Charcoal in the Growing Medium

At our local bonsai club meeting sometime back, a couple of guys had an interesting discussion on the merits of using charcoal as part of a bonsai soil mix.  I can't remember what the outcome of the discussion was (probably more concerned about getting myself coffee and biccies, as usual) but this blogpost at Yamadori Passion may interest some of you:

http://yamadori-passion.blogspot.com/2010/03/carbon-carvao-charcoal.html

Have a gander over there.  Loads of great photos from his travels.  My recent fave is his series of posts on the tools he uses for his yamadori.  Good stuff.

Nope, nothing to do with my phone

A Twitter link from Sarah of Smart Bitches Trashy Books led me to Columnist David Brooks' Op-Ed on Cellphones, Texts and Lovers.

While the bulk of his column may not have a lot of bearing on my particular soapbox (but go read it anyway if you want to be enlightened on what people can get up to with a phone on a Friday night), this particular bit did resonate (emphasis is my own):

This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other’s commitment.

This blog goes on a lot about bonsai club activities for a reason - the knowledge I have acquired in this hobby is primarily because we sought out a local club when I started getting interested in bonsai almost 14 years ago. Since hooking up with Teacher-san and a group of very enlightened (AKA geeky) friends, my store of specialist and horticultural knowledge has grown radically. But I would never have gotten there without the baby steps taken in the little club we still go to.  So, if I have ever helped anyone out there take their own baby steps in their journey of discovery, then well and good.

TOH and I are inveterate book collectors and the number of bonsai books at home probably rivals the size of a club's library. On top of that, we have videos. DVDs. Whatever. But we have always felt that nothing replaces the ability to ask someone a question, study a tree together and discuss possibilities.  To this end, private lessons are fantastic, but not exactly cheap.  A club meeting or workshop with more-experienced members is a reasonable alternative, especially for a beginner who isn't sure of how much commitment to make to the hobby.

But the downside to any collective is evident: it's full of OTHER PEOPLE. Which could mean politics. Or personality clashes. Or differences of opinion. Well, if you don't want a repeat of your own family, what can I say?

Don't think that confining yourself to surfing the 'Net is going to shield you from all that, though. I have read many a diatribe on public forums (OK 'fora' if you are a stickler for the correct use of Latin) which make evident that backscratching, brown-nosing and backstabbing are not purely face-to-face activities. (Or back-to-back for that matter.  Hurrrr.)  I also remember talking to a Spanish enthusiast whose beef with Internet forums was that any tree could be made to look good depending on the angle that a picture was taken.  So there's always video.  Maybe in a few years' time the technology will catch up with us, but at the moment the time it would take to integrate all the media involved just to do a quick Q&A - it makes my head spin.  We do a lot of virtual meetings in my day job and believe me it's got a ways to go yet.  (And yes my patience factor is VERY VERY SMALL when it comes to waiting for software to perform properly.)

Nonetheless, I find it significant that, while the Internet has opened up a Whole Wide World to us without the need to ever leave our armchairs, the success of social media shows that we still have a tendency to congregate.  Yes, into groups.  Only our congregations are not necessarily held together by time or face, but by a similarity of interests and etiquette.  We are still appreciative of help (if not necessarily actively looking for it); so what would be more logical - or even easier, for that matter - than the accumulated wisdom of a non-virtual community, if there actually is one to hand?

Bonsai isn't the only thing I do, and from time to time on Twitter I touch on the other interests and related congregations that I subscribe to.  And I've made new friends, kept in touch with old ones, learned new things and shared on others.  All the same sort of thing that I do at the clubs I go to physically, actually.

Huh. And you thought I'd tell you about what I do with my phone on a Friday night, dincha?

What? Didn't you read the title of this post???

What I like, what I really....

... really like at all these bonsai shows I go to - if I'm being very honest - is not so much the trees, as the wonderfully quirky personalities I have met in the the past 15 years.

Lots of the people I like and talk about on Twitter and on this blog would not consider themselves as 'big names' in the British or international bonsai scene. But many of them have been growing and displaying trees longer than I have; many of them have a lot of specialist knowledge in both horticultural and unrelated areas; and many of them are able to convey that knowledge with passion and humour. And many of them are great for just standing around and chewing the fat with.

Unfortunately I haven't sought out their permission to tell you of what each of them have told me in the past weekend - for example - so no names named, OK? Let's see... the juicy bits started during the lull after lunch. Things went quiet so a bunch of us just gathered around to chat. I think we started with someone receiving a proposal of marriage from two (yes, plural!) inebriated young ladies; then on to cross-dressing, which led to gay bars in the area. For some reason that went on to the feasibility of doing a bonsai demonstration with scantily clad assistants (don't ask), then on to nude sculpture, which led back to the gay bars (we have one-track minds). Which of course went on to the television programming that the BBC lays on us - whether for good or ill - and to the TV license fee that we have to pay over here.

Not bad - from the ridiculous to the sublime, isn't it? Or not, I guess, depending on how you feel toward paying your TV license.

And no, it's not all scandalous gossip, unfortunately :D

The rest of the day was spent discussing how to correctly ascertain if one of my needle junipers is a rigida or a communis (verdict - check the big Hilliers Encyclopedia), interviewing the holder of a 6th dan in Iaidō (oh my, oh my, oh my; not many of them walking around) and receiving a wonderfully insightful description of historical vs modern-day usage of netsuke, inro and ojime. Not to forget coffee and cake, and of course, lunch. Far be it from me to attend a bonsai show and starve. *shudders*

Not bad for a day's (non)work, right?

All the Pot's a Sphere (well, almost)

One of the bonsai on display at Humbees last weekend was this rose: bought from a garden centre and planted in a pot commissioned from John Pitt.

The idea for the pot came from one of Marc Noelanders' bonsai that I saw in January this year, although his was a perfect sphere. I hadn't wanted the hassles of properly balancing the weight of the plant in order to keep the whole thing upright, so this pot has a flat base - nice and simple solution.

The quirky bit about this pot is it actually has a feature built into it for anchoring the plant with wires, as one should do with bonsai. Yup, Mr Pitt thought of everything.

In this photo, said feature is invisible to the naked eye as it is inside the pot, just above the drainage hole and directly opposite the opening. All very clever actually, but my uncomprehending questions, loaded with innuendo (don't ask - I refuse to explain), caused a great deal of hilarity among the women and made Mr Pitt threaten to take the pot away from me.

As usual, this pic has been owing the Pitt-boss for several months now, but my excuse is that it wasn't worth photographing until the rose was actually in bloom, right?

Design = science, horticulture = art?

Don't blame me if we never get to last weekend's show report - someone had to ask an intelligent question. Not to be outdone, I have to try and pretend to give an equally intelligent answer.

So here is Sage's comment from the previous post, which sparked this off:

I was at the meeting getting a bit of design advice and a bit of horticulture advice. Everyone was giving me pretty much the same design advice, and every person had different horticulture advice. Design = science, horticulture = art?

I can only speak from my experience, but would be interested to hear from anyone who has a dissimilar (or not) point of view.

On the surface, I would have assumed it would be the other way around. But isn't talking horticulture to a certain extent a bit like talking to doctors - every time you see a different specialist you get a different answer. And yet, we all view medicine as a science; and science, because it's - well - science, has to be an exact and well-defined thing - like maths, right? (If anyone mentions fuzzy maths at this point I will shoot them, OK?)

Let's just take the growing medium bit, which has nothing to do with design. Everyone has their own mix which they will defend to the death and beyond. A good friend who has been doing bonsai for over 20 years told me the story of 2 British bonsai old-timers who, in the 1990's, got into an argument over the perfect soil mix. The argument put a big dent in what had been a long-standing friendship and I believe they never really made it up, although after 10 years they did start acknowledging each other. One of the old gents has now passed away, so it's just as well that breach had been mended.

Every serious gardener that I know has their own understanding of how the horticultural universe rotates and, while they are generally free with dispensing their knowledge, I think if one combined all the various growing techniques and applied them all to a single plant, the poor thing would be dead within a week. I actually do know a person who flits from bonsai expert to bonsai expert, asking for advice on said person's trees. Said person is perpetually dissatisfied with the trees' development. Which IMO is only to be expected of the trees, after having been subjected to a mishmash of what are probably contradictory techniques over several years. My take is this: if experimenting with different growing methods, confine a single set of teachings to a single tree, and never mix-&-match trees & teachings unless you are totally sure of what you are doing (and even then I wish you luck). So if you want to test whether the pine candle-plucking vs the candle-breaking method produces better results, do one or the other on a specific tree - and follow it from beginning to end (e.g. watering, light, feeding, needle stripping vs cutting, etc). Doing a bit of one with a bit of the other is my idea of a recipe for disaster.

I personally solicit advice only from a very small number of people, each one having a different horticultural specialisation. I have known these people for years and have seen their work develop over time. You could count these people on the fingers of one hand; none of them are considered 'superstars' of the British bonsai scene. This isn't to denigrate the Brit big names at all, some of whom I've known for yonks and have been down to speak at our club several times. (Our club can tell you stories like you won't believe... which is beside the point here.) Anyways, it's about proximity and access to information - I've identified the gaps in my skills/experience, decided what sort of specialist knowledge I need to fill these gaps, and chosen the best people I know who hold said knowledge and with whom I'm in constant contact. While I do listen to new theories that come along, I only put these to the test when I've heard glowing reports from someone that I trust.

And, all things considered, it's all a bit situational, isn't it? What works in Japan where they have longer growing seasons & high relative humidity will not produce the same results in the UK climate. Which is why I still stick to Alex Kennedy's satsuki growing methods, even if newer books have come out (but have been written for a climate like California's, for example). It's not that one's wrong, it's just that is what will work best under a given set of circumstances.

The same goes for the pruning-to-maximise-auxin-and-cytokinin-effects school of thought. The knowledge of plant hormones and their functions has been around since the early 90's AFAIK, but it's only in the past couple of years that I heard of it in practical application to bonsai. And I know of bonsai old-timers/big names whose eyes just glaze over when anything this technical is brought up. The basics are fairly simple to grasp, all it takes is a certain open-mindedness, I guess.

Design is probably a bit more limited by the existing material: the tree's existing shape, the habit of that particular species, placement of existing branches, etc. And, if you're like me, I go for the solution of facility: what's the most pleasing style that's easiest to achieve within the shortest period of time? I'm not the type of stylist that will drag out the rebar and bend a 6-inch thick trunk over a period of months. Although I have a great deal of respect for those who have achieved spectacular results in this way.

Searching back in my mind, we've had club members bring a tree along for styling critique and then been offered 2 or 3 options by the resident 'experts'. The subsequent consensus from the rest of the club has generally been towards the result that is easiest to visualise with the mind's eye. The tree's owner tends to gravitate to the solution that sounds the least drastic. Whether this is just the culture within my club or a reflection on human behaviour, I don't know.

That said, how much is influenced by the classic tree styles that we associate with bonsai? Perhaps it's this that subconsciously drives how people design a tree. Then again, sometimes a tree is so obviously growing in a particular way and its potential is so easily identifiable - it does happen with raw(ish) material now and again. If this is you, then you are a lucky, lucky person; especially if you got the tree for a song. It happens. And the rest of us just go green with envy.

I will leave you with TOH's description of bonsai as an art, a craft & a science, with horticulture spanning the latter two, i.e. the craft being the real-life interpretation of the science. In a simplistic example, the science bit would tell you the plants will die without water but doesn't tell you exactly how to water them within your garden's specific conditions. The craft bit will be taking the knowledge of the plants' vegetative characteristcs, an understanding of your garden's 'microclimate', mishmashing all the above and eventually not killing your plants by either over- or under-watering.

Display is another matter again.... but I think I've waffled enough about that already, right?

OK, so the photos of the show at Humbees are delayed even more than ever. They're coming, they're coming.... sheesh. ( Personally, I blame Sage :D )

All that primpin'

All my Twittering and blogging about preparing trees for show had prompted Andrew Nicolle to ask me what it takes to get a regular-sized tree ready to go on a show bench. Show veterans will all have their own styles of dressing trees and their particular methods for doing these, so all I can tell you is how I do mine.

Only a certain number of my trees go out on exhibit at any given year. Maples generally only get shown in their winter/early spring image as I feel they are at their best when the branch structure is visible. Most of my trees stay home to either get on with the business of growing or recover from successive years of going out on show. Others are victims of marauding caterpillars and bored blackbirds. A certain degree of laziness makes me tend to choose those that are easier to prepare than others. So those in glazed pots are big show favourites.

Towards the end of January I have a good idea as to which trees will be in top shape for Spring and are ready to go out for the Swindon Winter Image show, which kicks off the bonsai event calendar in the UK. Work commitments make showing abroad difficult, except for the EBA convention since that's in the calendar years in advance and we take the UK entries over anyway. With regards to the evergreens: I keep my junipers outdoors so they are still in winter (that drab olive) colour at this time; on the other hand, my pines are generally OK for show this early in the year. By early March, all the conifers are good to go. Deciduous trees are chosen according to how much their new buds are swelling in Spring. Oh, plus flowers and fruit later in the year: Prunus mume, chaenomeles, crabapples, forsythia, lilacs, Japanese bush clover, cotoneaster, satsuki azaleas, not to forget all the flowering accent plants and kusamono.

Limescale is removed from pots (and their feet), even the undersides of the pots are cleaned. Vinegar is a good one for removing limescale. Then the pots are given a coat of camellia oil, which is by far the easiest to work with that we have found. When we first started, only vegetable (cooking) oil was available, but that used to go sticky and then there'd be dead flies and stuff sticking to the pots before the end of the show. Way yuck.

The surface of the soil is prepped by removing ALL weeds. Liverwort, algae, oxalis, dandelions, grass - all gone. I sometimes think some people will try to get away with using weeds as a companion planting, however that is a ploy that very rarely works. Give it up, dudes.

I cover my soil surface with either very fine akadama, moss or a combination of both. I try to 'weave' the moss patches into each other, overlapping them (a bit like you'd lay turf) and pushing them into the soil. That way I avoid the look of 'fresh blobs' plonked on the soil - if this makes any sense. The look I'm going for is that of moss that has been there forever.

On the other hand, I remove the moss from the tree trunks and branches. Anything dead or crispy is stripped off. I also choose pines where the new & old growth are roughly similar in size. Generally, I find that conifers that were show-ready in one year tend to carry that quality over for about 2 or 3 years in a row. As I'm in a hard water area, limescale is a problem with trees kept in the greenhouse. I use Leaf Shine to deal with this (only on broadleaf trees!), sprayed in spurts from a very great distance so as not to inadvertently damage any leaves. I've been told cotoneaster are not partial to this product; so far my long-distance spurt/spray method has worked for me.

Time spent on doing this depends more on the condition of the tree/pot than the size of the bonsai. I find larger specimens easier to clean, despite the greater surface area. 'Mossing up' stuff takes forever to do properly, so rock plantings are not something I jump on with alacrity. Very tiny pots are quite difficult, unless you have small fingers and lots of concentration.

Here's Reg prepping his beech before the 2007 EBA at Ostend. This tree has probably seen all the big shows in the UK, and a few abroad, I'd guess. Note the bottle of camellia oil and the fine akadama in the tub beside it.
Like I said earlier, these are the techniques that work for me. There may be better ones out there, and if you think you have any worth labelling 'Best Practice', let me know!

So was it a success?

Thinking about the EBA conventions that I've attended from 2005 till March 2009, I can't help but compare what I thought were 'successful' vs 'unsuccessful' shows. But with my marketing hat on, what does define a successful show? Well, in reality it's whatever the show organisers say it should be.

Bear with my analogy here. If the guys who 'own' a show say, 'well we don't care about revenue or profit, all we care about is getting bums on seats and we set our baseline at 300 visitors' - and they count the tickets sold at the door and they hit 350 tickets sold, then it would almost be fair to say that they had a successful show.

Now the display may have been crap, the food abysmal and the customers completely dissatisfied - but if they weren't measuring any of that, how would anyone know? All the stats that would be released would be around the 350 tickets sold, right?

Like I said earlier, this is an analogy. I read in the local paper that the Spanish Bonsai Association had 500 registered convention attendees for EBA, but whether any further success indicators will be released, I don't know. The tickets were being sold by the trade organiser Expoflor, so I imagine you wouldn't be able to numerically separate the people who came purely for bonsai as opposed to the bloke down the street who came to see some cut flowers because he had nothing better to do with his 3 Euros on the day.

And if I asked myself, was it a success - well, I caught up with European bonsai buddies who I only get to see perhaps twice a year at most. The cafe con leche was fantastic, the lunches at 12 Euros were way beyond decent, but the breakfasts (included in the convention package) were average at best - unless you like toast, which I don't. Demonstrations by the big names are of minimal interest to me, although I do like checking out the finished product. The suiseki display is always superb at an EBA show. The smaller demos/presentations were a welcome change. The lack of Spanish potters was a keen disappointment to me, and the prices of trees were higher that what I expected - although the locals thought it was all a fair deal. The display infrastructure was the best I have seen to date, but I will admit that the gamut of the bonsai displays did run from the ridiculous to the sublime. However, 238 individual bonsai displays is really not bad at all. Most clubs would struggle to find enough space to show the half of that. So on the whole I would say, yes it was a success.

A bonsai aficionado who walks into a display hall will inevitably think of the cost involved in setting up the show. Whether it's a 'wow how did they manage to do that' vs a 'WTF did I really give them money to see this'. The display infrastructure of the Lorca show was probably the single biggest contributor to the success of the show - i.e. if the trees are good but the display structure is bad, then the trees will suffer for it. If the trees are mediocre but the display structure is stonking, then the trees are enhanced by it. And at Lorca, the carpets, lighting and backdrops were WAY stonking. That infrastructure was underwritten by local government and the trade council, but a lot of the manpower behind the show was still provided by the local clubs.

Still, every bonsai person wishes show organisers well. We rejoice in their achievements, we commiserate in their disappointments. We feel for club members and the effort they put in to making their show a success. Whatever that success may be. Even if they have outdone the show we put up previously, we have room in our hearts to wish them well. At one time or another, we have all been in the same boat.

All that said, I would like to know (even as a mere convention visitor) that the organisers were cognisant of their expectations, that their objectives were clearly laid out and quantifiably tracked, and that some measure of customer satisfaction was taken into consideration. After all, how else would you be able to ensure the show next year would improve on this one, right?

Because you'll be wanting to take my money at the next show, and I definitely wouldn't want to spend my heard-earned dosh on something that's below my expectations, would I?