai spending their winter holidays out on the benches may need a careful weather watcher (that would be you!)

(Reference: Tree Maintenance, P.P. Pirone, 1988)

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