The Jack Bellinger Cup

The Jack Bellinger Cup has been running for several years now as an inter-club competition, in memory of Jack Bellinger and sponsored by David Glew. Originally it comprised Eastleigh and Wessex Bonsai Societies. More recently, its scope was widened to include Solent Bonsai Society. The competition involves each society putting forward a panel of 3 trees, representative of the best they have to offer that year.

As I mentioned in a previous post, tiered display staging always poses a problem for me when photographing trees on a stand, so in some instances, I only took a single photo in an entire panel. Third picture down in this post gives a view of the Bellinger entries, and hopefully illustrates why I balk at photographing individual trees displayed this way. Therefore, taking a stab at equitability, I've only included one tree from each society's entries. As I wasn't walking around with a tape measure in hand, all dimensions given are as best as my memory serves me.

Solent Bonsai Society included this larch group in their panel of three. The tallest tree would be around 2 ft / 61 cm high:


Of the panel of 3 trees from Wessex Bonsai Society, here is a white pine in the region of 22 in / 56 cm high:


Eastleigh Bonsai's panel included a Japanese Ivy which was already covered in an earlier post.

This year's judge was Collette Harrison of Bonsai Trees Southampton, and the Cup was awarded to Solent Bonsai Society. Congratulations, guys.

I would've liked to include a photo of my personal choice (simply because I could :o), which was Robert's Itoigawa Juniper. However it was on the lower display tier - which precluded my photo opp - and getting it off the stand to the photography area would have been too much disruption for me. So I will have to content myself with a mention (a bit like waving candy in front of someone's nose, isn't it really). If I ever get a chance, I promise to update this blog with a halfway-decent photo.