Presentation by Bill Valavanis

 Earlier this month, I attended a presentation and a critique session by Bill Valavanis from the US. He is a well-known figure on the international bonsai scene. He has been doing bonsai for 50 years and has a long list of achievements. His presentation was informative and thought provoking, but not in a big way. There was a bit of self-advertising, but to me, when someone is presenting their bonsai credentials, it always comes down to five words: “show me your best tree”. He probably has some amazing bonsai in his collection, but he hadn't to showcased them well in his presentation. I think his presentation barely scratched the surface of his bonsai knowledge and I would definitely want to learn more from him. He studied bonsai in Japan and for me, the most interesting aspect of his presentation were occasional insights into Japanese mentality and values pertaining to bonsai.

Sydney Bonsai Spectacular

Last weekend, I saw an exhibition called Sydney Bonsai Spectacular held at Merrylands RSL. This was a joint effort of Sydney’s ten bonsai clubs. It was an interesting show. My favorite tree is shown below. In the past its trunk had no taper. Its owner split the trunk from the bottom and created a shari around the split area. It was a risky move, but it really paid off. It produced desired taper and added a lot of interest to the trunk.

There were quite a few trees with superb potential, which could have been turned from ‘good’ to ‘great’ by a simple change of balance in the branches or just by a greater amount of regular bonsai care. The exhibition also featured a few suiseki some of which are shown below.

 

Vintage Chinese pot



I bought a vintage Chinese bonsai pot. The previous owner Dorothy Koreshoff had it for a long time. According to her it is an imitation of Kanton green ware produced somewhere in northern China. It was certainly a mass-produced flower pot of its day. However, this pot tells a story. I instantly fell for the wonderful dragons-and-clouds decoration and beautiful running glaze forming tears all around the base (arrow 1, picture below). In fact, the glaze ran so much that the pot’s feet got completely stuck to the kiln shelf and had to be broken off (arrow 2), which probably was a normal practice. I know that the pot is old because it is wood-fired and mass-produced pottery in China is not wood-fired for many decades. The gloss on the inside surface of the pot (arrow 3) is molten wood ash. Also, only wood-firing produces flashes on unglazed surfaces. The flashing shown at (arrow 4) actually happened because another smaller pot was fired inside this pot. The weight of this smaller pot made the bottom of the big pot sag and it slightly distorted its whole form. All this makes this pot very unpretentious and reminds me of Yanagi Soetsu’s unknown craftsmen and the Mingei movement. The pot has no artist's mark. I also know how this pot was actually formed. The creases on the bottom of the pot shown at (5) indicate that the pot was formed by pressing a slab of clay into a mold. If the pot is old enough the mold could have been made of wood and not plaster. Now, you know what I mean when I say this pot tells a story.

Annual Exhibition of Bonsai Society of Australia 2011

Once again, I go to the Annual Exhibition of Bonsai Society of Australia. Same place different year. There were very few trees of interest to me. My favorite was the tree shown above. I could see only the demonstration by Pat Kennedy. He showed how to make a free form bonsai pot by making a plaster mold and pressing a clay slab into it. The demonstration was novel, informative and useful. The other demonstrations were by Joy Morton from New Zealand and Pham Bao Khanh Linh.

The funniest reference to bonsai

From this year’s Father’s Day catalogue of Shaver Shop.

Latest bonsai pots

Last month I had a few bonsai pots fired. See the photos below.

Round, 12×10 cm, unglazed, wood fired.

Left image - round, 20.5×7 cm, chun glaze, wood fired (sold).

Right image - hexagonal, 11.5×7 cm, celadon glaze, wood fired.

 

Top left immage - oval, 19×17.5×8 cm, tomato red glaze, electric kiln.

Bottom left image - oval, 28×23×6.5 cm, white glaze, wood fired.

Right image - square, 10×16 cm, unglazed, wood fired (sold).

P.S. For more info on wood-fired kilns see: http://lomov.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/during-recent-trip-to-canberra-with.html



Bonsai exhibition of Illawarra Bonsai Society

Last weekend, I went to the bonsai exhibition of Illawarra Bonsai Society. It is a very active group of bonsai enthusiasts and this year they held their exhibition in a new venue – Sutherland District Trade Union Club. The photos above show some of the better trees. 
 

Another event I attended this month is was Gardening Australia Expo at Rosehill Racecourse organized by ABC TV. Bonsai was represented by just one nursery. The only plants that caught my fancy were Tillandsias (see the photo below). There was also a good choice of reasonably priced gardening tools.

The annual exhibition of Bonsai Society of Sydney

I mentioned the exhibition of Bonsai Society of Sydney in my last entry, but didn’t say anything about it. First of all, there was a handful of decent trees like the one shown in the picture above (25 years old, 7 years in training). Secondly, it had a strong ikebana presence. In Japan ikebana is bonsai’s big brother and their history is intimately intertwined. 

There was an ikebana display and demonstration as well as calligraphy and origami demonstrations. All this gave this exhibition a genuine Japanese flavor, which was a good change. Unfortunately, an average bonsai grower in Australia doesn’t care much for the historical and cultural context of bonsai. This exhibition attempted to expose us to some of this context.

Bonsai demonstration by Hiroyoshi Yamaji

Last weekend, I saw a demonstration by Hiroyoshi Yamaji at the annual exhibition of Bonsai Society of Sydney. Hiroyoshi Yamaji is a bonsai grower from Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture. This prefecture is Japan’s largest producer of pine bonsai and they have been doing that for more than 200 years. Hiroyoshi Yamaji specialises in field grown Japanese Black Pine, Nishiki cultivar of Black Pine, Red Pine and Trident Maples. The pine trees are grown in the soil with lots of granite rock. It provides very good drainage. The pines in the field are dug out and root pruned every three years. The main finished products are two, five and ten-year-old pine trees. He also grows young miniature pines in pots, which are increasingly popular at the moment in Japan.
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So, what’s a guy like Hiroyoshi Yamaji doing at the exhibition of Bonsai Society of Sydney? Well, the purpose of his demonstration was to promote the 11th Asia-Pacific Bonsai and Suiseki Convention and Exhibition held in November this year in Takamatsu, Japan. He was doing it on behalf of the government of Kagawa prefecture and the exhibition of Bonsai Society of Sydney was a suitable marketing opportunity.

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Anyway, it was a lucky opportunity for a Sydney bonsai community too. He was asked to style an awkward looking procumbent juniper grown in a pot for about 25-30 years. He started with assertive ‘blind pruning’ to unclutter the foliage. It allowed him to see the branch structure and decide on the tree design. After that he wired and positioned main branches. One of the less common techniques he used was branch splitting. It involved splitting a 20 mm thick branch along its length into two equal halfs and wiring them in two different positions. The exposed wood was sealed with cut paste. While styling the tree, he was also quite conscious of propagating bonsai stock. For example, instead of cutting a branch he would wire it to the ground for a chance to take root and creating another tree.
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The demonstration was only two hours and Mr. Yamaji has done quite well by producing a well-designed bonsai-in-training from material with limited potential (see the photos above).

Trident Maple fuced trunk

Last year, I came up with an ambitions idea of growing a large fused trunk Trident Maple, but I didn’t have the material to do the project, so, I started from scratch. In June 2010, I got the seeds from my bonsai teacher, put them in the fridge for a couple of weeks before sowing them in July. They germinated at the end of August (see the picture below).

 

One lesson I learned from this exercise is not to sow the seeds too densely. You can see from the image above that although the seedlings look quite healthy, they were not as tall as I hoped them to be.

What I did with some of the seedlings this month to kick-start the trunk fusion is self-explanatory from the images below.

Olive yamadori

Last month, I participated in an ‘Olive Dig’ organised by my bonsai club. Spent most of the time digging out the specimen shown above. It is an African Olive (Olea europaea africana). For scale: the height of styrofoam box in the image on the right is 20 cm. Speaking of olive yamadori. Last month, my sister was visiting Baku, Azerbaijan and took a picture of the European Olive tree (Olea europaea) shown below. This tree was 150 years old when it was translocated to a busy city square and become its focal point.

 

Street trees of Tokyo

It has been one-and-a-half years since my last trip to Japan, but I still feel compelled to blog about it. Not sure if it is a good sign, but I am going to do it anyway.

When in Japan, you don’t have to be a horticulturist to notice that they spend a lot more time looking after their street trees. Some of them just stop you dead in your tracks. The photo above on the left shows an old plum tree featuring large areas of exposed wood on its trunk. The photo above on the right shows a painstakingly manicured Black Pine outside a private gate. Even trees looked after by the local government are impressive. Below are a few examples. The photo on the left shows bamboo used as road side planting. I am not sure what species it is, but most of them are ‘runners’ or ‘clumpers’ and will involve a bit of maintenance to keep them as they are on this picture. The photo in the center shows a pine trained into a pleasing shape, which also allows the passage of street cables. The photo on the right shows a deciduous tree, which has been carefully pruned every year to maintain a compact crown in one of the busy streets of Tokyo.

Gate-shading pine - Mon Kaburi

When I was staying in Ueno, Tokyo last year, I went for a stroll to explore the surrounds and was blown away by the density of temples in the area. There was practically a temple every fifty meters. Later, I learned that this relatively small area boasts 92 temples. Many of them are small though. In one of them I saw the most amazing gate-shading pine (mon kaburi). One long branch of this three stretched all the way from the temple to the front gate (photo 1) while the other long branch stretched across the entire front side of the temple (photo 2). Old branches of the pine were covered with moss and the tree trunk was ancient.

Visit to Bonsai Farm, Melbourne

Last week, I visited ‘Bonsai Farm’ nursery in Melbourne and had the most delightful conversation with Lindsey Farr. We talked about vintage bonsai pots and about the future of international bonsai. I bought his ‘’World of Bonsai’’ DVD’s, which was the main reason for my visit. I saw some nice trees there and generally got a good vibe from the place.

I kept thinking about the future of bonsai on the flight home. What are the possible directions for new development? To me, bonsai is primarily a form of sculpture. The fact that it employs some of the most complex artistic media (live plants) is important as well because it restricts the subject of bonsai as artistic work. The subject of bonsai is always a plant. There are bonsai or penching which look like a dragons or Chinese characters, but they still have to look like plants. A bonsai artist is a sculptor who has no choice, but to make statures of trees and nothing else. Trees come in many forms, but this variety is finite. Chinese and Japanese artists exhausted all these forms in the last two thousand years. Masahiko Kimura made a successful attempt to incorporate elements of abstract art, but how far can you go down that road? Can we have a bonsai tree that doesn’t look like a plant? 

Moving away from traditional bonsai pot forms is another direction for the future. You can’t make your bonsai tree look like a ‘couch’, but you can make a ‘couch-shaped’ bonsai pot and your bonsai tree may look quite novel in it.Thinking further outside the box: combining bonsai with objects other than rocks and containers. Here is the food for thought, because these objects can be an exquisite art in themselves and they are not going to be restricted in their form by anything...

Demonstrations by Peter Adams, Sydney 2011

Last weekend, I attended a couple of bonsai demonstrations by Peter Adams from America. He is great at painting bonsai trees and sketching different design options for trees. He has an acute artistic sense and a refined taste for bonsai and bonsai pots. He is trained as a professional artist and his abilities would be rather common in the artistic circles. However, they are rather rare in the bonsai community and he takes full advantage of it. Below, are Peter’s drawings of three different design options for a particular tree.  

He can be a harsh critic of something when he speaks in generalities and at the same time hypocritically mellow in his opinions when it comes to specifics. For example, he would look at a mediocre tree and say it is wonderful not to offend the owner. I know that they call it good people skills, but it made some people in the audience think that mediocre trees are wonderful.

He had a career of growing bonsai, which allowed him to accumulate a wealth of horticultural knowledge. Sharing it with the audience was good learning.

The organisers of these demonstrations provided him with the world class bonsai material, however a tree with a tremendous potential is not always the best candidate for a spectacular demonstration. Therefore, there were no amazing transformations. Below, are the before and after pictures of the tree, which is the subject of the three design options drawings shown above.

Peter Adams also showed us some photos of his bonsai collection in the US and I was a bit disappointed. The trees were decent, but none of them had the ‘wow’ factor.

Overall, I did learn quite a few things and it was well worth it.

For a blog post about Peter Adams' demonstration in Sydney in 2009 go to: http://lomov.blogspot.com.au/2009/07/peter-adams-workshop.html

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.

The best of fall 2011

I was doing an autumn clean up in my garden and found a few treasures. On the image top to bottom left to right: oak, birch, gingko, maple.

Mushi taji

When I visited Japan last year, I was puzzled by small straw mats tied around tree trunks (see the image above). Is this a horticultural technique? Is it a religious custom? Or is it just a garden ornament? I stumbled across the answer in a wonderful book on Japanese gardens by Motomi Oguchi. This straw mat is called mushi taji. It is put in autumn when insects descend from the canopy down the trunk to the ground for overwintering. Mushi taji tricks insects to overwinter in it and at the end of winter it is burnt. A more elaborate version of it, called fuyugakoi, is used in colder parts of Japan to protect the trees from frost and retain moisture in the soil, in addition to pest control. Fuyugakoi can be quite decorative as well.

Bonsai Study Group Show

Yesterday, I saw exhibition of the Bonsai Study Group at West Pymble Community Hall. It was a relatively small show with the emphasis on small bonsai. For me, the highlight of the exhibition was Pat Kennedy’s bonsai pots stall. Bonsai in Australia may have a long way to go, however we already have high quality locally made bonsai pots. The photo of Chrysanthemum is just random.

New wood-fired pots

A couple of pots that came out from the last month’s wood-firing. This time I prepared the glazes myself. The pot on the left is 12.5 × 11 cm, unglazed with natural ash.The pot on the right is 16 × 7 cm, celadon glaze.

P.S. For more info on wood-fired kilns see: http://lomov.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/during-recent-trip-to-canberra-with.html

Perth: Lee's Bonsai World vs. Miss Luong's Kitchen

Is it just me or there is a bit of a competition for advertising space here? And who painted the mural Miss Luong or Mr. Lee?

Worst possible introduction to Bonsai

I found it at last – the worst possible introduction to bonsai. It is an American product called “Miniature Indoor Bonsai Tree Garden”. I like it because it is wrong in so many different ways! It starts with a ridiculous name and then goes on to tells us that “This box contains one tub of miniature tree seeds pre-planted in a specifically formulated growing medium, plus a dwarf terracotta pot, a propagating cover and suitable compost.” So, that’s how it works!

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(MINIATURE TREE SEEDS) + (DWARF TERRACOTTA POT) = (MINIATURE INDOOR BONSAI TREE GARDEN)

Now that we are armed with the secret bonsai formula, how can we go wrong?

Bonsai Show of Nepean Bonsai Society

Today, I saw the annual bonsai show of Nepean Bonsai Society held at Penrith PCYC. There were a couple of modest trees, but the display of miniature bonsai pots from the collection of John Marsh stole the show. The photographs say it all.

Another pot

Last Christmas holidays, I missed playing with clay so much that one day I just sat and started hand-forming a small bonsai pot. It took long to get it fired, but the result is pleasing.

Mediocrity strikes back / New hope

Last Sunday, I visited the annual exhibition of the Bonsai Society of the Central Coast held at Gosford City Arts Centre. I’ve never been to their shows and this exhibition disappointed me. All trees were mediocre and uninspiring. Some trees were untidy and not properly prepared for the exhibition. Some trees exemplified bad horticultural practices. Some rather average trees were labeled as winners of past exhibitions, which indicated that the society rewards mediocrity.

To me the highlight of the visit was the Japanese garden outside the centre. It possesses a certain charm (see photos) and it has a tremendous potential for further refinement. The pavilion and the pond bridge are the star performers in the garden. It also features a nice tea-garden style arbour and a couple of decent stone lanterns. The most obvious area for improvement is the dry garden.

Termite factor

Last month, I visited Australian Northern Territory and was keen to see examples of naturally dwarfed plants in tropical savanna. It was a wet season, the time when many plants undergo a period of rampant growth. Very familiar young eucalypt trees boasted very unusual one-foot-long leaves. However, I did observe an unexpected natural force which can suppress plant growth even at this time of the year. Termites. The tree on the picture is stunted because it is virtually growing on a termite mound. Whenever any part of this tree dies due to heat, wind, insects, fungi, virus or bacteria it is immediately consumed by termites. I have a feeling that both the tree and the termite mound are quite old. From the trunk line we can see that its apex died back a few times and one of the side branches grew to be the new tree top.

Backyard clay

I had to dig a few holes in my backyard to put up a shade cloth frame over my bonsai shelves. The top soil layer was quite thin and underneath I found a very fine and pure brown clay. This is Wianamatta Shale clay characteristic to Sydney’s Cumberland Plain. I saved a small lump and used it to make a tea bowl shown in the picture. The shrinkage was nearly 30%, so the bowl turned out to be smaller than I expected. I fired it to earthenware temperature with clear glaze to preserve the original colour of the clay. The result was beautiful and quite similar to red raku ware (aka raku yaki). It also would have been not unlike the red clay ware (shudei) of Tokoname if it was burnished and not glazed.