Bay Island Bonsai’s 11th annual exhibit is scheduled for January 16-17, 2010. It will be held in a new location – the Alameda County Fairgrounds – in Pleasanton, CA. In preparation for the event, I began selecting trees to display in January. In July, I put together a few trial displays to get a sense […]
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.
The future behind us
Post-Dated: The Schooling of an Irreverent Bonsai Monk, by Michael Hagedorn. Crataegus Books, 216 pp., $14.95. Available from Crataegus Books and Amazon. Before Michael Hagedorn completed his apprenticeship – before, even, he left for Japan, I was excited for his return. Hagedorn came to bonsai as a talented artist. I believed, upon hearing that he […]
Bristlecone pine deadwood
Old Bristlecone Pines can exhibit outstanding deadwood. Some of it is gray and weathered – other bits look freshly sandblasted. Here are some shots of deadwood from along the Methuselah Trail in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. Bristlecone pine deadwood Dead branch Twisting deadwood
Most ancient forest
By far the best Bay Island Bonsai field trip of the year was our visit to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in California’s White Mountain range. The slow-growing Bristlecone Pines are a marvel – and this is the best place to see them. Along the Methuselah Trail alone, 11 of the 19 known 4,000+ year-old […]
Bristlecone pine
The name “Bristlecone Pine” refers to a cluster of slow-growing pines with bristles on their cones. The longest lived of these, the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, Pinus longaeva, is native to isolated patches in Nevada, Utah, and California. Many of the most ancient cluster in the White Mountain range, east of the Owens Valley and […]