We had a good turnout at Shirley's. Glenn advised on over 40! trees; nursery stock, recently worked nursery stock, more refined trees, etc. He had to shift gears so many times with so many species and levels of trees, mind boggling. Brenda's shohin trees are looking great, especially the olive on the right. The downward angle is not adequate but if you look closely at the trunk base, it is very wide and has a very pleasing angle from the trunk to the soil all the way around. It will be ready for showing soon. The tree on the left will be a very nice mame. Abe's salsa fresca. Great stuff. Nancy and Glenn starting the process on a new tree. Janice's incredible olive. This apple came in very tall. It was evaluated for shohin or chuhin. It could have gone either way but was chosen to be a chuhin. Eric and Glenn strategizing over a Ficus with big trunk and great taper. Ken's exquisite (fancy word meaning cool looking) Juniper. Beautifully jinned branches. The juniper at Nazim's shoulder came in as a bush and left.... ...as a shohin. The original plant was healthy and had very good lower and inside branching. This and the lower trunk movement made it a great candidate to become a shohin.
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One of the shohin group members found this Morten Albek article on shohin display.
http://www.shohin-europe.com/DISPLAYartickles-settingupthedisplay.htm The 2016 California Shohin Seminar was a great success. Over 200 people in attendance plus day visitors. Many fine vendors were showing their wares with the emphasis on shohin, of course. Ted Matson put together a phenomenal show of shohin displays. An entire room of only shohin. If you get the chance to go in 2018....GO!
Since we are doing a pot selection and tree positioning presentation at the February meeting, here is a timely post on Jonas Dupuich's site, Bonsai Tonight. http://bonsaitonight.com/
A group of shohin members went to Peter Macasieb's on November 14th. We worked on our shohin and a few small sized bonsai trees. Peter showed us how to create the beginnings of shohin "yamadori". See next photos. So, what is shohin yamadori? It is the same as any yamadori, a tree collected from the wild. One cannot find twisted pines and junipers that are shohin sized. Well at least they are very, very rare. A technique was created years ago to create the bending and twisting associated with the older, larger trees inorder to mimic trees that have been manipulated by nature for centuries. Peter has used and refined this technique and created many of his own. The big tree below is from Carson Pass at 8,000'+ in the Sierra's. This is what you find all of the time. This tree is about 4-5' tall and the trunk and exposed roots are about 8-9' long. A skosh big for a shohin pot. What appears to be roots growing down from the top of the tree are actually branches that took a header into the ground as the tree slowly fell over. Back to sea level. Before and after photos below. The tree was double wrapped with raffia. Then 3mm wire was pushed up through the bottom of the pot right next to the trunk. Enough wire remained out of the bottom of the pot to be able to bend it across the bottom and up the side about 1". This secures the wire. Then the trunk is wired clockwise. Using fingers and jin pliers, the tree is bent and twisted clockwise to help tighten the wire. While twisting and bending, you also need to be pushing down to help tighten the "coils" being created. This shortens the tree considerably. There are refine movements within the technique which need to be shown. A written description is toooooooo long. The process below took experienced hands about 10-15 minutes.
This is a another Shimpaku created by Peter. This technique reduces the size of the trees. Sometimes the highly twisted areas are eventually hidden by foliage, and if the areas are twisted tightly enough, the twists will grow together creating a larger trunk. Again, this is a technique that is better shown than described. There is more to the technique than what is described here. Below is an Olive sequence but you have to use some imagination since they are different trees, yet are similar. Top left: Scruffy with good bud breaks. Top right: More developed. Cutting back new shoots also causes more back budding. It is getting very bushy and strong. Bottom left: Main branches have been selected and others pruned out. Branches wired and cut for ramification. Not a good photo. Lacking good background. Sorry. Bottom right: A few years of training. Main branches allowed to extend a bit and cut for more ramification. Tree is opened up by thinning and wiring, and is now showing a little of age. This tree could be displayed at our show and it did not take that long to create. The Bonsai Tonight web site has a nice photo sequence for the early development of a Coast Redwood. Then below that are photos of Gordon Deeg's shohin and bonsai. Click on any of the photos in the "New Growth on Redwood Bonsai" sequence and you will get nice, larger photos that you can scroll through. The same for the "Coast Redwood Branch Refinement" and the Shohin/Bonsai Garden photos. The detail is very clear.
http://bonsaitonight.com/ One of the shohin group members found this on Morton Albek's web site. It is an excellent approach to creating better roots and nebari on shohin. This is the same technique with a tile we that we did 2 years ago, just on a smaller scale. If you use a convex object, aka a rounded object, the roots will follow the top of the rounded object and a gentler downward curve will created. The big decision is how big should the object be to accommodate the size of the tree
http://shohinblog.com/2012/04/11/growing-better-shohin-roots-and-trunk/ REMEMBER, the Shohin Seminar in Santa Nella opens its registration on October 30th. An interesting article by the Bonsai Society of San Francisco found by Eric. http://www.bssf.org/project/shohin-considerations/ We are looking at El Nino rain events this year. The events can come one right after the other with significant rain each time being very possible. A troublesome issue for us is our soils staying too wet for too long a period of time and nutrient being leached out of the soil. The obvious preventions are having your trees in well drained, quality bonsai soil and covering the plants or placing them under a roof of some sort. If cover or a roof is not an option, then tipping the pots during or after the rain event is always a winner, especially the shallow pots due to the perched water in the bottom of the pot. Even picking up the tree, putting your hand over the soil and tipping the pot over 45 degrees or so to let the water can run freely out and over the lip of the pot, works well. You can be surprised at times as to how much water can still come out of a previously tipped pot.
After a warm El Nino rain the air can be very humid and still. In the nursery business we controlled greenhouse humidity, and of course heat, with exhaust fans to promote drying and fresh air in the green house. So what can I do at home to improve drying conditions? First, place plants in the sun after the rain event. Second, after a rain event the air can be very still. During an El Nino I remember very high humidity and on some days fog scattered around after it rained. If these conditions exist after a long and/or a heavy rain event, it will not allow for proper/timely drying of soil in containers or in the ground. Bad things can happen to the roots not to mention above ground diseases. Soil evaporation, plant respiration and plant transpiration are minimal under those conditions. In 1983 during an El Nino period of rain after rain, an old nursery "salt" told me to get a fan and and point it at the plants to create artificial air movement. I have used a fan now on many occasions when the conditions warrant it. Once a breeze comes up, I turn it off unless the plants are very wet. Be sure to remove the fan before the next rain event. For fertilizing or soil applied products for disease control, try to use dry products and let the next rain storm get them into the ground. Sometimes one cannot wait for the next rain so foliar feeding and foliarly applied disease products work nicely. For plants in the ground, the same applies when the soils are too saturated for soil drenches. My garden soil can literally back up with water after frequent, heavy rains, so foliar feeding kept my citrus alive and well until the roots recovered from the "drowning". Hope this is helpful. Here is a link to the Artisans Cup judging of companion plants at the September exhibition. It is a short article with some key thoughts on good companion plantings.
http://www.theartisanscup.com/blog/kora-dalager Advice from Ted Matson based on a few questions I asked him about using wood slabs for displaying shohin.
How thick should the slabs be? Always, the thinner the better. The challenge when you cut slabs very thin is that they usually warp. You need good stable burl wood to begin with, and make sure all sides and surfaces are sealed so that too doesn't put stresses in the wood. I'd recommend storing them under pressure to keep them flat. How big should the diameter be? For diameter, the slab should frame the pot and tree. The common issue here is that people use too small a slab and the piece looks crowded on it. In general, the thinner the slab, the bigger it can be. You can even use a larger thin slab as the platform for an entire display, where the shohin is on it's own little table, and the accent is on a tiny slab, and both are arranged as a unit on the larger slab. I've seen some nice redwood slabs with multiple flat areas used effectively. They also use black lacquer rectangular slabs for this, for a bit more formal display. Pumice for Shohin
Finding small, quality pumice is not easy. A-1 has pumice that after screening has a very low % of pumice in the 1/8" and smaller range. Dry Stall is small but has so much dust, by weight and volume. Small scoria we can get at A-1 in a reasonable % after screening the smaller size grouping (3/16"). It is my understanding that shohin/mame soil has a particle range of 1/32" to just over 1/8" (1-3mm) for the larger shohin. I saw pumice at Anderson's but it was expensive compared to A-l, but the sizing looked very good for shohin. My curiosity got the better of me and I bought two bags. One was a 6 liter (<1/4 cuft) of Gardener and Bloom Pumice for $3.99. It screened out at 85%+ shohin/mame sized particles, and it appeared to have been washed so almost no dust or fines were seen. Some dust will probably appear as it dries more. At A-1, if one fills the bag they provide up to where it is just closable with the twist tie, it is about 1- 1/2 to 1- 3/4 cuft. We pay about $8 for a bag which would be $4.57/cuft, or approximately equal to $1.14/1/4 cuft, or putting it another way, at $3.99 for just under 1/4 cuft, that makes the small bag equivalent to $28 for an A-1 sized bag. The small bag is pricey, unless one only needs a small amount of smaller, clean pumice. The other bag was by UniGro in a 1 cuft bag for $10.95. It screened out at about 97%+ in the shohin/mame range, about 2/3 in the shohin size. There was essentially no dust and the larger particles were the remaining 3%. It too was moist appearing to have been washed, so some dust may appear later as it dries out and when it is washed again or after watering thoroughly at re-potting time. The particle size % over 3/16" was <2% and under 1/32" was <.5% , basically no fines and dust. The remaining was useable shohin size particles. $10.95/cuft makes it about $16 per A-1 bag. Pre-screening at A-1 makes it nice, then thoroughly screening it for use at home. But pre-screened or not, this does not affect the volume at the time of purchase, just the weight of the A-1 bag. A second bag was purchased and was consistent. The UniGro pumice is expensive compared to A-1 but it is almost all in the small sizing range for shohin and is very clean and therefore not dusty/messy to handle. Dry Stall is in the shohin size range. However, there is generally not much if any particles 1/8" to 3/16" and there is so much dust and fines that even though a bag of Dry Stall is cheaper per unit volume, after screening it is actually about the same or slightly more expensive than the UniGro. Dry Stall comes in a 40 lb bag that appears to be about 1 1/3 cuft. Based on the last 6 bags I have purchased over the last 2 years or so, about 25-30% of the weight has been dust and fines. The volume lost due to the dust and fines was less at about 20% since a lot of the finer particles occupy the spaces between the larger particles and the pores in the pumice and therefore do not contribute too much to the bag volume. The last bag I bought was almost 50% dust and fines by weight or about 25% of the volume. I paid about $14, so that makes it about $20 plus for an A-1 bag of1 1/2-1 3/4 cuft of usable material. I am sure the last bag was an anomaly, but the other bags are still wasteful. Conclusion: It seems that UniGro is a good value for clean, smaller sized pumice as compared to Dry Stall. It is easier to get enough of the smaller particle sizing for shohin than A-1. It is very clean and also compliments the sizing of the A-1 scoria nicely. So if one does not have the time to go to A-1 and/or only needs a small amount, Anderson's consistently carries the 1 cuft UniGro pumice and the 6 liter Gardener Bloom pumice. Dislcaimer: Shipments do vary for many horticultural products. A-1 had two batches of pumice the last time I was there. Both were signed 1/4". One was primarily 1/4"+ with small amounts in the 1/8"-3/16" size, while the other was at 3/16" to 1/4" primarily, with about 5-10% in the 1/8" size. Not much of the small particles in either batch. That could change, but history shows their source of pumice is consistently on the larger end. |
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AuthorSDBC member Charlie Mosse lets you know of interesting bonsai posts from around the web but especially shohin topics as he is leading the shohin group. Shohin Racks & Stands
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