Bonsai by the sea

Last Sunday was the annual event 'Bonsai South West', held in the Exmouth Pavillion by the sea. The displays are based on a selection of trees from supporting clubs across the South wesy corner of England, plus several local traders come to sell their trees, pots, accessories and all related stuff.

Representing the county of Cornwall Colin and I set up 6 tables with a few of our trees - setting off with cars heavily loaded about 6am. Here is an overview of our day in pictures........

I put off the first leaf thinning on the red acer as show trees want to be fuller - but 24hours after getting home half the outer leaves were removed to give essential light to the inner leaves and buds.

one of Colins tables - white pine and berberis

Driftwood Juniper Chinensis 'sergentii'

Red Hawthorn - Paul Scarlet

Accent plant in a Gordon Hunt pot with matching base

 Local reporter covered the show before heading off to Chelsea Flower show

Gordon near the end of the show - the tables look a little lighter than at the start - I think he's hiding a starter pack of bonsai bags and fertiliser in the other hand... ;-)

Cornish Elm

Before the talent styling competition I did a short demo on working with raw garden center material.

 

Then the comp got going for real - here are the entrants from cornwall hard at work

And Oliver took the cup !



Chinese Elm originally from Roberts St Mawgan bonsai Nursery - 18 yrs ago !

And a few lovely trees from our neibours - Celtic Knot bonsai in Wales Scots pine and blackthorn

And as the hall empties of people its time to pack up and go home !

DATE FOR THE DIARY -BONSAI  SW JUNE 23RD 2013

Bonsai Bags - Fertilising made easy

Over the last few years I've been getting good results with granular, pelleted type of feeds -initially using products like Biogold, Nakuro etc and then for the last 2 seasons with a fertiliser I formulated in the factory specifically for bonsai. With all the feeds they were scattered on the pots like normal and are left to leach slowly into the pot - but they come with several down sides.

• Can wash off, wasting fertiliser and money
• Clogs the granular soil up as it waters down into the pot - effecting drainage and airflow over time
• Some products completely cover the surface in mould - annoying if you show the trees
• Once spent they can be messy to remove or scrape off

Recently several bonsai growers have been using tea bags to contain the fertilisers and these solve lots of the above problems, but add a couple of others to the list

• They get soggy, split and spill the contents into the pot again
• Critters can easily run or fly away with them

Here we have a 4 week old tea bag containing my powdered feed - I turned it over and it has disintergrated so not a perfect solution.

BONSAI BAGS

This lead me to sourcing a fine nylon mesh fillable and re-usable bag which we managed to do - but they were white, pastel blue or pale pink !! The trials (with the blue ones) went very well so we placed an order to have them delivered in a nice natural dark brown and now they've arrived things are going really well as many benifits become clear. I'm filling the bags with a powdered version of my fertiliser recipe which combines intantly soluble ingredients with slower delivering elements - with these combined ingredients I leave the bags in place for 6 weeks for most normal situations.

Once filled the bags are added to the pot - they can even be lined up with specific roots to channel feed to key branches and areas

Once placed the bags are watered to soak the ingredients, begining to release the solubles instantly and starting the bacterial action that will break down the fertiliser into plant usable compounds.

Above we see a newly watered bonsai bag positioned on the outer edge of a pot - and that is taking care of the tree fertilising needs for the next 6 weeks - (The tree above will have 3 bags).

Not only are the bags a neat tidy way to hold the fertiliser in place, but they actually do a better job as can be held in place on sloping sections of a pot. Here I use the loops on the draw strings to fasten the bag to a root on a 45 degree slope on a juniper bonsai.

These nylon loops can be used to attach the bags to roots, guy wires, tying in wires etc and this stops birds and creatures disappearing with the bags - I've found the brown bags are not spotted so easily either.

In the picture above I am using the bonsai bags to concentrate the feed at the roots that feed the live veins of a needle juniper rather than in the areas of dead wood.This picture shows just how neat and tidy the brown bonsai bags are...

 The beauty of this method of feeding the trees is the neatness and speed with which spent fertiliser can be removed, the bags refilled and the free draining soil conditions maintained. Another added bonus comes when a tree is off to a show as instantly the fertiliser can be removed and the bag popped on the tree next door.

I have the brown bonsai bags in stock in packets of 10 and can send them to any country if anyone wants to try them out.

£2.45 / 10 + postage,  £19.50/100

We also have a combination starter pack with 250gr of the powdered fertiliser and 10 bonsai bags.

£5.99 + p&p

Just email us at info@aqualabs.co.uk for orders etc, or add any questions to the comments section here.

Cheers for reading Marcus

Wash & Brush up - Local show time

It's a week to go until one of our larger local shows - the Bonsai South West show which is a regular annual event hosted by the Exmouth Society. This year we have 6 x 6ft tables to set up so Colin and I are doing 3 each and are planning to take some of our larger trees to show on behalf of the Cornwall Bonsai Society. It needs a fair bit of planning as the hall used is the Exmouth Pavillion so on arrival there is just the tables so backgrounds need sorting out and squeezing in the car along with all the other related stuff. Our tables are back to back, so we are using one central back drop for the entire display which will make set up a bit quicker.

My original plan for the display was to use all different varieties of acer palmatum as within the club there are some really nice ones but a few months back, when the SW show date was confirmed, it clashed with one of our own clubs annual events held with the National Trust. This has split our available trees and members this year and the acers I had my eye on (or their owners) are being used elseware so a bit of a plan change was needed. Last year Colin and I used 5 trees in 16ft but they were a little close together (we use big trees!) so with the 18ft span I'm going to take 5 but maybe only use 4. Just a personal feeling I have is not to take the same trees to the same show if possible - certainly not for 4 or 5 years anyway as it just gets boring to see the same trees wheeled out time and time again. Last year the Hinoki went in its 'young' pre carved style and the old Anne Swinton juniper in its pre tanuki !! style so these two are staying on the benches for 2012.

 The lineup for the show is: the driftwood slanting juniper as the main tree, virtually my first bonsai - a chinese elm as no.2, the red acer is bursting with colour so it will be a nice popular tree for no.3 and to complete the lineup a grafted white pine as tree no.4. These have been chosen as they are exmples of the 4 main bonsai species commonly used, so hopefully many of the visitors will relate to some or all of them.

The trees themselves are quite neat and tidy, any branch wires used go round the back of the trunks as standard so they are not seen, and if a guy wire is still on it is 0.6mm copper, so basically invisible. Today - 6 days before set up is about moss hunting, mossing and top dressing the pots and deciding on each trees' actual display. Now one thing I find with all my bonsai friends---we've got no moss left in our gardens !! especially as it tends to dry up in the summer on the pots and the birds shred the rest looking for grubs. Luckily we have a stream at the end of the garden so I went on a little exploration hunt...........

and found a bucket full !
It is not the little round mounds you get on roofs but still quite nice flat sections with fibres of a  medium length, going onto big pots I think it will be ok. I don't like a solid mass of moss covering the entire pot, but too little looks wrong as well so in between the moss I add some neat akadama to give a colour variation.

Unfortunately I dont have any large stands yet so need to do some adapting !! I have a really old oak coffee table that was my grans that can be turned into a stand for the small pine so out came the jig saw .................

Another quick and easy base has been made this morning wiring bamboo canes together into a mat using 1mm copper wire. This can be a traditional base for spring/early summer and will be used with one of the deciduous trees -  18 canes and some wire was under £3.00 so we haven't broken the bank to come up with a base for one tree.  A couple of the trees will have to go without stands I think until I stumble on some 30"+ ones at affordable prices !

Luckily the accent plants are looking ok so thats one thing off the list.

Once the display is done there will hopefully be time for breakfast as the venue has a great little restaurant, and later in the morning I'll be doing a demo on garden center material. For the last two years there has been a South West Styling challenge with a lovely silver cup to hold for the year  - it is along the lines of the new talent competition. First year I styled a semi cascade juniper and was lucky enough to win, the following year the trees were great big beastly garden junipers and I made a small compact upright tree which was chosen as the winner again. For a change this year I'm doing a pre competition demo on another wild looking garden juniper to see what can be done in a couple of hours on totally untrained material. Here is a preview of the material they have chosen for me !.

Next post will be a show report but here are a couple of the main trees I'll use this year

Up the Reds -

This tree captivates me more than any other. For 4 years I had searched for a really nice red maple (acer palmatum)  and while we had seen lots of 'nice but normal' ones we had failed to see the tree that stood out from the mass produced crowd. As is the way, when you actually stop looking so hard the tree just pops up when you least expect it and this is exactly what happened. We had gone up to the inlaws in Sunderland - which is great as its only 45 minutes from Willowbog - and for a change Mandy and her Mum had come along for the drive. You walk through the shop and into the nursery and we literally stopped in our tracks 2 steps in as a bright red acer was sat on the 2nd podium ! This was actually funnier (to me) than it sounds as I go to Willowbog for the rugged wilderness, high quality wild trees and chilly howling  wind (and just up the road for £3 you can drive the Kielder Forest rally stage - 12 miles of forest track, awesome !! ;-)  the entire surroundings inspire you to buy a weather beaten conifer or at a push a sheep grazed Hawthorn so to be confronted with a twisting, turning intensely delicate acer caught me by surprise.

This picture was from a couple of years before my story, and shows Peter deep in comtemplation wondering if it's going to be frosty that night, while sheltering my tree from a Northerly wind !

We all left the nursery that Saturday, (without the tree) but I was back Sunday morning as I knew this was the one - even Mandy said at dinner the night before " are you going back for it?" - she knew too.

The tree came back to Cornwall that weekend and here she is in June that year, 2011. Why did this one stand out ? - the taper in the lower trunk, perfectly flowing into wonderfull roots that evenly grip the soil. There are no ugly roots - no thick poking out or straight roots and no gaps where there should be roots. (The branches are very well placed as most of the lower ones were grafted into place too). This acer has come from a grower that took their time and did things properly to produce a high quality piece of material.

Which acer is it?
It almost looked too good to be a Deshojo - the leaves are very bright and very fine - but the tree is an incredibly well done graft of around 35 to 45 years old so is a 'true variety' tree from a high quality original stock plant of some description - either  Deshojo or a Beni Maiko were in the running in my mind 2011. The original japanese named varieties were strictly chosen from unusual seedlings and unique hybrids if they showed quite specific traits - maybe leaf colour, leaf shape, growth habit, etc and these few trees would have been the stock plants that made all others mostly via grafting or sometimes layers and occassionally cuttings.

I used to work with an acer 'creator' who worked all his life for Hilliers Nurseries trying to make new named varieties and it was a very lengthy process - made even harder these days as there are already so many existing ones. Over the years there can be dilution of a popular named variety as other silimar looking trees are used as stock plants, sometimes a seedling comes up looking about right and gets named etc and before long the variations within a variety are huge, making lots of confusion !

The tree was in a lovely shallow japanese cream oval but was drying out very quickly in Cornwall so I did a summer repot into a nice modern chinese unglazed large oval -  just combing out the roots a bit, no root pruning. The larger pot is because the plans for the tree are to grow it out a bit wider on the lower branches. Over the next few months the foliage changed through purple-ish, to green, to early autumn shades of orange.

 

 

First winter all the branches were wired and March the buds started expanding so the tree was whipped out of the pot and all the roots under the trunk base were pruned off so I could get the tree back down into the pot from the raised little hill it had grown itself onto. Now a little planning ahead with the repot so the tree does not get an uneccessary disturbance in a year or two - i have positioned the trunk quite a way to the right ready to balance the long branches to the left that will be grown over the next few years. The longer root run in this direction will increase the speed and strength of the branches above, while the moisture and humidity below will support the increased foliage.

Red acer variety traits

I've been looking into the actual differences between the named varieties in the red (coralinium) family as just about every red bonsai is labelled Deshojo and have now found a few clues  from the original definitions and descriptions

• Deshojo has strong leaves that are 6-7cm long on 2-3cm petiols of rusty red brown, - New foliage was described as shrimp pink to red
• Shin Deshojo was a new (in 1965) improved version with brighter colour and the ability to hold the colour for longer in spring - it is described as 'fire engine' red.
• Beni Maiko is probably a very close relative of the Deshojos but the leaves are naturally a little smaller and appear much closer to the branches as the petiols are shorter at 1-2 cm. The give away in identifying Beni Maiko though is the leaves that form later in the year - they are often mis-shapen, sometimes strangely curved or rippled on their surface

Because of the hard root prune the bud expansion stopped and the tree remained static for about a month while new roots grew. Once the roots were recovered the leaves carried on opening during mid to late April

Later in the year the new leaves will show which variety this is - in the earlier picture with the Hawk moth some leaves look irregular on the surface, and coupled with the finer growth I think we may have a fine Acer Palmatum Beni Maiko, but if the leaves stay quite similar all year the tree points to Shin Deshojo - the age is about right as it was defined in 1965.

May 7th, 2012

May 17th, 2012

PHOTOSHOP VIRTUAL OF THE PLANNED STYLE