2022 Blooper Reel
Haven’t done this for a while…ending the year with our most embarrassing images. Really, they’re often better than what we were trying to do. So with that encouragement, please watch our montage, below. Because life is short. January 2023 Bulletin Board Seasonal workshop dates for 2023 are up! There’s a waitlist for several sessions, please […]
Coin Toss Forest Design Exercise
If you’re seeking something bonsai-ish to do while socked in by a snow storm, this might be it. I’d heard of this exercise years ago but had never tried it. While it wasn’t snowing out (it was raining), I did think this was the best thing I could do with my afternoon: take a handful […]
White Pine Rewire—
A client’s White Pine was in the studio this week for a quick cut back and rewire. About every three years a nip and tuck with scissors is needed on this tree. We didn’t pick up the concave pruners for this cutback. Most of the wire sizes were 16-20, with a few branches needing size […]
Van Helmont’s Intriguing Experiment-
Excerpt from Bonsai Heresy’s Chapter 22 ‘More fertilizer, more better’ The seventeenth-century Flemish scientist Jan Baptist van Helmont did something remarkable. He proved that it wasn’t soil that built plant tissue. Van Helmont designed a simple experiment. He took a large container, filled it with two hundred pounds of drysoil, and planted a five-pound willow […]
Reworking a Taiwan Juniper
A great honor to work on this Taiwan Juniper, owned by a client of Andrew Robson’s, here in the States. It’s not common to see one of this quality traipse through Oregon. Taiwan Juniper isn’t at its best in northern continental climates. I see them throw out a lot of juvenile growth there. And lose […]
Shore Pine Display at Pacific Bonsai Expo ‘22
This one needs some explanation. It was another of my vague ideas that needed reinforcements to execute. In late spring my friend Erich and I took stock of this Shore Pine, which at the time was attached to a metal post. It’d been styled a few years back. “So. I want to make a moveable stand […]
Photo Gallery: Pacific Bonsai Expo ‘22
I hope, after seeing these 40 photos, that you feel like you were there, with us, in Oakland, California, last weekend. My thanks to Vince Smith for the use of his shots- Three big cheers to Jonas Dupuich, Eric Schrader, and their team for putting on one of the most beautiful bonsai shows I’ve ever […]
Bunjin Part IV—Choosing Material
In this part let’s discuss some bunjin nuts and bolts. Ideally, what are we looking for in a bunjin? a thin trunk little to no taper a trunk line that engages age high branches short branches What do we NOT need when scoping out trees? though pine is the quintessential bunjin, just about anything can be […]
What’s Happening in Oakland, CA This Weekend?
The Pacific Bonsai Expo! This week our Shore Pine display for the Expo—co-created by architect Erich Raudebaugh—reached final tweak stage: adjusting the tree, stand, and accent, building wooden boxes to go on John Eads truck, loading up trees for Andrew Robson’s sales table, and wondering how likely all the moving parts would align in Oakland […]
Bunjin Part III—What’s A Good Trunkline?
To decide if an unstyled tree has promise as a bunjin, we first need to consider the trunkline. We might qualify a good trunkline as interesting and a poor trunkline as boring. How do we distinguish between them? If we study an instrument, we might be told “if you can sing it you can play […]
