Marin Bonsai Club

Our October meeting featured the final Peter Tea presentation of the year. For demonstration purposes, he brought two trident maples, a cascading cedar, and an Itoigawa juniper. The taller of the two tridents was the same one we’ve seen him work on a couple times before. The other was a shorter, stockier trident that we’ve only seen briefly in prior presentations. The conifers he brought to discuss overall style and pot-choice issues.

Having seen Peter work on the taller trident twice before over the past year really helped the assembled audience see Peter’s plan taking shape in the tree. The frequently trimmed top was beginning to look more ramified, with lots of division going on in the branches, and the untouched lower branches had grown very long with some obvious thickening occurring close to the trunk. Because he wants to continue to thicken the lower branches, Peter’s light trimming this evening was limited to the top of the tree.

Focusing on an area where he had done some prior pruning and wiring, some of it in front of us back in August, Peter pointed out that many of the littlest branches were new just since then. He had already done some trimming in the intervening months, and proceeded to do some more. His goal was to select promising branches and trim out the unnecessary ones. If the branches to be kept had nice short internodes already, they were left alone. Branches that were growing too quickly, with undesirably long internodes, were cut back to the point where they last had a nice short internode length. This method ensures division and ramification in the tree’s top and diverts the tree’s energy to other areas where more vigor is desired, like the lower branches that still need thickening. To review: an internode is the distance between sets of leaves on a branch, the points where the leaves come out being the leaf nodes. Peter was aiming for internode lengths on the order of half an inch in the top of the tree.

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Those who attended the September 5, 2017 meeting of the Marin Bonsai Club were treated to the latest installment of the ever-popular John and Chris Show. Two of our most avid and knowledgeable club members, John Doig and Chris Ross are like the Penn and Teller of bonsai. One of them does all the talking, the other does all the work, and they’re always entertaining.

Which one’s Penn?

This time around, John and Chris were there to take a common juniper exactly like the ones that were provided for the Beginners’ Workshop participants and turn it into a remarkable pre-bonsai. I say “pre-bonsai” because Chris made it clear at the outset that the days of over-stressing common nursery trees immediately into showy bonsai for the purposes of a demonstration are over. This juniper hit the bench as a bushy, lanky specimen from a landscaper’s nursery, raised to be a shrub, not a miniature tree. To transform it over the course of two hours into something you could show off as a bonsai would be almost certainly to sign its death warrant. If not the whole tree, large areas of it would probably die off as a result of that much stress. Such a transformation should be done in stages and John and Chris set out to do just one stage . . . or maybe two.

Having said that, John and Chris can really work a tree into a remarkable piece of art even without stressing it to death. The first step for this one was to cut away as much extraneous material as possible to get a good look at the two solid twin trunks. I couldn’t help noticing early on that both trunks had equally solid first branches and that both of those branches were pointing in the same direction. I was sure that would force a decision somewhere down the line, and was not disappointed. Continue reading →

Peter’s “Some kind of” Cypress

Our August session with Peter Tea focused on three different junipers. He brought a Sierra juniper trunk with lots of successful Shimpaku grafts, a Kishu, and an Itoigawa. He also brought some type of cypress as an example of a well-developed tree. The ramification on the undersides of the many dense pads on the cypress were a wonder to behold.

Before proceeding, I would like to share the results of a little online research I did into the names of the junipers Peter brought. Peter kept referring to his “Kishu” with a quick, parenthetic reference to “Shimpaku,” the name I recognize for the smoother, more luscious-looking variety of juniper. I was unclear if Peter using both names meant they are interchangeable or something else, and I suspect I wasn’t the only one. Apparently, Kishu, Itoigawa, and Shimpaku are all distinct but similar varieties, equally valued for their smooth, scale-type foliage, which is universally considered superior to the needle-type foliage found to differing degrees on other juniper varieties.

As he prepared to start work on the first tree, Peter reviewed the list of signs you want to see from a tree before you start any major work on it. These are bushiness, runner branches, and foliage that has hardened off. He pointed out that with relatively slow-growing varieties like Shimpaku, you may only get these signs of vigor once a year while developing Continue reading →