Membership has its benefits. This month’s Bay Island Bonsai meeting featured a critique from Akio Kondo, a Kokufu prize-winning bonsai artist from Japan. Kondo sizing up a procumbens juniper by Peter Tea Kondo first visited California in 1996 to practice bonsai for a year after completing his apprenticeship to Kihachiro Kamiya at Kihachi-en. Kondo offered […]
Styling
Styling bonsai gives trees their charm. Read the posts below to learn about the artistic decisions we make when working on bonsai.
Where does the first branch go?
At our last Bay Island Bonsai meeting, Boon had us complete one of my favorite exercises. He passes out a worksheet with the trunks of trees and has us draw in the primary branches and the outline of the tree. Pine, Pine, Azalea, Pine? It’s a super exercise that forces one to think about what […]
Shohin black pine from scratch
This is the one black pine I’ve started to date that will end up shohin sized. The bottom branches are off to a good start – the rest of the tree has a ways to go. I actually was planning on moving the tree along two years ago. I cut off most of the roots […]
Exposed root black pine
This is one of the exposed root black pines I started in 1994. This is the one tree of that group that I’ve planned on keeping for some time now. Of the 50+ I started, I now only have 3. Front – before Front – after Left side – before After Right side – before […]
Recent pine work
This is one of the pines I started from seed in 1994. Most of these trees were grown as exposed root style, but a few ended up more conventionally shaped. A few years ago I cut it back to one branch and one bud – these remaining shoots have developed quickly. Front Back Left Right […]