Joining a Bonsai Club

I first became interested in bonsai in around the year 2000, but at the time I was unaware that there were clubs which could help me to develop my bonsai skills.

So I did a little reading and then set off to buy my first tree. At the time I wanted to keep my bonsai indoors, which meant my options were limited.  It will come as little surprise that one of my first attempts was a Ficus.

Unfortunately I misinterpreted some of what I read and it didn’t take me long to kill my tree. I cried the day I realised that, after one too many defoliations, my little tree had run out of energy to fight me and that it would never put out any more foliage.

Happily I was not put off that easily and I soon went looking for my next victim.

After a few failures I finally learnt how to keep my trees alive but in the process I put little effort into styling them. With hindsight I realise that I was no longer trying to grow bonsai, just keeping potential bonsai as house-plants.

All that changed in 2007 when I visited a local bonsai show and was persuaded to join the club.

I was hesitant to attend my first meeting because I didn’t know how I was going to fit in among a group of strangers, many of whom had years of experience, but I needn’t have worried. Everyone was very friendly and helpful and joining the club changed my life.

At the time I knew an elderly couple who shared my love of bonsai but grew their trees entirely for their own enjoyment. I often discussed bonsai with them and one discussion sticks in my mind to this day.

When I mentioned how much I enjoyed attending the club’s workshops and how I appreciated the help I got from some of the more experienced members, the woman was unimpressed. She felt I should be styling my trees on my own. Of course I didn’t let her argument deter me.

It was only several years later that I finally got the opportunity to see that couple’s trees and I hate to say that I was really disappointed by what I saw. But as I said in my previous post, not every tree has to be a show-stopper. If they enjoyed their trees, that’s all that really matters.

That’s not to say they wouldn’t have benefited from joining a club. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s keen on letting their trees develop to their full potential.

Japanese Bonsai Tree Sunset Poster

by Lasting__Impressions

Not Every Tree has to be a Show-stopper

2 July 2016:

When I first published this post in October 2015 I was quite hurt by some of the criticism that I received, but I've learnt to take it and try to improve my trees based on the comments I receive. My intention is not to reflect Reddit's bonsai group in a negative manner but merely to express my opinion on bonsai as a hobby.

For those new to the art of bonsai, Reddit's bonsai group is a great place to learn from more experienced growers. I wish I'd discovered it sooner.

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24 October 2015

I recently joined a bonsai group on Reddit. It's a great place to learn about bonsai, but you really need thick skin if you're going to share photos of your own trees there.

I confess that I've shared a couple of my bonsai articles at Reddit under a cloak of anonymity and they've come in for some serious criticism. As someone who suffers badly from self-doubt, it's not easy to read what some of the experts have to say, but I need to evaluate the criticism I've received and decide how to deal with it.

Acacia Burkei

This little tree is still very much a work in progress. I first discussed it in my post A Tree with Dramatic Curves a few weeks ago. Sharing it at Reddit brought me a decent amount of views and quite a few likes, but the few comments it received weren't positive. My Reddit readers felt that I'd made a mistake removing the lowest branch and some didn't like the "S" curve.

After reading their comments I've starting to wonder about that branch too, but what's done is done and I have to work with what I've got. It's possible that the tree will still put out a new branch there, but either way it's not going to look this bare forever. It has already put out a lot of wild new growth since this photo was taken, but I'm not planning any more pruning just yet because I want the top to thicken up a bit first.

A little tree I grew from a cutting

I then shared this article I published at HubPages a few years ago - How to Grow Bonsai Trees from Cuttings. This one received a lot less traffic, but more discussion, and boy was some of it hard to take.  The experts insisted that the method I'd used was not the way bonsai should be done, but I admitted to some of my mistakes in the article hoping that people would learn from them and do better when they tried to grow cuttings themselves.

One of my Reddit readers called it poor bonsai while another went as far as saying my poor little tree was a "horrible bonsai". I accept that there's room for improvement and have been trying to get advice on how to improve it, but that hurt.

I admit that my trees aren't the best specimens, which is why I referred to myself as a Bonsai Artist in Training when I started this blog, but I still feel a sense of achievement for what I've done and I like my trees. At the end of the day I'm the only one who has to live with them, so the fact that I like them is all that really matters.

No tree is going to be appealing to everyone. I've seen some amazing trees on show, and some of the people viewing the show have felt they're ugly. What matters is that their owners like them. Not every tree has to be a show-stopper, and I doubt any of mine ever will be.

Watching Nature in Action

While tending my bonsai trees I've learnt to develop an appreciation for other aspects of nature that I never took much notice of in the past.

Part of that involves observing the creatures that visit my bonsai garden and trying to work out whether they are going to harm my little trees.

At certain times of the year I'll come across unwelcome guests like grasshoppers and caterpillars and those need to be relocated before they can do any serious damage. As a photographer, however, I'll often spend a little time trying to get a decent shot before I move them to a part of the garden where there are no bonsai trees. I've managed to get some nice shots that way, like this one of a pretty striped caterpillar which I found eating the leaves on one of my trees a couple of years ago.

Resident in my bonsai garden are some little lizards, or to be more accurate geckos. I often see them scampering along the walls and some even seem to have made their home inside my greenhouse. They're tiny creatures - around two inches in length - and move quite quickly, so I was lucky to get this photo of one on the frame of my greenhouse before I frightened it off.

I had a rare experience inside my greenhouse today. While I was watering my trees I noticed a small moth hiding beneath the leaves. Apparently my activity disturbed it because, no sooner had I seen it than it flew off in the direction of the greenhouse ceiling. Sadly the window wasn't open so it was unable to get out, but headed to the back wall where one of my gecko friends was hiding in the framework. In a flash it grabbed the moth, but the startled creature somehow managed to escape and flew back towards the ceiling. Then for some mysterious reason it flew back in the direction from which it had come, and this time there was no escaping the jaws of the gecko.

How I wish I'd had a video camera on hand, because that's not something I'm ever likely to witness again.

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Linking up to The Ultimate Rabbit Hole, Saturday's Critters and Camera Critters.

Drowning in Seedlings

Although I've got hundreds of little trees growing in my bonsai area, only a small proportion of them are trees I bought. A few others were gifts while several more came from my club's raffle table. The vast majority, however, are either trees I propagated myself or ones which came into the world uninvited.

The last category consists mainly of seedlings that popped up in my garden or in one of the pots in which an established tree was already growing. I affectionately refer to those as my "weedlings" because a weed is really just a "​wild ​plant that ​grows in an ​unwanted ​place" (*). And once removed from the place where they are unwanted, my weedlings are free to become little trees in their own right.

White stinkwood bonsai in training

At the end of August I won the above tree - a white stinkwood (Celtis Africana) - on a club raffle. At the time the weeds were a lot less conspicuous than they are in this photo, but I chose to let them grow a bit before removing them, just in case some were worth saving.

Weeds and seedlings growing alongside my tree

This week I took a closer look at the weeds and discovered several Trident Maple seedlings growing among them. So, realising that it wouldn't be good for my tree or the seedlings for them to continue living together, I set aside some time to rescue the seedlings and move them into pots of their own.

The first thing I did was to pull out all the unidentified weeds. I felt a bit guilty throwing them away as I couldn't be sure that there weren't trees of another species among them, but my space is limited so I had to be selective. Once the weeds were gone I faced the more difficult job of gently lifting the maple seedlings out of the soil with enough root to sustain them while ensuring that I didn't disturb the roots of my white stinkwood more than necessary.

Finally I placed each of my seedlings in a makeshift pot (a plastic cup with drainage holes in the base). I now have 25 seedlings recovering in a sheltered area outside. I'm not sure what I'll do with so many, but my first goal is to see that they all survive.



(*) Definition from Cambridge Dictionaries Online

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Linking up to Little Things Thursdays.

The Great Vinegar Disaster

When I shared my post about my braided tree on Facebook recently, a friend criticised me for being too hard on myself. That was never my intention. I know that everybody makes mistakes, including the experts from whom I've learned so much. Rather I felt that by sharing my failures as well as my successes, other people might learn something from them.

I certainly never meant to imply that the tree I was discussing was a total failure, just that it could have been better and that, with the benefit of experience, I still hope to create the tree I feel that one should have been.

But the truth is that I've made some horrible mistakes over the years and some have proved fatal to the trees I was working on. Perhaps my most embarrassing mistake was one I made about seven years ago, a little while after I became a member of my club.

It involved moss, which some people go to great pains to plant in their bonsai pots. Growing moss is a very effective way to create the illusion of a tree growing in a grassy field or garden. I've rarely bothered to plant it but have been blessed to have it grow naturally in some of my pots.

Unfortunately as a beginner I was rather perturbed when an expert warned me that when moss is allowed to grow up the trunks of trees over an extended period, it can damage the bark. I've since discovered that it is quite easy to prevent this - take a soft toothbrush and gently brush away any moss that is growing on the trunk while allowing the moss on the soil to grow undisturbed.

But seven years ago I didn't know that and I panicked, eventually coming to the conclusion that I should get rid of the moss entirely. I'd read in an online forum that spraying moss with vinegar will kill it, so I proceeded to do just that. What I didn't realise was that the acidity in the vinegar is also harmful to many species of trees.

Most mistakes aren't fatal. This one was.

I was fortunate that I only killed three very ordinary trees that day. The damage could have been a lot worse.

I've since discovered that if I really don't want moss growing in a particular pot, it's quite easy to lift it along with a thin layer of soil and move it somewhere else. And if I really want to get rid of it, there's bound to be someone at my club who will be quite happy to take it.

The tree in today's photo is one of those I killed in the great vinegar disaster. For some reason I've kept it on a shelf in my garage for all these years as a reminder of what can go wrong. Perhaps now that I've shared its story with the world, I'll finally be able to let it go.

Three Trees Become One

At a recent meeting of my bonsai club one of our senior members spoke about grafting, discussing a variety of different ways in which it could be used to improve our trees.

Although I've seen several of these methods used at workshops in the past, traditional grafting isn't something I've tried doing myself and to be honest I'd probably need a man's help if I chose to try some of the things he demonstrated.

Among the methods he showed us was how fusing several trees together can help to create fat trunks quickly. I used that method to create the tree being discussed here, although my reason for doing so was slightly different.

Tree created by fusing three different varieties of Ficus Benjamina

Many years ago, before I ever joined the club, I dreamed about creating a ficus bonsai with three different colours of foliage - different colour leaves on different branches. I'd seen braided ficus trees for sale on many occasions so that seemed like the obvious way to go. I didn't realise at the time that braiding is not the recommended method of fusing trunks as it can give a rather knobbly effect which never really goes away. You can see that effect in this photo of a tree which  was already braided when I bought it.

Knobbly effect of plaited trunks on a nursery bought tree

Fortunately I started my tree with very young material though, so the effect of the braiding is not so obvious. I used three very thin cuttings from different varieties of Ficus Benjamina and braided the cuttings tightly as soon as they had formed adequate roots to support them.

As Ficus Benjamina is a fast growing species, my tree quickly reached what I regarded as a decent height so that I no longer had to worry about braiding but could focus my attention on branch development. I was spoilt for options and had to remove a few branches to prevent the tree from looking too bushy. There are still visible scars where the branches were cut off, but in time they will become less obvious.

With hindsight I made a couple of mistakes. The first was in my choice of material for the palest leaves. I had two different varieties to choose from and sadly I chose the less vigorous one. The result is that those branches will never be as vigorous as the branches with darker leaves. I'm trying to fatten them up, but I'm not sure I'll ever succeed in getting the balance right.

My second mistake is more a change of artistic vision. I don't find the middle (yellowish) leaf shade so appealing and wish I'd restricted myself to using only the other two colours. I've often contemplated starting a new tree using just those two and hope to do so this summer.

A Tree with Dramatic Curves

I love visiting garden centres and scratching around to see if I can find any suitable bonsai material. I always visit the bonsai section, but prefer not to buy trees that somebody else has styled, so once I’ve seen what’s on offer, I usually move on to the regular trees and shrubs in the hope of finding raw material that I can style to my own taste.

The tree I’m discussing today is an indigenous South African tree, species Acacai Burkei (Black money thorn).  It was bought on a rare occasion when I broke my own rule about not buying ready-made bonsai. This one didn’t come from a garden centre though, it came from a supermarket. Although I wasn’t planning to buy anything, when I saw it I knew I had to have it.

This photo, taken on 13 December 2011, shows what it looked like when I bought it.

On close inspection, I soon realised that my tree wasn’t all it could be. That nice curvy trunk wasn’t being shown to its best advantage lying flat on the ground. On the advice of a bonsai friend I moved the tree into a bigger pot and gently pushed a small rock under the trunk to prop it up in the desired position.  I also wired a couple of branches to prevent everything from growing straight upwards. After that I left it to grow wild as its structure adapted to life at a strange new angle.

Then in December 2013, almost two years to the day since I bought the tree, I cut back a lot of new growth to reveal the beginnings of the structure I was after.

In April 2014, after another period of uncontrolled growth, the tree was in serious need of another pruning.

By this time the trunk had set at the desired angle and I was finally able to remove the rock. I also removed a low branch which was spoiling the design. Judging by the photo angle it appears I also had a temporary change of heart as to what was to be the front of the tree.

By January 2015 the tree had grown bigger than ever.

It was at this stage that I made the cut which will define the tree’s future, removing the straight part growing upwards and making the new trunk grow back over itself. I also reverted to my original choice of front.

This is how it looks now, in September 2015, after another haircut and a bit of wiring. The final structure is starting to show. It’s not ready to go back into a bonsai pot yet, but it’s getting there.