Jay McDonald finished trimming the Deodar Cedar he brought to the demo a few weeks ago.
Nice work, Jay!
Marin Bonsai Club’s very own VP of Shows, Jay McDonald was our very entertaining demonstrator this month. Jay cooked up a scrumptious rock planting.
The main ingredients: a beautiful lace rock foundation, one Hollywood Juniper and Jay’s special ‘Silverback’ moss.
Throw in a little Dymondia, a pinch of orange Bacopa and one tiny Tillandsia and here’s what Jay came up with:
Note the perfect corresponding ‘wing’ on the rock!
Treasurer Art Wasserman, the raffle man
Winner Cheryl Redmond
The bonsai winner and the winner artist. Good job, Jay!
Trident Maple rock planting
Deodar Cedar – Working from the bottom up.
Euonymus alatus aka Winged Euonymus, Burning Bush
Peter Tea returned to the Marin Bonsai Club for our August meeting with his ongoing program on developing junipers for bonsai. He brought several trees to illustrate his talk, some he had worked on previously with the club, so we could see the progress the trees have made.
Peter started out with a review of the trees, pointing out the differences between the Itoyagawa variety which has lighter, finer foliage and is a little more difficult to work on, and Kishu, which is identified by darker and more dense foliage. Examining the trees that had been worked on previously with the club we saw that the trees exhibited strong growth and buds developing at the base of branches enabling Peter to make some judicious cuts. He cautioned us not to over prune the trees. Generally junipers are worked on twice a year, in June and December. The months of June and July will generally show the strongest growth, and if the tree responds well to pruning at this time and grows back strongly, it can then be pruned again at the end of the year. The top might even need to be cut more frequently, but there will also be areas that we won’t want to cut at all. The temptation to cut ugly or overly exuberant growth is strong, but these branches serve a purpose for a period of time in that they may generate new growth in an area that currently has none.
Our club president, George Haas presented an excellent program on the art of collecting bonsai at our June meeting. This is a topic which has not been covered by any area bonsai club within recent memory, so most of the material presented was eye-opening for members. While many bonsai enthusiasts would not venture to the mountains collecting trees in the High Sierra, George’s description of the perils and rewards of collecting gave us all a heightened appreciation for these bonsai. And for those looking for bonsai closer to home George had plenty of tips that applied to urban and suburban collecting as well, something many of us can do in our own backyards.
Before launching into the details of collecting George emphasized the importance of ethical collecting. It might seem like a good way to jump-start your bonsai collection with trees that are decades or even centuries old and have intriguing deadwood features, but there is a right way to collect, and many wrong ways. Unfortunately with the growing popularity of bonsai more bad behavior has been observed: collectors not getting permission from property owners, or permits from government agencies to collect, collectors digging only part of the tree from the ground and giving up – not filling the hole back in so the tree can live, trying to collect too large a tree and not preserving enough of the roots and foliage to allow it to survive, leaving trash and debris behind. Whether you are collecting two hundred year old Sierra junipers or your neighbor’s boxwood hedges George enumerated the many steps of successful collecting.
The doldrums of this April’s showers were broken by the antics of our club’s own favorite bonsai duo, Chris Ross and John Doig. In their usual style where Chris does most of the talking and John does all the work, the pair brought form and energy to an otherwise common cotoneaster and smiles to the faces in the packed audience.
With his opening volley, Chris jumped right into his well-known banter about what makes a bonsai. He mentioned “emphasizing the vagaries of nature” and called the goal in bonsai “what a tree could be if it went to tree college.” Meanwhile, John, who had been in the background hungrily fondling tools, busted in at this last comment, eager to get chopping on the bushy cotoneaster before them.
A few notes about the subject matter: This cotoneaster came from John’s favorite, “secret” landscaping tree source, so it had been raised so far in its life to become a shrub, hedge, or some other large-scale plant. As is, it was a sturdy, bushy, even attractive little shrub, but a clear path to a bonsai it had not. But after caring for it for a few months on his property, and some prior consultation with Chris, John had a reasonable idea where he was going to take this tree’s bonsai potential. The trunk quickly split into two, and branches of various sizes, some appropriate and others not so much for their locations, were copious all over the tree.
John was so eager to cut some obvious inappropriately located branches off that he had to be interrupted by Morris Dailey, who asked, “What about choosing the front?” Although they explained that there is just so much that is crying for removal from this tree that it’s not important just yet, Chris and John nodded to tradition and stopped what they were doing to go about selecting the front for the tree. There was some disagreement in the audience, but one side was chosen as the front, with a nearly opposite location indicated for secondary consideration once some of the clear-cutting could be done.
With the formalities aside, John proceeded to lop off two substantial branches. The first was too twisty throughout the tree, the other was puny compared to branches above it and would never catch up, no matter how much the branches above it were to be pruned. Then a small branch was cut from among some larger ones and Dan Keller took issue with that decision. The gist of his argument was: why take that weak branch and leave so many strong branches that might contribute to a lump or “knuckle,” some early signs of which were already beginning to show? John was so intent Continue reading
