Unusual Displays from Last Year's Bonsai Show

With my bonsai club's show only days away, I realised that I still have a bunch of photos from last year's show that I was planning to write about.

Most of the trees weren't quirky, but the manner in which some of them were displayed was unusual.

Ficus with hippopotamus mother and child

Acacia forest with small hut and origami giraffe

Framed juniper procumbens nana rock planting

Junipers growing on a "mountain" - water feature

Juniper procumbens nana in a bathtub

There was also a Juniper in a rusty shovel which I wrote about at the time.

I can't wait to see what our members come up with this year.

An Entire Growing Season Wasted

It's been a year now since I last mentioned my fig tree, so I thought it was time for a quick update. Sadly things haven't quite gone to plan.

It was doing really well in spring, but the leader was getting far too long.

October 2016 - before pruning

I decided to shorten it so that I could get some ramification.

October 2016 - after pruning

The tree responded well. Within weeks there were lots of new branches developing more or less where I wanted them.

New growth - November 2016

Then disaster struck. Four days after the photo above was taken we were hit my a massive hail storm and all that lovely new growth was ripped off, leaving this:

November 2016 - after the hail

It's now four months since that storm and sadly the tree hasn't replaced those branches. After some lesser hail late last year, it's looking worse than ever.

March 2017

With winter approaching it appears that the entire growing season has been wasted. I guess all I can do now is wait to see how it responds next spring.

Titanic Bonsai

Last weekend I went out of town to visit a bonsai show held by another club. The trees were divided into three categories - classic bonsai, trees in training and pop bonsai.

I just had to share a couple of images from the pop bonsai section as they were totally different from anything I've ever seen before.

This one was rotating to show messages like "Save the forests and save the Earth" and "Recycle and save the Ocean and the Earth". What a fun way to convey a serious message!

My personal favourite however was this scene of the sinking Titanic. I had fun editing this one in Photoshop to capture the vintage feel of something that happened a long time ago.

I think sometimes we take the art of bonsai too seriously and ignore the fun side of things. I'll try not to do that going forward.

The Screaming Stinkwood Tree

Among the photos I used in my post about the trees I displayed at our club show last weekend was a shot of a rather boring stinkwood tree. The only thing it appeared to have in its favour was a fairly thick trunk.

Suggested front

I acquired that tree off my club's raffle table towards the end of 2012. At the time it was sharing a pot with a young Pyracantha which had taken root in its pot, so my first priority was to separate the two trees. I took them along to a workshop the next day and, once they had been separated, I asked my mentor for a bit of advice regarding styling and accepted what appears in that photo as being the best front for the tree.

Over the next tree years I did very little work on it. Then, late last year I took it to a workshop attended by members of various clubs from my area. I had a special person in mind whose advice I wanted as stinkwood trees are one of his areas of expertise.

Although I don't know him very well he was most helpful and even did some heavy carving on the back of the tree. When he was done I asked if that was still the back and was rather surprised when he replied in the affirmative. As he was the expert however, I accepted his opinion though I was never totally convinced that he was right.

Fast forward to October 2016 and my preparations for the show. I always planned to display the tree showing the "correct" front and when I arrived at the venue, I placed it that way on the display table. However every time I looked at the tree it just felt wrong and I expressed my doubts to many members before the breakthrough moment when one member looked at the gaping hole in the "back" of the tree and said it reminded him of Edvard Munch's painting called The Scream.

That was all the affirmation I needed to go with my gut and I immediately turned the tree around to show this front:

My preferred front

I don't care how many people tell me I'm wrong. It's my tree, and to me the carving is its most interesting feature, so it deserves to be seen. Now I just need to create the canopy the tree deserves.

Use Your Imagination

I hate to admit that when I first joined my bonsai club I became so bogged down by the rules that after a while all my trees started to look the same. I guess realising that mistake is the first step towards creating interesting bonsai, though I can't help feeling that mine still have a long way to go. Slowly I'm developing a taste for the quirky though, as can be seen in the development of my fig tree.

Some people have more imagination than others and fortunately it takes all kinds to make a club. Today was day one of our annual show and there was quite a mix of trees there.

Here's one by an artist with a lot of imagination:

Instead of a pot this Juniper is planted in the bowl of a rusty old garden spade which has been wrapped with barbed wire to depict struggle. There were a couple more elements to the display, but it was too much to fit into one small photo, so I concentrated on the tree and its message.

Obviously this kind of display isn't going to be to everyone's liking. You can love it or hate it, but you can't ignore it. I guess that's what makes it art.

One thing is for sure, my own show trees look very ordinary by comparison.

Back from the brink of disaster

My last post ended on rather a negative note. I'd totally lost my way in trying to turn a young fig tree into bonsai after making a chop that I soon came to regret. My poor little tree ended up looking like this:

August 2010 - extreme chop

Under the circumstances I wasn't too surprised to receive a comment on Facebook saying "I would've thrown it away!"

It's not in my nature to do that though. My trees are my babies, and while there's life, there's hope.

But I really didn't know where to go from there. So I did the only thing I could do - nothing. I just left the tree to do its own thing and waited for it to present me with some new options.

If I'd been working with a different species, it may well have grown a new branch close to the cut, and in time I'd have been able to revert to the original design, but this tree has a mind of its own, so I was forced to work with the leaders it produced.

I would let it grow for a while, then pick the leader I wanted and cut back to redirect its energy in the desired direction. I don't believe that I did any wiring over the next five years.

Finally last week I decided that it was time to commit to what I had. Here is how my peculiar little tree looked in all its overgrown glory:

December 2015 - before pruning

As it was growing rather low in the pot, I took it out to get a better view of its structure.

December 2015 - before pruning

It had developed a lot over the last five years, but I didn't find that view too pleasing so I tried rotating it, and found a view that looked slightly better.

December 2015 - before pruning

Before going further I decided to take it for a critique at my bonsai club. I must confess that I was a little nervous as to how people would view this rather quirky tree that I was trying to pass off as bonsai material. After all, it breaks just about every rule I've ever been taught.

I was in for a pleasant surprise. Once people looked beyond the long sacrificial branches, they could see that what I had grown was a "fun" tree with some interesting curves.

Rather than remove a branch that was in a totally wrong place, it was suggested that I thread it through the first bend in the trunk to give me a branch on the side that was bare. In most cases that would be inappropriate, but for this tree it just felt right, so that's what I've done. Now that branch needs to thicken up until it's in proportion with the rest of the tree.

This was the suggested front:

December 2015 - after pruning

After giving it some thought, however, I wasn't sure that I like that angle. I prefer this view:

December 2015 - after pruning

I haven't totally committed to it yet, but if I do, I'll need to remove one small branch which is coming straight forward. For now, however, my final step was to defoliate the tree to help it recover from having its roots pruned.

December 2015 - after pruning and defoliation

I know this tree won't be to everyone's liking, but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out after such a disastrous beginning.