After visiting the Bonsai Collection at the Huntington, I carved out time to visit the adjacent Chinese Garden. It was an eye-opening experience! Taking its inspiration from 16th and 17th century gardens in Suzho (near Shanghai), the 15-acre complex features a large pond, more than a dozen historically-inspired structures, and twelve different paving patterns. Liu […]
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Visiting the GSBF Collection at The Huntington
Last weekend I had a fantastic visit to the GSBF Collection at The Huntington. I was in town for the Bonsai-A-Thon, the garden’s annual fundraiser, as a visiting artist sponsored by Joshua Roth (thanks, John and Michelle!). The garden much bigger than it was when I last visited (more than twenty years ago!) and there […]
Highlights from BABA and California Shohin Seminar
Two recent Northern California bonsai events – the Bay Area Bonsai Associates annual show and the California Shohin Seminar – featured some great trees. Here are some of the highlights along with comments about the trees’ designs. Black pine (The apex, the trunk, and the key branch all flow to the right) California juniper(This tree […]
Pot selection exercise – ume
One of the best ways to refine your sense of which pots are a good match for a given tree is to try out different alternatives. This is especially true for trees with unusual shapes or features. In the case of the ume below, I can use a deep round (or square, or hexagonal) pot […]
Appreciating shohin displays at Gafu-ten
After reviewing the basics of how to assemble a shohin display last week (see “Award-winning display” for details), we can begin to spot differences in otherwise similar-looking displays and better understand what makes these displays “work.” At a glance, we can see all of the elements we looked at last week in the display below: […]