Below: Way back in 2007 my old Belgium Bonsai friend Danny User (owner of Ginkgo Bonsai Center in Belgium) asked me if I wanted to be a demonstrator during the very last famous “Ginkgo Awards”?! My reply was: HELL JEH!!!! Needless to say that I was over the moon and very honoured! Later I drove up to Belgium to look around his amazing Bonsai Center to find that special demo tree for my demo. And that was by no means an easy task because the place is enormous and there were literally thousands to look through! My luck was that I preferred to demo on virgin Yamadori material and of those, there were only a few hundred to go through! After a few hours and a lot of coffee, I found a large field-grown Japanese Yamadori Yew!
Below: Tadaaaaaaaa!!! It has a lot of raw deadwood to style and only two locations with bushlike short branches and foliage.
Below: Preparing the tree for wiring and styling in a tent that was hot as a sauna! Finding just the right branches to style in those bushes was serious business! Because what you cut off can’t be put back on!
Below: And this was the end result of those 2 days of very hot and hard work! I was pretty pleased with the (for now) end result! This demo was one of the highlights of my Bonsai career and I just wonder after all those years: who knows who bought it back then and who now owns this tree and if it is still alive?! It would be such fun to know this and maybe to show here on my blog how it is doing and looking now??? If you know anything then please mail me here: karamotto@hotmail.com
Cheers,
Hans van Meer.
The Bonsai Blog of Hans van Meer 