It’s always fun to see other people’s workshops. Shinji Suzuki’s was well organized when I visited in 2009 – and that was when it was still under construction. Now fully completed, the place is one of the tidiest I’ve seen. Here are some more of Boon Manakitivipart’s photos from his visit to Suzuki’s garden in […]
Excursions
Excursion posts feature visits to bonsai gardens in the U.S. and in Japan, visits to the Kyoto's Most Renown Gardens, and trips into the mountains to see junipers and pines in their natural setting.
Shinji Suzuki’s bonsai garden
Late summer is not the most exciting time of year in bonsai. Most conifers slow down a bit, decandled pines are busy producing new shoots, and deciduous trees aren’t looking as fresh as they did in Spring. Winter, on the other hand, is a great time to view bonsai, and Japan is a great place […]
Scenes from a Kondo workshop
I recently had the good fortune to attend a bonsai workshop run by Akio Kondo. In contrast to the last Kondo workshop I attended, this event was more pensive, more contemplative. My trees experienced no radical transformations. Instead, we spent time making plans for the future and talking about how and when to execute these […]
Summer at the Lake Merritt Bonsai Garden
On a recent visit to the Golden State Bonsai Federation’s Bonsai Garden at Lake Merritt, a number of trees with scars caught my attention. The first is a Coast oak collected from Carmel with extraordinarily small leaves. The scar has completely healed over and how adds interest to the already gnarly trunk. Coast live oak […]
Evaluating bonsai
As we prepared to begin a judging exercise at this month’s Bay Island Bonsai meeting, Morten asked a good question. It was something to the effect of, “Is the highest scoring tree the most valuable tree?” I knew the two were closely related, but had to think for a moment before coming to a conclusion. […]