A little knowledge...

Beautiful picture? Sure is. First thought I had was must have taken a lot of skill and patience to carve that pumpkin.  Also a lot of imagination.
Take a good look at the design.  Those have got to be ginkgo leaves, but they sure don't grow on vines, don't have tendrils or little berries.

Artistically this is a great looking bit of art and craft.  But botanically, its gibberish.

I just wish that little voice in my head didn't pop an remind me of it.

Lucky find

Mother Nature can be a darned odd lady to hang around with.  Earlier in the year, I shared some photos with Facebook friends of some horticultural oddities that had me scratching my head. Things like a spaghetti squash vine that popped up in my tomato patch, or a geranium sprouting out of a pot that contained an Elm cutting.  I can only suspect that it was a seed from the compost, or from recycled potting mix, or both.  I have no real sports loyalty,so the buckeye I planted was more of a horticultural curiosity, but it is frustrating that it has put on so little growth-there is squirrel planted nut of some sort three feet from it that has topped it in a single season

.
I have Irish moss (Sagina subulata) growing in almost every bonsai or bonsai in training I have. Keeping it under control is a never ending battle. Every spring I take the culls that grew like crazy in the bonsai stock and tuck them between the bricks of the backyard patio. That's when plants that seemed immortal wither and die with in the week, often much sooner.

Some times Mother Nature is on my side, but she's quiet about it.
This common Fig (Ficus carica) is one of several that live in the back yard most of the year, then bunk in the garage the rest of the time.  Last year's winter was pretty brutal, with temps in the garage getting close to zero. Two of the figs managed to leaf out in the spring, this one did not. Thinking it was a lost cause, the pot sat in a corner of the yard behind a fence waiting for a good time to recycle the pot.  Three months later, looking for something else, here was a fig tree, looking very much alive.

Recognize this plant? Take a look at the tubers growing underground. It's ginger, right from the grocery store. Well not right from the store, the knob of fresh ginger probably sat in a kitchen cabinet for several months, until it was a shrived up old bit of leather. It wasn't really planted as much as thrown away under some newly spread mulch. Five months later its a good looking plant, and looks like plenty of ginger to cook with.

The ginger is sprouting not far from a St John's Wort bush. I noticed a few seedlings popping up under the bush, thinking they may be root suckers.  On closer inspection, it was clear that though the little plants looked quite a bit like the St John's Wort, there were differences.  What they look like to me are pomegranate  seedlings. Where could those come from? Again the compost pile is the likely source. Last Christmas time, one of the items from a holiday fruit basket was big red pomegranate. As good as it looked, procrastination is easy with this fruit-they are labor intensive! Long story short, the pomegranate ended up in the compost bin. How the seeds themselves got out of the bin in into the mulch is a question. There were five seedlings working their way out of the mulch, the one that was getting the most sun was the tallest and thickest, no surprise there.   I cut back the top growth a good deal, but left the roots pretty much alone, just washing the heavy clay soil off and getting the little plants set up in proper bonsai soil.

The pomegranate leaves are shiny compared to the St. John's Wort they had been growing under.
Their roots had made a twisting path through the mulch, then once they hit the clay soil underneath kept going. I kept some of the top growth that I trimmed to see if they would root as cuttings.

Here are the seedlings potted up. The curves came from growing through some fairly large sized mulch nuggets.  Word to the wise: always handle collected plants carefully.  The nice thick specimen on the left had the start of a nice tripod root base already in place.  One misplaced tug and that tripod become a bipod.


Pomegranate are popular bonsai subjects. The dwarf for is most often used since the leaves are much smaller the the species,   Easy to grow and adaptable, they can be found in many nurseries, not just specialist bonsai suppliers

. They strike from cutting fairly well,m and obliviously are not hard to start from seed

Here's an example to aspire to: fullsize Punic grantaum styled by John Naka, now part of the collection at the National Bonsai & Penching museum.

You keep using that word...

There is an old saw that goes something like"repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth..." Does it really work like that? What is truth can be a murky topic. As with some many things that are subjective, people tend to disagree.

If the sun is high in the sky and shining brightly, no one would argue that it is night time. But flip the radio to a random station and ask a crowd if the music is good, and you just might get as many different answers as there are crowd members. Different strokes for different folks, as they say. It may depend whose clustered around the radio. If it were located, say in a retirement home with senior citizens, you may not have many positive responses to thrash metal or rap.  Conversely, school agers are likely not going to be very ecstatic about opera or big band. Lots of factors go into what we like.

Facing the question of "What is a bonsai/" can lead to some deep thinking, intense discussion and even some hurt feelings.  Some of that may come from bruised egos, along the line of "I have been doing bonsai for 7 month and I think I'm pretty good at it, what do you mean it is not a good bonsai?"

Now there I really complicated the question-not just what is a bonsai, but what is a good bonsai? Simple definition is that bonsai is a tree in a container. That's what the Japanese words bon and sai roughly translate to.  A fuller definition might be a container grown plant that give the impression of a tree, especially a tree of age or experience. Clearly simply putting a woody plant in a pot satisfies the letter of the law-but not the spirit. There is a whole set of artistic expectations that go along with bonsai. Learning them and following them can be the hard part of the hobby. To borrow that slogan of the board game Othello-"An hour to learn, a lifetime to master".

One defense of poorly executed bonsai, most often from a person new in the hobby, is that they are just starting and they only want to keep the plant alive. You know , the old "It's just for me" dodge.  I think that is false reasoning and not a good place to stand. It's an excuse, and a weak one, and admission that the artist can not-or will not put the effort into learning the basics of technique.

Good technique is import in any art, and learning it from the get go is the only way.  My son plays the cello and my daughter fences. In both these pursuits bad technique leads to failure, good technique to excellence.   My kid's teachers don't let them get away with substandard bowing or sloppy fingering, with slow foot work or imprecise point control.  This is part of what makes them good teachers.

So should new bonsai growers be leaned on to improve their technique?  I think so, if the correction is done encouragingly.  Students in a class, or new growers at a club meeting are presumably there to learn.  One key to being a good student is casting ego aside-you may be told things that are unpleasant, will you absorb them and improve? Its easy to understand a C- on a math test-when the sums or dividends are incorrect, it's plain the math was wrong. But being told your English composition was stiff and hard to read?  That rankles. But will thinking about your work rationally help yo improve, if you take a teacher's/coach's/leader's suggestion? Most assuredly.

I got to do some thinking on this line after hearing someone mention the challenges they were facing with their bunjin style Bradford pear.  That's a tree that is sometime used as bonsai but not often in my experience, and that style seems to at odds with the tree's natural shape. Seeing photos of the tree in question, a primary question pops up-is it bonsai?

My thought is no. It is a tree in a pot, and from the leaf color and other signs it is doing well-this grower has the horticultural aspects of the hobby well in hand. But from a style perspective, what's going on here?

Consider what features make a good bonsai:

• Good root base. Roots on this tree are a twisted, tangled  mass.  Likely they were never combed out and organized at the initial styling. It may be too late to do it now-or take a lot of work.
• A trunk with taper. This is a broom handle-uniform thickness, and no real movement.  One or the other is vital, both would be ideal.
• No branching or indication of branching. One of those bonsai tricks-if the tree does not have ideal branching, fool the eye of the viewer and make it seem so. 

Right now this is a very appealing and great looking topiary. A pair of these at the head of a garden path or on either side of a door way would look super, especially when they were in bloom (though don't take a wiff, Bradford pears are not pleasant that way.) But as bonsai, not as successful.

How could a better result have been achieved-and is it still possible? If I had to guess, the style was chosen first, and then everything done to make that work. I would also bet that things were looked at top down, that is foliage trimmed, branches pruned,etc.  Good bonsai start from the roots up-literally. Choosing stock, or making design choices for a new tree have to start with the roots, then move upwards:trunk, branches, etc. Leaves are last.  Fixing this tree would entail removing roots from the bottom up, leaving only what would become the surface roots. The top of this tree has to go-an airlayer is possible to get two trees,  but the trunk needs to be shorter.  Pears usually grow in a sort of vase shape, so a sort of formal upright/broom style would be best.  Well placed branches will hide the fact that there is no taper.

A side bar discussion has to be What is a bunjin tree?  Also called literati, these tall, spare elegant trees are striking when done well-and hard to do well! As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said when asked to define pornography-"I know it when I see it" explaining what a bunjin is and what makes a good one is far from easy-but you know it when you see it. 

 My guess is that this bonsai grower saw a long expanse of trunk and though of the tall bunjin style as the only alternative.  Arguing against that stand would be that branches are easy to encourage where you need them, and that the broom handle trunk on this tree just isnt compelling enough to be bunjin, since its a style that is really all about trunk