This old girlfriend of mine lives with me since 1990 and in those 30+ years, she has grown good radiating roots/Nebari and has doubled her overall Hight and her trunk circumference! And to show herself off this year, her colours are seriously beautiful! So I just had to make a quick picture with my old cell phone before the sun disappeared completely! Hope you like it anyway?
Height: 74 cm/29 Inch. This (in my eyes special) pot is by Isabelia.
Below: close-up of the delicate and beautiful multi-coloured foliage.
And then now another (I hope) helpful tip! A lot of us use aquarium tubing (see the picture!) to prevent the wire from digging into the bark of the tree when we are bending thick branches toward each other with the help of a tension wire between those two branches!
See the example below: Imagine that the right side tubing is bent around a tree trunk or branch! And now we want to bend that left side tubing just like the right side around a trunk or branch, but then we have a problem because we can’t stick the wires through the tube to tighten them together (red arrow)?!
Below: Well here is the solution to that problem! With the help of a concave cutter (see the picture!) cut out a small bite off one side of the tub!
Below: So that you are left with a piece of tube that looks like this (see the picture!)!
Below: Now you do can run both ends of the wire through both ends of the tube en run them through the hole you just cut out! Slide the tube down the wire as tightly against the bark as possible and with a tong twist both ends of the wire as tight as necessary to bend and hold the two branches or two trunks in position!
For the last two days, this Trident maple was trying hard to hold on to its leaves, while I was waiting for some sunlight to make a decent picture! And this afternoon there finally was just enough natural light to shoot some quick shots of this amazing coloured foliage! And just in time because now, just a few hours later, the wind has blown off a lot of the orange/red leaves! I hope you enjoy this picture of this colourful messenger of the coming winter?!
Below: The fast-sinking sun creates surreal colours!
Below: After two nights of low temperatures almost all leaves dropped off, creating a different scene and feeling!
Now that I can’t work for long on my trees anymore and have to sit down for a while when my knees and back give in again! I find that I have much more time to really, really look at my trees and try to enjoy them as if I would see them for the very first time! More annalistic and aware! I most often do that while taking pictures and then end up completely overlooking all details and the whole of those details, the Bonsai! Doing so I got stroked again by the upwards-twirling old deadwood (Shari) and the beautifully aged bark with all its cracks! The Shari at the right top of this picture was made over 25 years ago and was during that time bleached several times with Lime sulphur with a few drupes black inked added to leave more of a greyish white after it did its bleaching work! But it still those not have the right greyish/white colour that the twirling old natural Shari has! So I shall have to bleach it again and again until it has the right colour!
Below: That’s how old Hawthorn bark and deadwood (Shari) look!
Below: She looks a bit top-heavy with all those red berries and the old cell phone those do not help much in this case either! 😉
Cheers,
Hope you enjoyed these quickly-made pictures of my baby and forgive me for the poor quality?!
Earlier I posted a picture of the tinny mushrooms that hat overnight suddenly appeared around the root base of my Taxus/Yew. Well today, while busy removing all of the unused photos that I had made from my cell phone, I made an unbelievable discovery on one of them!!! Little SOOT SPRITES!!! 😱😉
This morning I discovered these very lovely tiny shinning white mushrooms growing in front of my Yamadori Yew/Taxus and I just knew that I had to make some pictures of this magical scene with my cell phone as soon as the sun came out!
Here are after many small sessions of wiring some quickly made cell phone pictures of the almost finished result of my Old White Pine that was imported from China some 32 years ago and was one of the first Bonsai I ever bought! Her height is 87 cm/34 Inch so getting her to where she stands in this picture by myself to wire her proved to be a backbreaker for my bad back indeed! And that I had to stand on a small stool the whole time to reach the higher branches to wire them did not make things any easier for my poor back!! The wiring itself took me (in short sessions) more than one week! Below: Some big decisions were made to shorten or remove some otherwise good branches!
So after finally finishing wiring, lifting her to the place where I usually take my pictures was out of the question for me at this moment (sigh!) So the below pictures of her are shot with my cell phone at the place where she was wired! She is on her way to her older glory and needs just a few more years to back bud some more and hopefully double her foliage! And a new pot because the one it is in now is precariously cracked on opposite sides (frost-proof my ass!)! The now more than 30 years she has lived with us have aged her so well and she has become a part of our family!
Below: A close-up picture of the amazing mature bark on the trunk! And when I cleaned up and removed the top layer of old soil around the base, I discovered that the roots had widened a lot and almost doubled in size! The fled large root on the left bottom side and everything else below where that moss line stops on the lower trunk is all new to me O joy!!!
Now I have to find a nice new pot for here because after more than a decade it is time to repot here in some fresh soil in a new home! I hope you like my old Pine?!
Now I know that I wrote before about using 5mm thick household sisal rope instead of raffia or burlap to protect the branch that you want to bend from breaking! Well, they say: the proof is in the pudding! So here we go: I had to wire a mature thumb-thick branch on my old White Pine (Pinus parviflora) from China and then bend it a lot! So I had to protect it from cracking, but I was oud off Raffia?! But I did find half a ball of sisal rope more than enough to protect that branch with two tightly wind layers of sisal on top of each other. Then this now with sisal protected right branch was wired with 4 mm aluminium wire and then slowly bent pretty severely to become almost a back branch! All without any trouble whatsoever! So my advice: always have some sisal 5 mm rope around as a backup! Cheers and stay safe everybody, Hans.
P.S.: Below is a link to the YouTube channel of “Love Bonsai” where I for the first time saw a lovely and strong Chinees female Bonsai artist protect the thickest of branches with sisal rope and then wire them with aluminium wire! And boy did she bend them and never brake one!!! Go have a look!!!👍👍👍
A few days ago it was such a sunny day that made my colour-changing Trident maple from Japan almost glow… so I just had to shoot some quick photos of her. It proved to be a race for time because the sun was on her right side quickly sinking behind my house! It proved to be a great year for my two maples (the above one and an Acer palmatum deshojo) that I both have had under my care for some 26 years orzo! This unique pot (that I like a lot) is by Isabella.
Note: considering that I live in Holland, then yes this is exceptional winter weather that did not happen for well over two decades! An extremely high air pressure system above the whole of Scandinavia is pretty unique believe me! And I do know that this weather is pretty normal in many countries around the world, but not where we live! And we applaud this weather because we are an ice skating nation! There is even hopeful talk that the world-famous 11-city tour a 220 kilometres long nature ice skating tour finally can be staged again after more than 2 decades! So yes this is extreme weather for us here!
Yesterday’s weather forecast of at least a week-long snow and very cold weather was not wrong for a change and I have today’s picture to prove it! I woke up this morning to discover a magical snow-covered garden that I would love to share with you all!
Below: under need, this thick layer of snow more than 20 shohin pre-Bonsai Itoigawa Junipers are hidden!
Below: For some of the bigger Bonsai in my collection, there was no more room underneath my backyard shelter! But I am sure they don’t mind at all!
Below: My big Larch named the Elephant looks like a real scene you could see in nature.
Below: My big old Chamaecyparis obtusa nana gracilis mother plant looks beautiful!
Below: But her backside looks even more stunning!
Below: A magical top view of my big multiple-trunk beech raft.
I hope you enjoyed these with my cell phone-made pictures as much as I loved to make them for you all…it was magical in my little city garden today!
The Bonsai Blog of Hans van Meer 