Wire, unwire and rewire!

Sydney bonsai enthusiasts are lazy to wire secondary and tertiary branches of their bonsai trees. And please do not tell me that it is inspired by the natural growth habits of our native trees. A picture of paper bark tree here shows that this is not true. This bad influence actually made me feel that bonsai trees in Japan had “too much wire” and the branches had “too much movement”. There are no excuses and one has to pay for the wire and spend those long hours wiring, unwiring and rewiring branches. If one doesn’t have time for this then one should have fewer trees. I would rather have five excellent trees than fifty mediocre ones. Unfortunately, the majority of bonsai growers in Sydney prefer the latter. 
   

This week's pots

A couple of new pots this week (images above). I am pleased with the results, but there is also room for improvement. Obviously they are imitations of Pat Kennedy’s pots and were inspired by the demonstration Pat gave at one of the bonsai exhibitions last year in Sydney. Image below shows one of his pots in the process of being made.



Pidgin Sanskrit

When I was in Japan I noticed that some of the Buddhist temples had symbols which didn’t look Japanese (see the picture below). My guess was that they are in Pali, but I am not sure and it would have been good to find out.

However, recently I came across another symbol (image 1 below). This time it was in a book which said that it is ‘yakushi’ - Sanskrit for ‘healing Buddha’. I think it is a distorted ॐ (images 2-4 below) – Hindu and Buddhist ‘OM’ incantation. Still don’t know how ‘OM’ became ‘yakushi’ in Japan.



National Bonsain Convention in Freemantle

A classmate from my bonsai lessons went to this year’s National Bonsai Convention in Freemantle, Western Australia. From the photographs of the trees exhibited there and my photographs taken at the bonsai convention in Sydney last year, I could see that the standard of bonsai in Western Australia is slightly higher. It’s just a handful of trees that made all the difference. I was especially impressed by the fact that some of those outstanding bonsai were Australian natives trained in their natural growth style. It’s an interesting observation considering they have only one or two bonsai clubs and a much smaller number of bonsai enthusiasts.