Two Half Heads are Better Than One!

Creating bonsai takes a really long time. It also takes a long time to figure out exactly how to do it so if you are starting out TODAY assume it will take twenty years to figure out the basics, and that assumes you are busy and not applying yourself in a ‘working from home‘, civil service, tired hands kind of a way.

Having been hammering away at bonsai now for the better part of forty years I might be so bold as to say I figured this all out a while back. I often say it takes ten years to figure out which end goes into the soil. Now that’s not strictly true in a Trumpian kind of a way, it’s not to be taken literally, it’s a figure of speech which illustrates that even after a decade in the saddle one can still be susceptible to chafing. That’s another figure of speech isn’t it but illustrates my point I hope.

Sadly todays society has, by and large, lost the appreciation of things that take time unless that time can be charged for of course. A bottle of Private Collection Glenlivet 1949 74 Year Old will set you back about £35,000 whilst a bottle of Whyte & Mackay Blended Scotch Whisky from Asda comes in at a very reasonable £17.00. I don’t drink Scotch but i know folk who do and they would be very keen to point out the difference of which I would be largely oblivious.

The basics of these two bottles are much the same (a distilled spirit) but the fact is one got left in the shed for a really long time and to a connoisseur who is blessed with a sensitive palate the difference is night and day and quite possibly worth every penny. The single malt had time to develop it’s special unique character alone whilst the blended one was engineered to taste a certain way and always the same way. Long ago I worked as a printer when the use of chemicals was acceptable workplace behaviour and I burned away whatever sensitive tissues I had in my head, my nose has not really worked since and so my ability to taste at all is minimal and as a result I have literally ZERO appreciation of these fine things.

For sure I wouldn’t drink that cheap blended s**t. On the very rare occasion I have Scotch in the house it’s going to be a 15 year old Glenlivet (donations gladly accepted). To be honest my preference is for a single barrel Jack Daniels, donations of which, again, I would be very glad to receive. Leave that blended stuff to the kids getting hammered on a Friday night.

So in this respect I feel I am like a lot of bonsai folk I encounter in daily life. I appreciate, at some level, the difference between good and bad, i know the basics but beyond that i literally know nothing and have no comprehension of the finer points. What I call a good whisky is unlikely to ever touch the lips of a true aficionado who might well look down on my choice as ‘window cleaner’ or some such.

After a lifetime spent immersed in something so deeply and so fanatically it’s impossible not to develop one’s palate and appreciation but it’s far from guaranteed. I know lovely folk that have spent twenty years travelling the world, attending every top bonsai exhibition year after year who see the very best our world has to offer and getting to know all the right people but don’t have a worthy bonsai to their name or a single clue how to make one.

I guess that’s like racing drivers, you don’t have to know how to engineer a car to drive one. If you want to be at the top of the game there’s a lot you need to know about how your machine works, why it does what it does or not. That way you can relay information back to the man that actually knows how it works so he can make it better for you. That’s why racing cars are largely managed and supported by a team. It brings all the best elements together that can never be embodied by a single person and the net result is better.

Seems to me many folk have money, opportunity or both and so have these nice things but can lack the apparatus to genuinely understand and appreciate their true value whilst a lowly person lacking in means but with highly developed senses, acquired through long application looks on in horror at the flagrant waste of true value and lack of appreciation and understanding beyond some notion of smug pride, that ‘look at what i’ve got’ nose in the air notion. Remember Stanley and Pammy……

These days I don’t tend to leave home, i did an insane amount of windscreen time back in the day and unless i am on two wheels I tend to avoid all travelling and stay off the roads. I don’t drag my trees all over the place showing them off and I’m very particular who I let visit my garden. I have no interest in impressing anyone with my work until I myself am impressed and trust me I am very far from that level so I continue to work hard and carefully to improve my results every single day and if I get the time perhaps one day i just might make a good bonsai in much the same way a blind squirrel might find a nut.

Going back to my analogy of a motor racing team it has always struck me that working together is best. However finding someone I can work with has not been easy. Most bonsai folk, certainly those I might choose to work with are a very long way from me. Just nipping over to Milan to work with Salvatore or Marco is not entirely practical. I’m also what one might call a ‘rummun‘. Hard to get along with, opinionated, largely oblivious to the feelings of others and determined to do it my way. Finding anyone to work with therefore was always going to be a challenge but lucky for me I know a guy….

Thankfully that guy lives not too far away, about 40 minutes on a well sorted Shovelhead. On paper Kevin Willson and I should not get on, we should fight like a cat and a dog but somehow, after 25 years, turns out we can actually work together fairly well. Mutual respect goes a long way and as they say ‘two heads are better than one’. Considering our advanced age and history of ‘substance abuse‘ I might say that two ‘half heads‘ make one properly functioning one but that might be unfair on my buddy. Whatever, between us we can knock up a half decent tree when we combine our skills despite our differing ideas on how that actually happens.

I guess we all have bonsai trees that have spent decades on our benches. Some become special to us whilst some are just bulk in our collection. This scots pine was one such for me. It came here from Norway perhaps fifteen years ago. Surprisingly it survived and I even styled it and made a video of the process though that was never released. Ultimately I got bored with it. I tried to sell without success and in time it started to suffer a little from neglect. I just could not bring myself to love it and having spent so long looking at it, as it was, I had absolutely NO inspiration to do anything with it at all.

Sound familiar? You got one on your bench?

Nowadays I stopped selling trees like we did at one time and am just rediscovering my love of bonsai work. I really don’t want anything in my garden that’s not special. So this pine stuck in my craw, can’t sell it, too much heart to dump it and no inspiration to reinvent it. As they say I could not see the wood for the trees. So what to do?

I’m a firm believer in letting folk do what they are good at. I don’t do any book keeping, banking or accounting because I have absolutely no head for numbers, absolutely NO clue whatsoever so I leave that stuff to professionals as I do web site stuff and lots of other things. Now when it comes to reinventing a bonsai tree there is only ONE place to be and that’s 40 minutes up the Norfolk coast and so it was I dropped this pine off on my unsuspecting mate last autumn.

I can’t imagine anything worse than having to create a bonsai tree from another artists work for that very same artist. Especially when you know it’s all going to end up online for the world to see in glorious Technicolour. That’s pressure right there but thankfully my raffish mate has a cast iron work ethic, a thick skin and’s not really that bothered what the hell I think. But then I did tell him to do whatever he wanted with my long suffering scotty.

As anyone who has had a tree worked by Kev’ will know, chances are when you get it back it’ll be tipped up on it’s side. No1 item on the agenda is finding the best trunk line and inclination. After that it’s just the technicalities of how to get the branches in the right place and with a good trunk line that’s usually pretty easy. But, this tree has a problem, one I failed to deal with decades ago and now I have no choice but to bite the bullet.

Norwegian scots pine 2017. To date lots of work has been completed in getting this established and ready to work.

2017 Same tree after Rammon and I worked on it. Nothing then happened until 2023, other than a few weak branches dropping.

Now when I first got this tree it was recently collected and I vaguely remember it was a planted in a long thin wooden box that was about a foot square and four feet long. It had been growing in a crack and had a long V shaped rootball with a good couple of feet folded back on itself. The growth was pretty much non existent. Come August Rammon helped me get it out of the box with the intention of sorting out the roots but that long hard V shaped root ‘ball’ was rock solid and mostly composed of wood in the form of big thick roots. The only live root ends I could find were insufficient to fill a teaspoon. I was entirely disgusted with the whole affair and intended dropping it in the bin but Rammon was insistent we give it a chance and so we broke up the rootball as best we could, cut away a load of dead suff, shortened it all as much as seemed safe and stuck it in a plastic pot with all that ugly wood just squeezed into the rectangular pot corner to corner. Miraculously it survived obvs.

So, as soon as I got the restyled tree back for Kevin my heart sank because I could see there was no chance of potting it at the appropriate inclination. Come last weekend and with buds extending i decided to bite the bullet. I would not normally repot a newly styled tree and I certainly would not recommend it but over the years I learned a few things that make a difference and create possibilities where there was none. Sometimes we just have to pull on the big boy pants and step up. Back in the day I would have done this without thinking but nowadays I don’t kill trees because I learned the finer points and have ‘developed my palate’ somewhat.

In conclusion working together, with someone of weight and experience really is the only way to create special bonsai trees worthy of the title. However finding that person’s not easy and if you are lucky and find one in you life hang onto them for all you are worth. Just last week my one and only bike riding mate of fairly recent acquaintance dropped dead on the way to a football match. Never even made it into an ambulance and I am totally heartbroken to have lost such a lovely positive and special friend.

Keep it real folks! Who knows what is just around the corner.

Kevin had the tree tilted a little more. This is my compromise. Two Half Heads are Better Than One!

Masses of root and deadwood shoehorned into this pot. Beneath the surface is a solid block of wood literally hammered into the pot from corner to corner.

Corner to corner. There are several more like this directly beneath the surface and in both corners.

Those stumps were actually trunks as this grew in a small crack in a large flat expanse of granite.

Long overdue a repot. When you see white root ends like this repotting can take place. Roots will regenerate in a few days.

It took 45 minutes just to get it out of the pot.

And breathe ……. Sadly got the pot feet in the wrong place and it’s not the best of pots but this is one giant leap forward. There’s always next time.

The post Two Half Heads are Better Than One! appeared first on Graham Potter | Kaizen Bonsai Blog.

Open Your Eyes!

My job has, over the years, developed into something more of a lifestyle than just being what I do to pay the bills. Part of that job these days entails putting myself into the public domain. For a socially retarded carrot cruncher from deepest Norfolk with a bit of an attitude and an old school opinion on everything that’s definitely not a comfortable place to be. I get a lot of emails and telephone calls asking for advice on the cultivation of bonsai and many of those leave me dazed, confused, baffled and even angry. The level of ignorance often leaves me shouting at my screen though I do my utmost to help where I can.

“Open your eyes!“

Professionals everywhere, it appears, are often exasperated at the ignorance of their customers. I spend most Saturday afternoons loitering around my mates motorcycle workshop where the endless topic of conversation revolves around events of the proceeding week including great long and detailed recounting of, to us, hilarious tales of ignorance and stupidity. Sadly these days few folk understand the intricate workings of a motorcycle and as a result endanger themselves and those around them. When they come into the workshop for help my very experienced mate can tell instantly wether he is dealing with an experienced and knowledgeable rider bestowed with mechanical integrity or a total numpty. He and I both have an intolerance of fools.

Now before you go off on one let me say, we were all ignorant once and that’s okay. When I was little I wore nappies because I didn’t have sense not to crap myself. However in time I learned what to do, jettisoned the plastic pants and so these days I rarely crap myself. There’s no shame in ignorance, but to remain ignorant is largely unforgivable. These days there’s absolutely no reason to be in ignorance regarding much of anything at all. The internet places almost the entire canon of human knowledge and experience at our finger tips so how can anyone be in the dark about anything?

Of course the issue, as I have said many times before, is that we allow literally any WAF* to publish stuff online. Nobody has to prove their qualification, experience or understanding on a subject before they go posting their two penn’orth. Allow me the bandwidth to recount a tale I read once on a Jaguar (car) forum. The guy concerned had purchased a repossessed Jaguar from an auction. However he could not get it to run in anything other that limp home mode. This was a nice car in good nick, not an old beater. Having tried the obvious he started posting questions online and a whole host of what turned out to be WAF chipped in with their opinions.

This was, as much as it does not sound it, a fascinating example of my point and I sat here and read pages and pages of posts. Over time and at the behest of many armchair mechanics the guy started spending money on things like plugs, coil packs, sensors, fuel pumps, filters and an array of ‘black boxes’. This being a V8 there were a lot of parts and soon the bill reached several thousand pounds. Because nothing worked folk then started to question the quality of his replacement parts. After a year (yes seriously) he still had a limp home Jag’. Eventually he took it to the authorised Jaguar dealership in trepidation, expecting a bowel loosening bill at the end. An hour later the dealer called him and said it was all fixed. The bill was under a hundred quid. Simple fix, a new transponder in the key just needed matching to the cars security system. A moments job with a laptop. Because the car had been repossessed the bailiffs had towed the car without keys, they got new ones but never programmed the car to recognise them.

This illustrates the importance of two things……

1. Ask the right questions. (Spare us you opinions)

2. Ask the right people. ( Sizzle or sausage?)

Of course in our relative ignorance of a situation it’s not easy to hit these points. A little knowledge informs us that perhaps things just ain’t right but who to ask? Is a self proclaimed expert really an expert or just someone who talks a lot? Go into my mates bike shop and ask the wrong question and he might throw you out the door on your ear. A few weeks back a youngster came in on his little 125 and asked for a new tyre. When asked what size he said “ I don’t know, you got a tape measure, I’ll go measure it.” He got chucked out right there, no tyre and no explanation. That just proves ‘the customer’s always right‘ to be a crock of shite. My own approach to customer service and education is perhaps a little more generous…. sometimes.

Trying to keep your end up. Sounding smart, intelligent, informed, knowledgeable or experienced in front of a genuine expert is a fools errand and best avoided. My own approach is always to plead ignorance and ask for help. I then listen hard, accept and act accordingly. In many things I have a little experience but with the exception of bonsai and motorcycles i’m no expert, and even then I have more to learn than I currently know. In general experts are happy to share what they know when approached with respect. However phone a guy at 10pm when he’s half cut and start spouting off about what you know and who you know and how brilliant you are or waste an hour of a guys time right when he’s insanely busy and you can justifiably expect a metaphorical bleeding earhole.

I could go on about this ALL day. These things ARE important but sadly ‘social’ media has given a lot of folk a sense of entitlement when approaching knowledgeable folk. Seeing as it takes a minimum of 10,000 hours relentless practice to master even a simple discipline we should respect folk who have put in the hours and be very grateful for any help. Keep questions short and to the point, refrain from trying to ingratiate oneself into favour and listen to the answer. Then offer sincere thanks, be polite and finally offer to send lots of free money. Experts have spent a lot of their lives learning through great effort and sacrifice and it’s the height of disrespect to simply expect to receive the benefit of their hard earned wisdom just because you feel entitled and that’s all I have to say about that.

So in relation to helping folk ask the right question of their chosen expert, and this relates to most things……

Open Your Eyes!

Let me offer the following example. It’s early spring and today is sunny and warm, the first day of the year to be so. Walking amongst my trees at first light today I noticed something about all the scots pines (pinus sylvestris). Some are still asleep, some are waking up and some are romping away. Thankfully none are dead! So why are the trees all at different stages considering they are all outside in the same yard? Overall the answer is VIGOUR. A strong tree will be raring to go in spring and with all it’s ducks in a row will begin growth early but the old tired sad sack of a tree that’s been neglected or abused will not.

My advice has always been do not go to the internet for answers before you Open Your Eyes! See what you are looking at and think it through. For this you need some peace and quiet both externally and internally. That’s why I was outside at 5am and that’s why I smoke stogies. Some significant skills lacking in a few folk I speak to are focus and an ability to shut up. Put simply there is just too much noise out there. To make great bonsai we need focus, focus, focus, quiet, quiet and more quiet. A lot of the time we instinctively know the answers we seek but learning to extricate what we need is, yet again, something we have to learn by working at it.

So here are a series of photographs, all taken this morning, of scots pines in my garden. I have put a few notes alongside each to explain what’s to see. Notice these go from absolutely no movement whatsoever to displaying significant early season growth.

Enjoy!

No movement whatsoever, small buds and poor colour. Long neglected tree in dire need of repotting and good cultivation to restore vigour over the coming years. Too early to repot. Unresolved this tree will become even more leggy and begin dropping branches. It’s a customers tree 😉

Strong early candle extension and significant back budding. This tree was previously weak following excess pruning and the use of a shallow bonsai pot years too early. Following work to restore vigour this tree is on an upward trajectory.

Nice even growth of good colour. Good consistent needles that are not too small, early season activity and lots of flowers show this tree is strong which is just as well as it has a good way to go yet. Top to bottom the growth is the same indicating good balance. Lots of back budding thanks to high vigour and correct pruning.

Incorrect pruning has weakened this tree and resulted in overly large needles that have been cut further weakening it. ‘Work’ has been done to reduce needle size but that’s inappropriate for this tree which still needs significant development of it’s secondary branch density.

Recently weak but recovering. Nice even growth and bud formation. This years needles will be much better than last. This will need a re-pot next year to keep progress moving forward.

Beautiful even dense growth on a ramified tree in good balanced condition with strong early activity. Just right!

Neglect papered over with inappropriate wiring makes this tree appear something it’s not. No signs of life and very poor colour in places hint at bad pruning practice and long overdue a repot. A pig wearing lipstick is still a pig.

Even top to bottom, early growth, perfect colour and masses of back buds. No wire and holding itself in place. A mature scots achieved following decades of correct pruning and cultivation, the tree was never wired, this is purely scissor work and patience over the better part of 50 years.

Low vigour, poor needle growth last year and scrappy uneven buds late starting. This tree has minimal density and foliage so will struggle to develop the foliage mass required to build real vigour. Careful considerate cultivation and patience should see this improve year on year.

Overworked but this tree is SOOOO strong it’s a Pitbull. This summer back buds will appear everywhere, growth will be huge but needles will be small as the density is coming along very fast. There’s an incredible pot of roots on this one. Sometimes, if a tree is strong we can take a liberty or two.

A strong tree but under developed. Early days but everything is in place for the right things to happen. Hopefully this years needles will be big and lead to ever more vigour.

A gratuitous update of this monster scots worked in conjunction with Kevin Willson. We didn’t loose a single needle and growth is really early showing exceptional vigour considering how little time this has been under bonsai cultivation. SEE THE VIDEO

Further hints and tips on pine cultivation……

* WAF – Wind assisted f***wit

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