A Visitor to the Bonsai Garden

Things have been rather quiet in the bonsai garden lately. It's not that I haven't had work to do on my trees, because there's always more than I can cope with, but I just couldn't find the time for what needed doing. And when I did have some free time, the weather seemed determined to keep me indoors.

The only significant gardening I've managed recently was removing the air layer from a problem mulberry tree growing in our garden.

Today I finally found some time to get out among my trees and I got a little much-needed work done, though not as much as I'd hoped to. I removed a lot of unwanted new buds that had sprouted all over the trunk of an olive tree and tidied up my little ficus pumila, which had been growing wild for most of the summer. I removed some new branches from a maple tree because they had ugly long internodes and would have spoiled the appearance of the tree. Finally I did a bit of weeding.

When I was done I started looking for trees I could bring inside to work on during tomorrow's cricket. And that was when I spotted the visitor. He was hanging upside-down, clinging on to a leaf on one of my ficus trees.

A grasshopper clinging on to one of my bonsai trees

I have no idea who this guy is. Some sort of grasshopper, I guess, but he's far more colourful than any grasshopper I've met before. I suppose I'll have to do some research because I'd really like to know his name.

Naturally I'm never happy when I come across a creature that is likely to damage one of my trees, but when a photo opportunity comes along I'm always prepared to sacrifice the odd leaf in the hope of getting an interesting shot, so I immediately headed inside to fetch my camera, keeping my fingers crossed that he'd still be there when I returned.

Fortunately the little guy wasn't very active and I was able to take my time in setting up the shot. In fading light, however, even the smallest movement on his part caused most of my photos to come out rather blurry so I decided to experiment with my camera's video feature instead.



He was quite cooperative, and I must have spent close to 30 minutes poking my camera in his face, but eventually he got tired of my interference and jumped off the tree.

When I closed up for the night, he has still out there somewhere. I just hope he decides to leave my bonsai area before he does too much damage.