Page 61 - BSAM 2015 Q4

Top left and right; This photo of the tiny informal upright boxwood appeared in a bonsai magazine in 2000. In October, 2015, it is still only 10” tall from the top of the pot to the top of the tree. Aren’t bonsai supposed to look like survivors? This one is. Look at the bark and you can see the ssures are much deeper.
What will happen to them when I can no longer care for this small number? In recent years a bonsai enthusiast 40 years younger than I am has been help- ing me and learning. at’s where they’ll go.
If I were to make only one suggestion, it would be to make arrangements to pass your bonsai on to some- one else. A woman acquaintance of mine in Santa Bar- bara, California did this by inviting her friends over to choose a bonsai from her collection and take it home. It solved two problems: how to reduce her work load and how to make sure her bonsai lived on.
Henry Rand Hat eld, an early theorist in Accoun- tancy, said “All machinery is on an irresistible march to the junk heap.” So are we. Most of us don’t like to think about that, but there’s no sense in being like the proverbial ostrich and burying our heads in the sand. If you have the forethought to plan for a will, then plan for the future of your bonsai.
e second suggestion would be not to get in over your head. A man here in San Diego liked bonsai but had no ability to grow them. So he bought them. He paid high prices for good bonsai but had no idea what to do with them. ieves helped him get rid of some of them so he had cages made that would keep the remainder safe. He hand-watered them as long as he could but when I o ered to set up an automatic wa- tering system, he declined the o er. e result: the collection died.
I did not want to get in over my head. My skills never progressed beyond the intermediate level. Al- though I live in California where California junipers are available, I never attempted to dig one or own one. Leaning how care for a new species inevitably runs the risk of killing one or more and I couldn’t see doing that to these old trees that can live to be far more than a hundred years old.
When the time comes to pass your bonsai on to another enthusiast, you may want to take photos of them to remember them by. Or better yet, take annual photos and use them in a PowerPoint presentation if you have the so ware. If you haven’t done it yet, buy a camera and learn to use it. Digital cameras now cap- ture the date and time of the photos taken, eliminating the need to add them to the caption on the photo. It will improve your designs as you can look at your trees without being distracted by the foliage.
My wife and I have used the most photogenic bonsai—a different one for every year—on our Christmas cards. Here’s our card for 2015.
If it is kept trimmed back hard, the leaves will reduce to about the size of the ‘Morris Midget’. The small size is the result of restricted root space, infrequent transplanting, and strong pruning. The top could be shortened an inch.
Middle left and right; The other boxwood, acquired in 1984, appears on the back cover of Saikei and Art. On the right is how it looks in October, 2015.
Both the informal upright and the slant style are Buxus microphylla japonica.
Ultimately, my wife and I concluded that any bonsai materials I did not expect to use in the near future should also go. at meant pots, stands, slabs, wire, and everything except my books. ey went. If you are thinking I was standing there crying to see them go, you’re wrong. I was lled with a great sense of relief that someone else would get to enjoy them and that I would not have to struggle and stagger around to water them or put them in the recycle bin if they died.
e few trees that I kept are at the le end of our deck, take no more than 5 minutes to water, can be trimmed readily with scissors, and can be trans- planted by cutting wedges out or by coring around the roots. All of them have appeared in articles in one bonsai magazine or another. None of them are show- ready at the moment. From smallest to largest, they are two small boxwoods, a 26-year-old bougainvillea cas- cade, an Orange King bougainvillea tanuki, the top- dominant chorisia speciosa started in 1986 that I have fought with for at least 25 years, and a cus benjamina ‘Little Lucy’ clump that is 22 years old.
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