Yesterday Kylie and I drove about an hour out of town up through winding foothill roads to this nursery. I’ve seen so many galleries in books and online, and I’ve seen a couple of modest backyard displays with decent bonsai; I’ve had never been to a proper bonsai nursery with significant displays. This guy has some truly amazing bonsai. the biggest and best were priced up to $3500. These are the kinds of trees you only get after 30 or 40 years of work on a plant. He had hundreds and hundreds, all different species and styles and sizes. All of them properly displayed in an extensive, multiple acre garden with winding paths and fountains… I was amazed, and the whole experience made me feel very, very amateur. I have a pretty extensive knowledge of horticulture, and I know all the basics of the art of bonsai, but I don’t believe I will be creating gallery-worthy bonsai without some professional training. There are a couple of local bonsai clubs that offer periodical workshops. Lotus Bonsai nursery even offers training, though it’s very expensive. The cheapest is around $75 per DAY. The most expensive, where they work with you and your plants one-on-one, is $350 a day.
Anyway, here’s another website with galleries that make me feel like an amateur. It’s sort of a bonsai blog with articles and galleries profiling various bonsai masters. I’m especially obsessed with this piece by Warren Hill. Watch for a future post displaying my own grove planting. (I haven’t done one yet, just plan to).
There are so many bonsai masters with such amazing collections. One of my favorites right now is Walter Pall. He did one of my all-time favorite bonsai; this japanese maple is famous all over the world.
I’ve been messing around with Mame style bonsai lately. (also known as Shohin or Shito, depending on the school) I have actually done a couple of these before; I’ve had two of them for about two years. The rest I re-potted and trimmed to their current shape within the last couple of months.
Bonsai is an art form. people have mixed definitions of the word itself, and I don’t think any of them can be considered incorrect. I would define any manipulation of a plant with the intention of creating illusions of size and/or age, as a bonsai. With that broad definition, I find myself attracted to the more extreme representations; in this case extremely small.
This gallery first introduced me to the concept years ago. Certainly, none of my own bonsai look anything like the amazing works pictured on that site. Still, I am very proud of my little beginners and I’m asking you to look at them for what they will become after years of proper training.
A micro-leaf variety of Hedera helix, Mame/semi-cascade.
A variegated Serissa foetida, mame/broom style.
A common cotoneaster, mame/upright style.
Another species of cotoneaster, mame/upright style. (I don’t know the species)
These are my favorite four. This is them displayed as a group.
besides these, I have a number of cuttings planned fore this style that are still rooting and far too young to display as bonsai. Also, at the end of my last blog post I showed another bonsai. I didn’t know the name of it at the time, but I recently discovered that it is a variegated eleutherococcus, or Aralia. That one could also be considered mame, assuming I keep it about the same size it is now.
UPDATE: I listed the fourth one down as a cotoneaster. I just found out that it is not technically cotoneaster at all. It is a Corokia, or wire-netting bush. The nursery that sold it to me had it tagged as a Corokia Cotoneaster, which I read as a common name for a species of cotoneaster, when it was in fact the scientific name for the plant. See, cotoneaster is large genus in the rose family. But this particular species of corokia (genus) is called cotoneaster (species). Corokia genus isn’t even in the rose family. There is debate between botanists on which family to classify it in but the debate is between the families Argophyllaceae, Saxifragaceae, or Cornaceae. None of this would matter much if I hadn’t been showing an actual cotoneaster, (the Cotoneaster Microphylla in the third picture) in the same post.
