The Bonsai Blog of Hans van Meer

Hi, everybody,

last week I spend most of my time walking along the coastline not to fare from where I live. It was the warmest week on record with temperatures way above the twenty degrees mark! It was amazing to enjoy the warm sun this late in the year after such a bad bad Summer! Would you believe that I even had a lovely swim in a mirror-like calm sea on the first two days of October! But in between this Indian Summer fun I managed to restyle my Spruce that I brought back from a workshop and demo weekend that I did in August 2008 for the “Norsk Bonsaiselskap”in Norway. Link:  http://hans-van-meer.ofbonsai.org/2008/08/ A student from Sweden had brought along this yamadori, that he had collected himself, to work on. After the workshop, he swapped the tree with one of the organizers for some pots and other Bonsai related paraphernalia. And  I bought it from them because I liked it and it would be a nice reminder of the great time I had in friendly Norway! But I got there by aeroplane so there was one major question to be answered…would it fit into my trunk?! Well, my friend Rune, where I stayed during that weekend, helped me to pack my little stowaway tree like it was a priceless desk lamp! 🙂

People often ask me why I always bring such a big trunk along? Well, this is why!

      And this is the first picture of the tree unpacked and safe in my garden.

And this is how the tree looks after I restyled it a few days ago. I must look
for a better pot though, I don’t like the colour of this one ! 🙂

I think that this simple little tree already has a nice and pleasing image, but I don’t like where the bottom left branch is growing from. It is disturbing because it grows from the inside of that curve! I will replace it as soon as the branch above it has thickened enough. For now, it is back to growing happily for a few more years and then we will see what happens! Before I know it, it will be time to go and find me a nice pot for it!
This Friday I will travel to Slovenia to do a weekend workshop and demo! I can hardly wait to go and work with all those new Bonsai friends!!! I will post images from that trip as soon as I get back home! So watch this space!
Cheers,
Hans van Meer.

Info: karamottobonsai@hotmail.com

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Hi, everybody,

two of my Bonsai friends on the IBC forum are responsible for the next virtual! Kev Bailey posted this beautiful picture of an evening sky with a “Z” from Zorro in it and Ed van der Reek virtually planted my “Z” next to it!

Cheers,

Hans van Meer.

Info: karamottobonsai@hotmail.com

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Hi Everybody,

In early 2002 I had the honour to be invited by Mark Noelanders to give a 3-hour evening demonstration in March of that same year at his Bonsai club in Belgium (B.A.B Belgium Bonsai association). Although I was really excited at the prospect to give a demonstration at this club that already had seen most of the big names demonstrate, it also put me under a lot of pressure! How and where could I find material good enough to work on that would entertain this knowledgeable crowd? I spend many days visiting all my regular material addresses here in Holland, but could not find anything remotely interesting or good enough! So in a last desperate attempt to find something, I drove with my wife An through Belgium to try our luck at the Bonsai dealers we knew there!  At the end of a long day driving, without finding anything suitable and affordable,  we had become pretty desperate! We had only one more Bonsai centre to visit and had not had much hope to find something there. But we did! In the back of the garden, hidden away from sight, we found some really weird and impossible-shaped Pine yamadori! And that was just what I was looking for, ugly and affordable! J
One-off them immediately jumped out to me, a Mugo that looked like the mark of Zorro! It was basically a long and thin Z-shaped tree full of mistakes and with only some long branches at its top. The base and the first 10 cm/2,5 inch upwards of the trunk were really thin and then suddenly changed into a big lump that was created over many years with old deadwood and thick live vain running over it! From there the trunk becomes thinner again and stays the same thickness until the first sharp bent to the left. The next section of the trunk is slightly curved and goes abrupt to the left and back downwards. Some time long ago this section of the trunk was split right through the middle by mother nature, leaving a long opening that looked very strange! And again this section also had no taper whatsoever! At the end of that section, there was another abrupt change of direction to the right side from which one thick branch and a few thinner ones grew upwards. Out of these branches I  had to create the whole future Bonsai! A big risk to try in a 3-hour demo, but this is what I like to do, trying to create a Bonsai out of challenging material! Because when it all falls together and it works it can become really special and unique! I always had, and still have, that motivation to work with impossible and unlikely material! At first because there simply just wasn’t any good material to be found here in Holland, but later I discovered that I really like that challenge to find something interesting or even beautiful in these ugly duckling trees! So this Mugo, which we instantly named Z, was just right to show what my interest in Bonsai.

Below: The first pictures of  “Z”  in my garden. This is the planned front side of the tree.

Below: Left side view. notice that in the whole of the trunk there is almost no movement to the back of the frond. So I had to create some sort of dept with the foliage!

                                                  Below: Backside of the tree.

                                                     Below: Right side view.

Below: Close up of the section where all the branches grew from. Only the thick branch will be used to create the whole top section!

             Below: This is the design that I made as a reverence for the demo.

                                      Below: Before the demonstration started.

Below: Just one the right side of my top hand finger is where I sawed out a wedge, separating the branch from the deadwood section on the right. Allowing (I hoped) the branch to bend easier and further to the left side! The branch will be protected from breaking and ripping with layers in water socked raffia, tape and thick copper wire.

Below: This is probably the first demo tree that could receive Belgium radio!

Below: The audience was allowed to get real close to see what was going on. Just the way I like it!

Below: The most difficult part of this demo, bringing down that thick branch, has worked out just fine. Without any splitting or cracking! But to make it in time I had help wiring the last branches from one of the friendly members of the club.

Below: At home, I had made construction that tilted the tree and pot into the desired angle and held it in place during work!

                                             Below: Bonsai is hard work! 

Below: The finished result of 3 hours of hard work. Before I started I had explained to the audience that I would not try to make a compact tree. Most of the foliage was simply too far away from the base of the trunk and I don’t like to twist and curl long branches just for the look of it. So I just created the desired outline of the long branches. And in the coming years, I will use the proper technique to force the tree to back bud so that over time I could shorten those long branches to the desired length! 

Last week, almost 10 years after its first styling,  I restyled “Z” once again. Below: 3 major branches were removed during this restyling.

Below: Close-up, as seen from the right side, of the strange but beautiful deadwood section on the lower part of the trunk.

                                            Below: Close-up of the split trunk.

Below: Close-up of the thick branch that, with the help of a cut-out wedge, was controlled and ripped away from the deadwood. The green arrow shows the point up to where the branch was attached to the deadwood (yellow arrow).

Below: Close up of the finished top section. Most needles are just 1,5 centimetre/ half an inch long!

                          Below: The finished result in a pot by Brian Allbright.

I am pretty pleased with the new image of “Z”! I like how she changed from an unwanted tree into an impressive Bonsai!

I hope you enjoyed this story?!

Cheers,

Hans van Meer.

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Comment/question by Jack Sales.

Very interesting read.  Thank you for posting.  I was wondering if I could ask you a really quick question?  I have a mugo pine from a nursery with a lot of top growth and a small amount of weaker growth further down.  When would be the right time to prune the top branches away to allow the lower branches to develop?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65635415@N02/6097606096/

Hi, jack,
sorry for the late reply, but  I simply forgot to answer you! 🙂 I had a look at your picture and I saw a typical nursery Mugo with long thick branches with mostly only growth at the end! Getting foliage to grow closer to the trunk on Mugos like this will take a long time but it can be done and it is a good practice to understand the growing habits of this species! I don’t know where you live but this late in the season you can only cut back the too-long branches up to where a smaller branch grows from it. But don’t cut that thick branch too close to that smaller branch! Make sure to leave some room for the old branch to die/dry back! A stump of about 1 cm/0.4 inch will be more than enough to protect that small branch from harm! Seal the woods with cut paste. Later next season you can remove that dried-up stump with no problem! Now would there still have been older needles along those long branches, they stay on there for 2 or even 3 seasons then you could have cut back any branch right back into that old growth! This can be done from early in the growing season to mid-Summer! The tree will then react with loads of new buds all along your branches growing from the base of those older needles! That would have saved you a lot of time! With your Mugo it will be a case of lots of feeding and removing candles to promote back budding lower on those branches. If it helps you can find these techniques in an article that I wrote about two-needle pine care on my website! This article will explain most of these techniques in words and pictures! Hope that helps you some, if not you can always ask me for more advice, even if I sometimes forget to answer! 🙂
Good luck with your Mugo!
Cheers,
Hans van Meer.

Link to the article on my website: http://www.karamotto.org/?page=40

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Hi, everybody,

here are some pictures of what I have been doing during the last week, in Bonsai that is!

Below: Here is an updated shot of the Dutch Hawthorn that I showed here two mounts ago. It needs a couple of years of growth to fill out the foliage, but the main frame is there already!

 

Below: This is another Dutch Hawthorn. Since I collected this one, some 10 years ago, it has been shortened from more than 1 meter/40 Inch to just above Shohin size. It still needs to fill out in the top section and the deadwood needs to be sculpted, but I am pleased with the image and the progress so far.

Below: Close up of the beautiful old bark. It proves that Dutch Hawthorn can show remarkable character as well.

Below: And here I am decorating the X-Mas tree! 🙂 I salvaged this and another Juniper from a cemetery where they were dumped in a garbage container. It took me 3  years to nurse them back to health and now that they are, it is time to air-layer the most promising ones. These Juniperus media Blaauw varieties have beautiful slow-growing foliage that resembles Juniperus Itoigawa foliage but is darker coloured. I made 13 air layers that if all goes well will become a forest planting in the future! Please note, just how stylish I dressed for this special occasion!  🙂

Cheers,

Hans van Meer.

Info: karamottobonsai@hotmail.com

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Hi, everybody,

remember I told you about those Itoigawa cuttings that I have been collecting from 3 original cuttings over the last 6 years? Well here is what happened to one of those tree original cuttings. In 2005 I attached it to a beautiful piece of  Yew deadwood. This deadwood is what was left of a yamadori that sadly did not make it after collecting. But I did not want to throw such a natural sculpture away, instead, I used it to make a Tanuki. The deadwood and the Itoigawa cutting were merged in early 2005. The pictures below are from November of that same year.

Above:  First a groove was made, just big enough for the cutting to be squished into. Then the cutting was planted, leaning to the right, in the armpit of the deadwood that forms the base of the tree. Both the deadwood and the cutting were tightly secured in the pot and then the soil was added. Then the still bendable gutting was pushed into the groove and it was such a good fit, that no wire was necessary to hold it into place!

                                             Above: The beginning is there!

Above: September 2010, the shape that I was seeking is starting to come through.

                                 Above: Close-up of the amazing deadwood.

Above: Yesterday, and this is how it looks now. The main branches and a few of the smaller ones were wired and placed in the desired position. Then the deadwood was cleaned and treated with Lime Sulfur. And finally, the tree was repotted into the same pot but in a slightly different position. I think that this pot suits this tree very well! This small Tanuki needs more growth to get an optimal branch structure. But for now, I am really pleased with how it looks. And I am very happy that all those years ago I decided not to throw this beautiful piece of deadwood away! I think it is becoming a really elegant Bonsai.

Cheers,

Hans van Meer.

Info: karamottobonsai@hotmail.com

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Hi, everybody,

I would like to share with you some before and after shots of my Juniperus Chinensis that  I named “The Italian”.  You will find out why I named it that way in the next story! This tree and I go back a long time! In ’95 or ’96 I  joined Farrand and Rene (today owners of the Bonsai Focus magazine) and three other Bonsai enthusiasts to drive in a rented bus all the way to Italy to see Kimura demonstrating for two days. We stayed that weekend in a very posh hotel, where after a great banquet, we even spend some drinking and having a fun time with the Master himself! Later that night he asked me to roll him a “Dutch tobacco” cigarette, like the ones my travel companions were smoking. I rolled him one and he took a puff and then he turned green and started coughing for ten minutes! 🙂 But that’s another story! Before all that, we spend a day in the famous Crespi Bonsai centre in Milan. As a group, we were able to buy trees there that later would be shipped to us. Walking through all these greenhouses, filled with all these amazing imported trees, was a dream come through.  It was there that I saw the juniper from this story for the first time and although it was not really my taste in Bonsai (even then!), I fell for the quirky curves in the lower section of this tree! Because it was not prized I had to ask for the prize. Then I was told that the tree was styled by Kaneko during a demonstration the year before!  And that was noticeable in the price!! But business was good that year for me so I bought the tree, together with two other trees,  regardless of the price! I think now that I bought it then because material like this was pretty rare in those early years in our parts of the world! And it was the first chance I had to buy such quality material from Japan! And I wanted to have at least one more traditionally styled Bonsai in my collection! And today together with an imported shohin Itoigawa they still are the only two imported Junipers in my collection! So now you understand where this Juni gets its name from, “The Italian”!

Since then I restyled the tree several times, removed the main bottom branch and about ten years ago I planted it in a lovely old shallow pot, where it lived happily for many years. But about five years ago the tree started to lose its normal health. So I repotted it into a deeper pot and it took me up to now to get it back to grow abundantly again! So I felt it was safe to give it a gentle restyling again!

Below: The oldest picture that I could find in a hurry! It was made in July 2006. Here the Italian is still in its old shallow pot and the straight first branch on the left and the long thin front branch are still on the tree!

Below: Before the work started. The problem was always that awkward placed the first branch on the left! It crosses over the trunk and I have no idea why they decided to do that all those years ago? Removing it in the future is an option but that would also mean that I would lose that beautiful live vein that swirls across the front of the tree! I might decide to do so in the future, but for now, I will still use that branch in the design that I am after! Just above that first left branch, where you can just see two lines of cut paste on the trunk, is where last year I created the start of a new Shari that runs upwards to the top. This was done to bring some more interest to that only straight part of the whole tree.

  

  

The first thing to do was clean the bark and the deadwood of the whole tree with different-sized brushes and sandpaper. Then the deadwood was treated with lime sulphur. And then the whole tree was wired and the branches were brought into their new position. Then finally, to make the contrast between live and dead even more obvious, the bark was coated with a mixture of water with a few drops of vegetable oil in it!  In the near future the brightness of the bleached deadwood will tone down en will look more natural. Which is more to my taste! The foliage is not thinned out and plucked as much as I would do with a healthier specimen, so it looks a bit fluffy. But I don’t want to risk the health of this old friend. If he reacts good to this styling, I will thin it out later this season to bring out more detail in the foliage layers.

Below: The end result for now. The balance needs to improve in the future, to realize that I need more foliage on the left top side of the tree. The left lower branch needs to fill out some more, to obscure the top boring part of that same branch. At the top, you can just see something light brown in the foliage. This is a piece of wood that holds up the top. But for now, I am really pleased with the outcome! And I am really glad that my friend “the Italian” has overcome his struggles and is thriving again! I look forward to the day that I can put him back into his old shallow pot!

I hope you like “the Italian” new image?!

Cheers,

Hans van Meer.

Info: karamottobonsai@hotmail.com

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