I promise, I wasn’t hanging out with any rich men in Northern Virginia. It was all cool bonsai peoples. See?

Not a single politician (I don’t consider Roberto a politician, and he was in Peru anyway).

I was at the beginning of my summer tour, making a triumphant return to the Northern Virginia Bonsai Society. I brought a lot of trees for the workshops.

They gave me a tree, what I believe is a Ficus macrophylla (or the Moreton Bay fig, a ficus from Australia) as the demo tree. . This particular specimen has been passed around in the club a few times, with no one really doing much with it. Maybe a trunk chop or two. I liked it and the challenge.

I kinda like an underdog, so I tried my best, using my tropical tree bonsai superpowers to bring out the most I could from the tree.

We start with an approach graft.

Cut it back in places, let it grow in others.

The graft….

The growth….

The cut back.

And below, my hand in an anticipatory gesture of the “Let it grow!” number, along with choreography and three part harmony.

This was the demo. Along with the work, I told the chicken sexter story (I’ll have to tell you, the readers, that story sometime), I explained what different plant growth growth hormones do (see this post: I use some fancy words to justify my defoliation habit, go figure ). I talk about my childhood trauma and how I use it in the styling and care of tropical trees in the sunshine state (not really, my trauma is manifested in less healthy ways, as it should be).

I told the story of my youth in bonsai, trying to find as much about bonsai as I could, and happening upon a website from a guy that not only grew tropical bonsai in the Great White North (coincidentally, in Massachusetts, about four miles from where I grew up), but developed spectacular tropical bonsai, better than most bonsai artists from Florida. His name is Suthin Sukosolvisit. One of the only true Masters in American Bonsai.

Anyway, I had some fun making a fool of myself on stage and hopefully imparting some knowledge.

I’d love to have the tree for myself. Maybe there will be some altruistic NVBS member who bids on it and sends it down to the FLA as a gift.

After the demo, and some lunch, we had a workshop. My wife took the pics with me in them. I think she’s biased, but she likes them.

In my element, surrounded by trees and students.

The trees got smaller as my ego got bigger.

Love a good trunk chop. It’s like the smell of napalm in the morning.

Here’s a link for the ficus trunk chop, above https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuwgSarMCtD/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

And below, a willow leaf that needed some courage….

Like a pretzel. We just needed some cheese.

Doh!

Where did the pretzel go?

Yea, of course it’s a reel. Here’s the link from Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuyRox2g05X/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

And just the video. For those that don’t like Led Zepplin.

My wife channeling her inner Jack Kirby with the wacky camera angle.

Now, we get to a cool tree. It’s a tree originally from Ed Trout, one of the last true gentlemen of bonsai. Ed had sold it to a man named Jonah Hill.

I know. Adam lavigne helping Jonah Hill work on a bonsai tree. The joke writes itself.

Study the pic just above. You’ll notice a hole in the middle of the trunk.

Below, I have a tree that no one wanted. So we are going to graft that into the hole.

I cut off a piece of the tree, a piece with a good aerial root. The red circle is where I cut it and the graft will occur.

This, below….

….needs to fit into here. that’s the front of the tree, to keep you correctly oriented.

There’s Jonah, at the top of the pic. I’m about to stick the graft through the hole. Yup. Through it. That’s Jack behind me.

This is the back of the tree. The leaf end of the graft will act as a new back branch.

We use a brass screw (use a non reactive metal) to attach the graft.

Here’s the front of the tree. I arrange the roots, artistically, so that they compliment the tree. Notice the screw in the bottom left. And my wife giving me the “Look”

To get the graft to grow faster, I remove all the leaves except the last few, and I leave the grow tip.

There is still a hole, but as the graft grows, it’ll fill it up. That’s LeAnn, on the left, who was my host, giving me the same look my wife gave me. Both of them want me to work on her buttonwood. don’t worry ladies, it’s next.

Some more pics to give you some detail.

Jonah has done well reducing the leaf size.

Just about done. We tied some aerial in place (bottom left).

And, finito!

For the next tree, and the next post, we get to meet LeAnn’s buttonwood. An amazing tree, also from Florida (like Jonah’s tigerbark), and originally from none other than Mary Madison, the Buttonwood Queen.

Excited?

That’s Washington DC. I think. Lots of converging lines and paths layered on top of each other. I posted a similar insane street map last time I was up in the area and I visited the Bonsai and Penjing Exhibit at the National Arboretum .

I was too busy working this tour to get to see the Collection. That’s ok by me. I like working. To be human is to work. To find meaning in that work is the sole purpose of this life on this earth.

Anyway, there’s room for philosophy later on in the mid and last section of this essay, so, as promised in the last post, here is LeAnn’s buttonwood.

She said it was collected (as most in the USA are) by the Buttonwood Queen herself, Mary Madison.

LeAnn is the lady in lavender (purple? Lilac? Not periwinkle, or plum, for sure) hovering behind me.

She waited very patiently while I worked through all the other workshop attendees trees and finally got to her tree.

It desperately needed a repot. I teach my students in Florida that buttonwoods need a repot every year. Up north, like here in Virginia, it’s not so important. Unless you use a horticultural heating pad, that is. (Wait, is Virginia “Up North”? I’m not sure. Where’s the Mason-Dixon Line?)

Ok now…..WHAT? (not the North/South thing, even I’m not getting into that). What’s a horticultural heating pad?!

Here’s a few secrets for my northern tropical bonsai growers. First: get grow lights. We are in a golden age of indoor growing of plants. Yes, due to the legalization of cannabis, mostly, but we gain from it because all kinds of grow lights, from full spectrum LEDS to metal halide, are available almost anywhere for cheap. So get yourself one. But…BUT..secondly: heating pads!!! Horticultural heating pads are the game changer for those that need to bring in their tropical trees for the winter (one should always put your trees outside for spring and summer, there’s no replacement for the sun and rain. None). Most tropical trees growth habits are dependent on temperature. But not just ambient air temps. It’s the temperature at the root zone, in the soil, during the evening, that makes tropicals grow.

Which is why we here in the Sunshine State don’t repot buttonwoods until nighttime temps are above 65°F for at least 6 weeks after the repot.

In sweet Virginy, this particular operation is taking place in the middle of July, and LeAnn has the rest of July and most of August to grow more roots. So no worries there for her. But I knew of a guy in Cincinnati that repotted his buttonwoods in January. He had a greenhouse and heating pads. That’s where I got the idea.

Anyway, we got the buttonwood out of this pot:

And into this pot:

We wired it, tried to bend some deadwood with the torch and steam technique (only partly successful) and, now, just to make you wait, how about a bumble bee and a moth on a coneflower?

Awwwww, ain’t that cute?! LeAnn has an amazing garden and an even amazing collection of trees.

Here’s one of the more developed bullhorn acacias I’ve seen.

And a twin trunk willow leaf on a rock (a rock from Hawaii I believe, where LeAnn hails from).

And now, the buttonwood.

It’s an impressive specimen.

You can kinda see the burnt section where I tried to bend a straight piece of deadwood (middle of the below pic. It was ramrod straight).

View from above.

The constant reader is asking, “Why are there still leaves on it?”

Well, we are in The North, and the sun isn’t quite so strong as in La Florida, so, even though we are in full summer, I’m not comfortable totally defoliating a buttonwood up here.

And the main thing I don’t want to do is to kill this special tree. We really beat up the roots when the repot happened, and foliage is what grows new roots, so I left the foliage. Simple calculus, as they say in the movies.

And the tree was collected by Mary. Here’s the last pic I got of her before she passed away (that’s her daughter Terri, behind her).

Mary was such a force in bonsai, it’s hard to believe she’s gone. I truly miss her. There won’t ever be a woman in bonsai like her again.

And it was an honor working her tree with LeAnn. Thank you!

One last tip, and I learned it from Mary. Since we beat up the roots so much, I advised LeAnn to set the pot in a tray of water. One deep enough to cover the drainage hole. This will help the tree to grow new roots. Contrary to what I’ve said before about air being important for root growth on other trees.

A buttonwood lives in the coastal saturated zone, where mangroves grow, by the ocean, and are used to water. In fact, to make a cutting root, the easiest way is the old fashioned “Put the cutting in water” method. Oftentimes (don’t tell anyone) when we collect buttonwood, it’s really just a big cutting, with no roots at all, and we place the tree into the pot, and, as LeAnn is doing, place that pot into a tub of water.

One can, as many often do in bonsai, point out the unscientific practices of bonsai people. I do it often. But I have a saying I use religiously, and it applies to bonsai practice distinctly:

“Horticulture is a science, but the practice of horticulture is an Art”

I’ll leave you with that to mull over. Quote it to your best friend and your most divisive foe. It’ll separate the wheat from the chaff, real quick.