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Posts Tagged ‘Seasonal’

The Year in Photos…

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 13, 2013 | 6 Comments »

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Silly fun with Ingo Klemmend and Ivo Druge at Bonsai Zentrum, Germany. Ingo owns Bonsai Zentrum with his father, Wolfgang, and Ivo is one of the brains behind the beautiful German magazine Bonsai Art.

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Wandering around Bonsai Zentrum-

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Teaching a workshop in Germany using… interpretive dance…?

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A favorite Mexican restaurant of Portland students-

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The Portland Bonsai Village passport on its trip through Holland…

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Treating juniper deadwood last summer-

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What a shoe-free home looks like when Seasonal Students (‘SeaStudents’) drop in-

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Greg Brenden and I on our first Portland Bonsai Village ‘organizational dinner’, which ended up as an outrageously transparent excuse to treat ourselves to some good food-

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Under a shelter waiting for the light rail to the Portland airport-

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Quirky small Shore pine collected last fall, now growing buds-

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Nice client tree, Japanese White pine-

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Map of European trip, not showing a very brief stop in the Czech Republic–

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Fall color in my bonsai yard-

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Cool bamboo bike in Portland-

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My artist friends Pigment, Print, and Photo (named after their media) at our first, and sadly only, brunch meeting. Guys, we are a sorry lot for not doing this since last summer!

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The ‘Bison Bank’, courtesy of Greg Brenden’s whimsical brain. It’s only 1/64 filled with coins so far.

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Lovely antique chinese pot-

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Vine maple tower, in an early phase, planning out the adventure with a sharpie pen-

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Eileen with her larch at a Portland Study Group-

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Joanne at a Portland Study Group (and Greg, peeking around the door)-

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Jorge with a hornbeam project-

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Cowpie blooming this spring-

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Gary Wood at Telperion Farms working on a young rascal-

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Gravel moving day in my backyard with Jorge, Troy, and Ed-

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My friend Chris with Ruri, looking at her climbing wood-fired kiln-

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Amsterdam-

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Vine maple tower-

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Troy with a massive pomegranite-

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Noelander’s Trophy in January-

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Prague, a shot very late in the day. My camera invented light that was not there-

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The John Lennon wall in Prague-

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Olympic National Rain Forest-

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Curious stairs in Prague-

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Opera house in Vienna-

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Ray watering in my backyard-

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Wacky light show in a church, Vienna-

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My opera-singer aunt, Elizabeth Hagedorn, entering a rather glitzy elevator, Vienna-

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Konnor and a lime sulfuring project-

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Stair moss (I think), Olympic National Rain Forest-

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Hemlock clump (to be featured later…)

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Photo shoot for German bonsai magazine Bonsai Art, with translator Heike von Gunst. This looks weirdly like a posed shot, but wasn’t. Tree is a larch. Another future post-

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Sharing rice pudding recipe with complete stranger-

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Vine Maple… Tower… Experiment?

Posted in Before and after, tagged , , , on April 1, 2013 | 21 Comments »

I had no idea how to title this one. Just as I had no idea, really, what exactly I was doing with my March Seasonal students the day we put this thing together. Which must instill a lot of confidence in my students. Seasonal veterans are familiar with me taking a left turn sometimes. But this time I was more than a bit uncertain about their reaction when I started our morning with, ‘I’ve this idea, but not the faintest clue how we’re going to do it.’ So with that, we did… it. Whatever ‘it’ is, I hope the photos will describe better than I-

The vine maple for our experiment. Vine maple, Acer circinatum, is a Northwest native which typically grows as a multiple-trunk understory tree. They are similar to Japanese maple. I collected this one in the Cascades.

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Preparing the roots-

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Ya, I know, now it gets weird. What the heck are they doing? Tom and Ed are monkeying around with a plastic cutting board…

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More monkeying around… Thanks to my students this thing was really well built. They were superb engineers.

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Now the cat’s out of the bag. This plastic internal support was intended to loft a cascading deciduous tree.

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Our bronze mascot crab makes another sneaky appearance.

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I had to include this photo, as you’d never guess bonsai had anything to do with what these four are engaged with-

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It did rather look like a guitar…

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Tom

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John

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Howard

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John and Florentina scoping out the positioning.

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After some revision, our final support structure-

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Tying the maple to the support- which in itself took some weird engineering.

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We used sphagnum moss (‘orchid moss’) as our substrate. No muck this time.

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Wrapping the sphagnum with cheesecloth, just to clarify the form a bit.

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32″ H. After adding a few projections and licorice ferns with moss… there is some moss sprinkled on the sphagnum, too, so I hope the whole thing will be green in several months. In any event, (hopefully) it will shortly look less like a mangy dog that’s been mummified, but this is where it is now. Little leaves are now popping all over the branches. It’s in a greenhouse under a misting system and I’ll give you some updates on it in the future! For now, I’m thinking this is an ‘Ode to the Northwest’—full of spindly deciduous plants growing near rotting logs and more moss and ferns than you can shake a moldy stick at.

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3 Repotting Days at the February Seasonal-

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 7, 2013 | 5 Comments »

February ended with a great Seasonal group comprised mostly of new students—three newcomers, one returnee. Thanks Andrew, Dan, Steve, and John (our veteran) for a fantastic and productive three days. And thanks too for taking such great photos! Many of these I did not take, yet found on my camera-

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The one shot I found of everyone: A sliver of Andrew, John, Steve in the background, and most of Dan.

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Old trees…

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…and young ones.

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Steve and Andrew tackling the root mass of this Japanese maple.

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This maple is the sister tree of the one I had in the last post, air-layered about six years ago from a sweet spindly thing I bought after coming back from Japan. I got it at Wee Tree, I think.

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Levitated bonsai. (Enjoy,Greg-)

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John noodling a Trident, giving it a strong suggestion to have a better nebari. Seedlings to be threaded on the table.

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Dan excavating part of a Limber pine’s root system.

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Our bronze mascot crab—as yet unnamed—who wanders around and shows up in random photos. Crustacean courtesy of Matt Reel.

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Rather wretched ‘potting soil’ discovered at the back of this spruce, so it was partially bare-rooted. The opposite side was in akadama/pumice set in place a couple years ago and was untouched.

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Dan- are you a professional photographer or what? Loved this one. (Think it was Dan with the camera this time…?)

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Steve and I chopsticking. To anyone who does not do bonsai, that does not mean we’re fencing with chopsticks. Read: ‘Settling soil between roots’. With chopsticks.

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Gotta love rawhide mallets.

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It’s such fun photographing photographers. Why?

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Exit with spruce-
Thanks SeaStudents! Great times-

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Photos and Stories from the Fall Seasonal-

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 24, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

In a mix of seriousness and hilarity, the 2012 Fall Seasonal wrapped up a couple weeks ago leaving us all well-fed and with somewhat dirtier fingers. Here’s a few photos of those three days–

This was one tree we worked on, a Mountain hemlock from Canada. This was the original front.

New front chosen at the Seasonal.

And after Bob’s work. It was a fun project tree with the key branch moved from behind the trunk to the right side.

Naturally, students will mimic their teachers, and sadly this includes irreverence. Howard trumped everyone with this t-shirt, which suggests several possible conclusions:
1. He’d had a hard morning and wasn’t going to take any !#$^& from anyone
2. Impishness is a honed character trait, and he generally doesn’t give a rat’s ass
3. He’s from Chicago

Something always seems to need fixing at the Seasonals. A few Seasonals back we had pair of glasses that needed fixing, and this time it was my hand. Thankfully it was expertly immobilized by Seasonal surgeons using completely inadequate tape and rubber bands. One does lose a bit of authority waving such a club around, although I have a tough time keeping a straight face around such silly students anyhow—2 Americans and 3 Canadians for gosh sakes. Thank you Ed, Howard, Ray, Bob, and stalwart Roger for once again braving the Seasonals, where you never really know what’s going to happen other than something’s probably going to break, and it might not have anything to do with bonsai.

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Summer Seasonal Field Trip for Rubber Snakes…

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on July 26, 2012 | 2 Comments »

This year’s Summer Seasonal class had the usual impromptu and totally off-the-wall field trip, as is becoming familiar to frequent students. The memorable one from this session was a trip to the dollar store to buy rubber snakes… for scaring away birds. Which is sad, I as I quite enjoy birds. What I don’t enjoy is replacing moss they’ve destroyed and putting on more fertilizer pellets where they’ve been flipped out in the excited search for insects.

It started as something of a joke, really. What we found at the store were snakes for kids, that when put in water swelled to 60% their size because it was not really rubber but some scary sticky gluey stuff that you’d never allow anywhere near a kid.

Oddly enough our joke worked. We’ve not had a bird attack since, although it does keep me active in the mornings moving snakes around so birds don’t wise up. Well, they might eventually, but I’m happy enough to have a few weeks respite.

What the others bought at the dollar store is not for publication-

Evidence we really WERE at the Dollar Store and actually DID buy rubber snakes there. John Conn and Linda Shotwell pose with their purchases-

Morning chat session with handouts, tea, and music before getting the hands dirty

This was my day to be taught in the bonsai studio… that a smart phone had a bubble level was in itself new, but when I put a student on the task of making a plumb bob for a new inclination on a juniper, I NEVER would have thought of this!

 

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Spring 2012 Seasonal Photo Gallery–

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on June 1, 2012 | 5 Comments »

Earlier this week five guys descended on my studio for three days of bonsai festivities. Here’s a photographic tour of some of the happenings… minus most of the black pine decandling, the wiring exercise, and the final removal of ponderosa foliage from a grafted tree. Hope you enjoy what we did manage to document-

Getting ready to decandle a black pine, concentrating on the needle count. Howard got his glasses fixed since he was last here.

Yes, we even covered proper watering technique…

Our nutty band at one of the local restaurants. A few students refuse to go anywhere but this quirky Mexican restaurant on the first day. This time we had three students from the USA and two from Canada. They all got along very well, thankfully. No deportations were necessary. In either direction.

Partial defoliation on a Japanese maple

We forgot to take a photo before cutting off the Rocky Mountain juniper foliage on this grafted tree (rats), so helpful hands put them back where they were originally.

Here’s the same tree with only two veneer grafts of a rather coarse shimpaku on it. It’s been three years since grafting. I thought the coarseness of the tree should be mirrored in the foliage, hence the weird choice of foliage. We shall see how it develops-

Cleaning shari on a juniper with a water blaster… sort of like a really powerful water pic for teeth.

Putting approach grafts on a juniper

Another favorite restaurant…

And a display exercise to finish up the session. Well, actually we saw a bonsai video after this with popcorn. There was quite a bit of red pepper in Howard’s popcorn I think, given his expressive reaction. No foul play, though, I think he put it in himself. Good times, thanks everyone for joining me!

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Developing an Unpromising Sierra Juniper Bunjin–student work from Seasonal

Posted in Before and after, Development, tagged , , , , on July 29, 2011 | 6 Comments »

This is a product of my Seasonal sessions. A few years ago I bought this weedy looking Sierra juniper, removed the field soil and repotted it into a pumice/akadama mix in a plastic nursery pot with help from Seasonal students in 2009, and styled it with a Seasonal group in 2010.

It really did look unpromising at first, but I’m proud of my student’s work. They made a significant bend in the main trunk in hard dead wood—which originally was as straight as an arrow—and wired the top branches. Then this spring we repotted it into the bonsai container it is shown in. We tried a few display options and possible companion plants in our summer Seasonal last week (July 2011), which included several of the students who had seen it through from the beginning.

It was a lovely transformation, this tree, my student’s efforts. They brought what was nothing much to something of note. Rilke says something appropriate in his Letters to a Young Poet:

“If you will love what seems to be insignificant and will in an unassuming manner, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor, then everything will become easier, more harmonious, and somehow more conciliatory, not for your intellect—that will likely remain behind, astonished—but for your innermost consciousness, your awakeness, and your inner knowing.”

The Sierra juniper at it's first styling, just after making a bend in the trunk. May 2010. The long jin on top was later removed.

25" high. July 2011. Tricky to get the lighting right in a photo that will express the back and forth movement of the simple trunk. I've never been satisfied with images of bunjin, which require the viewer's presence for a sense of scale, subtleties of movement, and evocativeness. To critique this, I think the apex could be smaller and more compact, it seems a bit loose and rangy for the thin trunk.

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