Raw Material to Bonsai

One of the most difficult aspects of bonsai is deciding when to begin designing your 'tree'. You will see that I use 'tree' a lot on my posts because it is the word that we use in bonsai for finished trees and trees in development. The single quotes help deferentiate between the raw material and the bonsai. For example: "There is almost always more than one 'tree' in a tree. Seeing the 'tree' is very difficult and virtually impossible for a beginner. Even some people who have practiced bonsai for many years do not develop the talent to see the 'tree'. There are many elements that come into play in deciding what path your 'tree' will take, but they can be divided into two basic categories: What you want and what the tree has to offer.


What you want:

The two most important elements in deciding what you want in your bonsai are the size and the form. Recognizing this is the most basic step in developing a plan for your bonsai. Size should be thought of in terms of trunk caliper (diameter at the base) and height of the finished bonsai. This will help you decide on an appropriate method for developing the trunk. And developing the trunk is the first and primary task. Deciding on the form will determine the shape of the trunk. Form is the basic shape of the bonsai. The simplest are formal upright, informal upright, slant, semi or half cascade, and cascade. After you have decided on the form and the size, you can proceed with a plan to create your dream. But the dream doesn't exist in a vacuum; it is woven from live material. So, you also have to consider what the material has to offer.

The approach to creating bonsai can take two directions. You can search for material to suit a specific desire, such as an informal Japanese Black Pine that is about a foot tall with a massive trunk. To make this come true you need to consult your wallet and your time frame. You can spend a lot and make it happen in just a few years, or even immediately if you purchase a finished tree, or you can make it happen over twenty years by growing out your own material from scratch. Of course there is a continuum of possibilities in between these two extremes.

The other approach, and the one used by beginners, is to search for any material that has possibilities. This is fun. It is like shopping at a flea market or a garage sale. You aren't looking for anything in particular, but rather just looking for something to strike your fancy. What strikes your fancy should be some aspect of the 'tree' that you can see. Rarely can anyone immediately see the whole 'tree' in a piece of material as good artists often can. But there should be some element of a good bonsai that attracts your attention.


What Does the Tree Have to Offer?:

If you purchase good pretrained material, which is not inexpensive by the way, the trunk may be essentially finished, that is, it will already have the size and form determined and completed. Your job is then to turn this finished trunk into bonsai. This can occur rather quickly, or what passes for quickly in bonsai. It will look like bonsai just after the initial styling and will only get better in succeeding years. Or you can grow out inexpensive nursery stock and create your own pre trained material. In either case, you still have to see some element of the 'tree' to begin converting the material into bonsai.

The first place to begin looking is at the nebari. This is the bonsai term for the buttress, crown, and surface roots of the bonsai. This is what anchors the tree to the earth. Without a good nebari, a tree will stand awkwardly, it will look unstable and unsure of itself, something a strong wind could blow over. A tree with a good nebari will swell at the base and spread across the surface of the earth, grabbing and clenching it with big radial surface roots that divide and ramify. If you find a tree with good nebari, buy it no matter what the rest of the tree looks like, even if you have to regrow the entire rest of the tree. Excellent nebari is rare and one of the most difficult aspects to achieve in bonsai. If at all possible, you should plan the entire design of the tree on the basis of the nebari, choosing the front from it, deciding on the size and the form from it.





The second aspect that should demand your attention is the trunk. What does the trunk have to offer in terms of size? If it has a good first section, that is, up to the first branch, or where the first branch will be, that will save you about five years of growth for most bonsai. If it tapers from this point, that's even better. What it does from this point will help determine the form. If it tapers into the next section but is straight, then it will work for a formal upright. If it tapers and moves at this point. then you have the possibility of an informal upright or slant. Try to see where the trunk becomes uninteresting. Does it have a long straight section with no taper or branches? Or does it have a radical curve after a basically straight beginning? The place where it becomes uninteresting is where you should consider chopping it and regrowing the rest of the trunk. If you don't, you will build in a fault. This is extremely difficult to overcome. It can be done sometimes by an expert, but you will probably spend more years and effort trying to hide it than if you just corrected the situation by cutting it off and regrowing it.

If you have both a nebari and trunk (rare), then you can begin looking at branches. Branches on decidous trees usually aren't a big deal because you can simply regrow them or even graft them. Conifers are more difficult, especially pines. With pines you pretty much have to have branches were you want them or you will never get them. They can be grafted, but it is neither fast nor easy. On most deciduous trees, the branches aren't even started until the trunk is basically finished.

If you collect material for bonsai, as nearly every practitioner does, there will always be some material that doesn't speak to you. It just won't offer any elements that suggest a 'tree'. This happens to me too. If you decide to keep it, make sure it is pruned and basic aspects are developed and not ignored, like growing out the trunk size and maintaining low branches. Look at it twice year with a critical eye. As it develops, it will change, and you will change too. You will begin seeing things that you have never seen before. At some point, perhaps many years later you will see the 'tree'.

REBS Show 2005

Saturday and Sunday, the fourth weekend in August, is the traditional date for the Redwood Empire Bonsai Society Show. I look forward to this date every year, and I don't believe I have missed the show since the first one I attended around fifteen years ago. It is the bonsai highlight of the year for Northern California. This is one of the biggest shows in the country with over 100 major show quality trees from all over the Bay Area as well as the North Bay. It is always held at the Veterans Memorial Hall in Santa Rosa.

I used to attend this show as a vendor. The sales were good, but my business just isn't set up for this kind of event, so it was much more work than it was worth. But the worst part about vending was that I didn't get to see much of the show! Now, I go down for one day and spend it entirely with the trees and my old bonsai friends, some of whom I only see once a year at the show. It is an inspiration to see such magnificent trees. I get energized to go home and work on my own. I haven't shown any trees for a number of years, but I hope to do so again next year. I have three major trees that I hope to have in shape by August next year. I bought a big cream oval pot for my redwood and agreed to have Tom Colby build me a stand for my Pyracantha. Bob Shimon has a pot I want for my Liquidambar, but it wasn't at the show, so I will have to pick it up later. I rarely buy trees anymore, it's too much of a case of 'coals to Newcastle', although I did buy a wonderful old crabapple from Jim Gremel this spring. Pots and stands will take up most of my 'tree' budget for the next few years as my trees edge toward show quality.


It is nice finally to be making the transition to finishing trees, it only took twenty years. It doesn't have to take that long, but that's how it has worked out for me. It's odd, bonsai is an art that is turned on its head. Beginners want to do all the last things first, and necessary things last. You don't get to work on leaf reduction, ramification, potting, and showing until the tree is basically finished. That's the glory stage, and beginners want to jump right into it. The problem is that they haven't paid their dues, the many years it takes to prepare the material, or the commitment to buy quality material, and the years it takes to learn how to deal with it. The years spent getting there look like a huge hurdle to someone at the beginning, but in fact, the getting there is the real joy. It is the joy that you get everyday as you prowl among your trees, getting hundreds of little surprises each year as you discover each little improvement that you and nature have created. Sometimes it's happenstance, sometimes it's planned, but the joy is the same.

In fact, if beginners don't discover this joy of the journey, they don't stay with bonsai. The path is so long that no mortal human could endure the frustration of that delayed gratification. Yes, the oohs and ahs of the spectators taking in your trees is rewarding, but it is only the tip of the total joy, deeply intense, but soon gone. Monday morning brings you back to the reality of watering, pruning, potting, fending off the elements until next year. Yet, shows are a great incentive to stick with bonsai, especially really good shows like REBS. I take pictures each year of both my old favorites and new trees. Seeing these trees again and again reminds me that I have to finish my own; I have to give them their moment of glory. The trees begin to take on a life of their own. Not like pets, because they are totally dependent on your care and love, but a live entity striving for beauty through your efforts. It's important to show them, to let others enjoy the artistic beauty, to be pulled into the frame that cuts through reality.

Old friends are important too. For the last several years, I have made my critical tour of the show with Greg, whom I only get to see once a year. We are fellow nurseryman, so there is a professional bond beyond bonsai. He is a lovable character and it is a great joy to see him. We, and sometimes Jeff, my best bonsai buddy, enjoy and study each tree in the show, taking a couple hours to make the rounds. We absorb the experience the great trees give us, pausing to let the beauty and the story sink in. Then we critically analyze them, both the wonderful and the bothersome aspects, and make suggestions. It's a great opportunity to test your skills and expand your horizons. The opportunities to see such material all at once and in person are so rare, that they cannot be wasted. I find myself finding new fronts for may of the trees. In a few cases I would have made the front the back, but usually it is a more subtle than that, turning a few degrees to display better an important aspect or to diminish a bothersome one.



The vendors section gives me the chance to see old business associates. These are people I love as friends but with whom I can also talk shop. But since they are busy trying to make some money, the conversations are by necessity short and concentrated. I always try to talk to Ian from Lone Pine Gardens, who is a propagation nerd like myself. He actually propagates a lot more than I do these days, but each of us delight in sharing our new discoveries in the prop house. This is also the chance to actually see and feel the pots, stands, and stones that you otherwise would have to guess about in catalogs and on the internet. You get to talk to the people that make and sell them. I had a nice conversation with Tom and went through all the stands he had there, but there just wasn't one big enough for my monster trees, so I am going to have him build me one. It is going to set me back more than I wanted, but it's time for me to make that kind of commitment to the art. I'm not going to live forever and its so easy to keep putting off these decisions until one day you wake up and it's too late or life takes a left turn, and then it's impossible. I don't want this opportunity to pass me by.

Then at the end of the day, after all the chatting and shopping and looking, I go back through all the trees one last time and take pictures. It's such a challenge. The lighting in the hall is terrible and if you use the flash, the shadows wreck the image. I used to spend about an hour on each picture pixel painting out shadows and enhancing them until they looked like what I remembered. Yesterday, I just gave up and took them without the flash and instead spent far less time correcting the color, contrast, and brightness. They lose detail by not using the flash, but the really important part is that the feeling is still pretty much intact, and this is a process that I can stand to perform. There are a few shots in this post, but the bulk of the pictures in much greater resolution will be posted at our website in the coming weeks. I will announce it here when they are done.

On the almost two hour drive home, I think about these things, about what I am doing, where I am going, how much progress I am making. It's one of those time markers that I keep talking about. This is a yearly one, a chance to gauge my life, and the life of the nursery, and the life of my trees. During the six years of the move, these measurements have been difficult. Yes, I was building something better, but I was also sacrificing a lot of things. One of those things was my trees. That's over now. The old nursery has been closed a year, and there have been other setbacks since then, but these too have been resolved. There is still much to be done, but now it is time for a long climb back to the dream, that fateful thought I had twenty years ago as I prowled among my new collection thinking I could spend my life selling these little trees to people.

Problem Solving

Remember those word problems in elementary and junior high math?

If Tommy rides his bike at ten miles an hour and the store is four kilometers away, How much change would he get from a twenty dollar bill if he bought four dozen eggs at $2.95 a dozen? And how in the world would he get them back home safely?

We universally hated those problems. It's too bad because they probably represented the few, if only, chances to do any real problem solving in school. School was, and probably still is, cognitive oriented. How many facts can you cram into your head for just long enough to spew it out on the next exam? Our whole focus of education is wrong. Sure, there is some basic stuff that everyone should know about our history, culture, our bodies, etc, that could probably be summed up in a few good sized text books, or less. But apparently, even this isn't happening. Ever see those polls that say 57% of seniors in high school can't find the Pacific Ocean on a map? That stuff is mind boggling. Or current events, one poll the other day said something like 45% of adults don't know who Karl Rove is. He's probably only the second most important man in the US political scene today (I wonder if they know who number one is?). I guess we all have gaps and holes in our cognitive domain, but boy, some people must have holes you could drive a semi through. So, if the cognitive gaps are this bad, it doesn't leave much hope for the problem solving realm.

The sad part is that problem solving is really fun! It's curiosity with power tools. Sometimes I think the main object of school is to kill a child's curiosity about the world. We explain curiosity away by putting labels on it. "Teacher, what makes the moon go around the earth?" Answer "That's gravity, Bobbie". Well, that one's done, what's next? I was in college physics before I really knew what made the moon go around the earth. No kidding, and I was a chemistry major and lifelong science buff. Oh, sure, I could talk about the attractive forces, I could even regurgitate an equation if I had to, but I didn't really know in any meaningful sense. It happened like this: One day I was sitting in the huge physics lecture hall, bored out of my skull, thinking "why can't they make more left handed desks in these places". In the background was a voice that was talking about orbital motion and falling bodies. Now, all my life before this very instant, I was fascinated and disturbed by the fact that orbiting bodies had just the right amount of momentum to keep them perfectly balanced against the attractive force of the body they were orbiting. I guess I thought it was because if they didn't, they would either fly off into space or crash into the larger body (which is largely true), thus, only these perfect matches would last. All the physics majors out there are giggling now, but I really didn't know.

So, here I am half listening to the professor, and thinking again about this perfect match problem for the upteenth time. And then something magical happened. The words "falling body" triggered a brilliant flash of intuition. He didn't explain it for me, but he provided the key piece to the puzzle. I was so excited, I was almost dizzy, I wanted to scream "THEY ORBIT BECAUSE THEY ARE FALLING BODIES!!!!" There is no perfect match. ANY body that approaches or FALLS toward a larger body can play out one of three scenerios depending on it's speed and mass relative to the larger body. If it is high, it's path will be curved but it will first fall and then escape, just passing by it. If it is too slow, it's path will be curved enough so that it falls and crashes into the larger body. But for everything in between, it is captured by the gravity of the larger body but its fall never reaches the larger body, it continues to FALL forever in an elliptical orbit. So the moon, the earth and all the other planets are still falling bodies. Falling bodies that are just barely captured will have enormous elliptical orbits, slowing down at fartherest extent of their orbit, nearly about to escape, but can't quite make it, so they slowly turn back toward the larger body gaining a lot speed as they swing just past it on the return trip, but not close enough to crash into it. If you slowed them down, remember the retro rockets Scotty, they would still fall, but their orbit would bcome smaller. There would be a continual sucession of smaller and smaller orbits as you slowed the object down more and more until they did crash.

So, I know a lot of you are saying big deal. But my problems aren't your problems. Each of us has 'falling body' problems wandering around in our psyche, nagging, aching to have an answer. Sometimes, maybe even most times, we aren't even truly aware of the nature of the problem, we only know the nagging feeling. These are problems that cognitve learning usually can't answer because we just haven't been taught the process or the beauty of problem solving. Cognitive learning provides the fundamental stuff from which we can build theories, and it is from theories that we attempt to solve problems.

Why didn't the curiosity get beaten out me? That's a good question. Part of the answer is that I was a 'goody two shoes' in school. All the teachers said on my report cards "If I only had a classroom full of little Brent's". It was disgusting. Unlike a lot of other bright children that act out on their boredom with school, I turned it inward. I wondered about stuff. The reason I wasn't a trouble maker was that I was inside my head most of the time, both in school and out. I had my own little realm going on in there that didn't depend on real world much, or at least the social world. I can remember quite clearly when I must have been about seven or eight, looking at an electric motor. I can still see that motor. I was thinking, how in the world can something like that work? It just a case with a bunch of wires inside that you plug into the wall. Now I bet that is still the extent of understanding of fully half of the adult population in the US. But it bugged me. So, I did something about it. I went to library. Those were different days, I use to take the bus by myself at the age of five and go into town and to the library and the movies, and nobody even thought anything about it. And there I got books on electric motors, how they worked and how to build them. I had a little work shop in the basement and started building simple motors from dowls, thread spools, wire, and copper tubing for a commutator, it ran on six volt lamp batteries my father used to bring home from work for me. From building a simple motor, I got to learn how they worked. Later, I got a reputation as the kid who knew how everything worked. Maybe I couldn't understand or explain the fine details, but I could tell you how a car, or the refrigerator or the TV worked. The other kids would try to stump me, but they couldn't.

I guess that set a pattern for my life. It has been a source of immense pleasure and also painful frustration, mostly in school and college, where the real meaning of what you are supposed to be learning isn't important. Especially math, but that's the subject of another post. Then later, I too, became a teacher, and I tried to teach this awe and wonder of knowing how the world works. I put a priority on this aspect over the cognitive realm, so of course I was fired. Public school and I were just too combustible a mixture. I have continued to teach over the years, but only when I could do it my way, and it in little ways, usually in one to one situations, but I have taught adult college classes too, using these same principles.

Thus it is that I approach bonsai the same way. I reject the cookbook approach. I want to know why I have to root prune when the plant is dormant. I try to incorporate plant physiology into teaching bonsai, so that you gain the power to solve your own problems. These are extremely powerful tools. If you know how plants grow, then you can manipulate them and predict the outcome of your actions, whether you have read about it or not. The parable in the bible is so true: If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you feed him forever.

A Beginner Demo

Probably the most common question a bonsai beginner will ask is "What can I do with this?" That's when I just heave a big sigh and do the best I can. There are just so many factors involved. For starters, there is usually more than one 'tree' in any starter material. So one of the questions is "What do you want it to be?" Most material that is presented by beginners is just too young to show much of anything in the way of styling potential. So the next question is "How long do you want to wait?". Fortunately, there are some basic guidelines that can help you design your 'tree', if you have some decent material to work with.

What is decent material? More than stick in a pot of course. Decent material will have a trunk with taper and an interesting trunk line. It should not need massive growth to increase trunk caliper. If it does, then it's too soon to use it for immediately styling other than planning a general shape and size. So the trunk should be essentially finished, at least up the first branch. To get any further with your design, there should also be branching. Branches that are not too thick and that fork into secondary branching makes it more workable, but at least having enough branches to create the major final branches is necessary to proceed.

Now that doesn't sound like much, but just go to any nursery and try to find something like that. It's pretty difficult. Most nursery plants that fit this descriptions are going to be overgrown shrubs in one to five gallon size containers. These can make nice small bonsai in a few years and the basic structural work can be done in one session. Deciduous material is the easiest to work with because it will usually bud back if there is little or no growth close to the trunk where you need it. Conifers that have enough branching for immediate design work have all their foliage too far from the trunk, so that if you created the outline you wanted, you would have to remove all or most of the foliage and probably kill it. Thus, you can buy nice conifer candidates, but you usually can't just take them home do the kind of design work that you as a beginner want to do. You first have to prune them back to force foliage closer in, then do the design work months or years later.

Probably the most important rule that should be etched into every beginner's mind is the six to one rule. This is the rule that virtually every novice on the face of the planet violates, and every mallsai every created violates. This rule tells you how big your bonsai is going to be. Most real bonsai have a trunk that is six times taller than the width (or caliper) of the trunk. This isn't something that requires you to actually measure to get an exact ratio of six to one, but nearly every real bonsai will be in the range of about three to one (fat) to ten to one (tall and thin). Most bonsai will fall around a mean of six to one. So if your bonsai is taller than ten to one, it just isn't going to look like 'bonsai'. You can rail all you want about stupid rules, and how you are only doing this to please yourself, etc, etc, but, the truth is, you just won't be creating bonsai. You will be creating a stick in a pot, and that is exactly how it will look.

Armed with the six to one rule, you are ready to begin. Now you know how tall your 'tree' is going to be. The next rule to apply is create a triangular outline. There are a lot of correlations to this rule which would refine the outline, but for initial styling, all you need to know is that you need a triangular outline with the top point as the apex. Beginners tend to make the outline too broad. Good bonsai will usually have all the foliage relatively close to the trunk. The wider the base of the foliage outline triangle, the smaller the trunk will appear. Keeping the outline tight will enhance the trunk. You can start with a wider base for the first round of pruning and refine it to a narrower outline as work progresses. Knowing that this triangular outline is the shape of your 'tree' allows you to cut cut off everything outside this outline. This reduces the thinking process tremendously.

Now you have a basic shape and height. The rest of the work is more difficult and will require study and practice, but almost anyone can do it. More rules will follow. I have illustrated these ideas below with a series of pictures. The material here is Cotoneaster microphyllus 'Thymifolius'. Cotoneaster is a wonderful bonsai teaching tool, because they are easy to grow, are very shrubby, and can make a decent small bonsai. You can often find overgrown one gallon size plants that can be treated immediately like the one below. The one I have illustrated here is a bit of a ringer because it is an older plant that has been pruned several times in the past to get some trunk movement. But you can often find such material in nurseries. The problem with Cotoneaster is getting a decent trunk caliper, so it will almost always be a small bonsai (remember that six to one rule!). You might easily end up with a six inch tall or even shorter bonsai from one gallon size material. A bonsai tall would have a 3/4 to 1 inch size trunk caliper.

Now look at the picture below. The white line defines the triangular outline and gives you the maximum final height of the finished 'tree'. You can cut off everything else. This isn't rocket science. You just take a pair of shears and make a cone to create this outline (remember that a bonsai is three dimensional, so the rotated triangle is a cone).


Here is what you get after this preliminary shaping.



I should stop here and tell you that bonsai have a front and a back. I could write another whole article on how to determine the front (the angle from which you view it). But for this beginner analysis, I would just like to make two points. If at all possible, the front should display the most powerful and interesting aspect of the trunk and the base or buttress (the nebari). So if the trunk has some nice interesting curves, that's what you want to show. If it has a nice thick base and flare, you want to show that. If it has good radial roots anchoring the trunk, you want to show that. It's not often that you will get to show everything to it's best advantage, so it is usually a compromise. The second rule of choosing the front, is that that the tree has to move toward you, not away from you, especially the apex. The apex can usually be grown toward you without too much difficulty, but the trunk is usually fixed, so you will have to position it so it leans slighty toward the viewer. Sometimes, but not always, you can accomplish this by tilting the tree. When it is repotted the next time, you plant it at it's new angle. Wooden wedges are great for angling the pot to get the best view while you are deciding. Always remember that you are working in three dimensions; not only can you rotate the tree to get a good front, you can tilt it as well. It is often amazing what a few degrees of tilt or rotation will make. I chose this as the front because the entire tree leans forward, there was no possibility of having the other side the front. It often isn't this simple.

Now you need to refine the tree somewhat. This is still gross pruning, so it doesn't require a whole lot of thinking. If look at the first picture closely you will see that there is a multitude of straight thin branches coming from the trunk and from larger branches. For deciduous trees, the only potentially useful part of these branches is the first inch or so, because that is where you would want the branch to fork and bend. You get it to fork by pruning it back to where you want the fork to be or just a little longer. When the branch buds back (sprouts) as a result of the this pruning, two things happen. First, you get an nice bend in the branch because one bud will break from the side. The second thing you get, usually, is another bud break that can be the side branch. Now there are many more branches than you want in your 'tree', but at this point, you don't need to think about it, just prune them all back, and don't remove any of them. We will remove the extra branches later when we have decided on the final design. It is very easy to remove them now and wish you had them back later.

Here is the result of the next stage of pruning.


Now it is starting to look like a 'tree', but it needs final branch decisions, final trunk line decisions, and refining. I need to stop again and talk about trunk lines. This is a very simple, but extremely important concept in bonsai. The trunk line begins at the soil line (at the nebari) and continues up the trunk and finishes at the apex (top). That seems like a simple statement, but getting this final result can be extremely difficult and literally can take years or even decades for good bonsai. The trunk can have movement (curves), or it can relatively straight as in a formal upright. It can either end with the apex over the base (upright), or it can end with the apex off center (slanted). It can also end up below the rim of the pot (cascade or semi-cascade).

Now branches need to be selected. There are many rules of branch selection that I won't go into here, but they can be found in the RULES article at the website. A few simple rules can be applied here. Branches should go on the outside of the curves, they should get smaller and finer in nature as you go up the tree. They should also get closer together as you go up the tree. If you are in doubt, you should leave more branches than necessary, they can be removed later. In this particular tree, it had several thick branches that were already nicely formed, so it was an easy decision to keep them and remove the long straight thin branches entirely. However, had the thicker branches been too thick, it would have been necessary to keep a nearby smaller branch and develop it. This takes time and most beginners want results now. So, I left the more developed branches, although some smaller ones were also left for possible future development. Hopefully by now, you are getting a feeling of the potential for bonsai by recognizing the number of parameters there are to the various aspects. Read that sentence again. If don't know what "parameter" means, you should look it up, it's a great word and has particular import for bonsai.

Almost no beginner would have cut back the thicker branches as much as I did. There is a good reason. Think of branches as little horizontal trees. They should have movement and taper, just like the trunk. The only difference is that they are created relatively flat on the bottom. The get smaller and finer as go out toward the tip, the secondary branches get closer together, just like the trunk. The large branches on this tree don't do this. Study the longer, larger branches. You can see in each one that there is a long straight section where they don't taper or move. They have to be cut back to where they become a problem. That is, where they stop moving, or where the taper stops, or where they begin to become boring. You will have to regrow and reform the rest of the branch from this point. This is a difficult thing to do when you are looking at a tree as in the photo above that almost looks finished, and you realize that you will end up with the tree in the photo below that looks bare and naked. It is necessary, or you will have a flawed tree forever. Bite the bullet and cut them back, you will be thankful years later that you did.




Now look at the top of the tree in the picture above. Notice that there is a twin apex, or in other words, a fork at the top of the tree. This confuses the eye and breaks the 'flow' of the trunk line. There should be a clear undisputed trunk like to the apex. The apex itself can branch into a little crown, but it must be very fine in nature and the forking should be of equal or similar caliper branches. This is not the case here. The left hand apex is very heavy and lacks taper. The right hand apex is smaller and more refined. Many people might be inclined to go with the larger apex simply because it is larger, but this is a mistake. It is also a mistake to leave both. The correct choice is the right apex, the left has to be removed. In addition to the taper and the small nature of the right apex there is another reason to choose it over the left one. If you look at all the pictures, you can see in each one that there is strong movement to the right. There are bends, but the movement always returns to the right. This is the direction of the 'flow'. This is a vague concept, but like love you know it when you see it. The apex must always finish in the direction of the 'flow'. If you look at the left heavy apex, you will notice that it moves and finishes to the left; it changes the direction of the flow. Also notice that visually it forms a "C" with the portion below. The "C" formation is a classic sign of a fatal break in the flow. This is what I call moving back on itself. I have coined this term because that is exactly how this formation makes me feel. Anytime I see a "C" formation in bonsai, it gives me an uncomfortable feeling. It closes off the flow and suggests a circle rather than a soaring upright visual movement. The flow gets stuck in the "C".

So, remove the left apex and this is the result. When it is next repotted, it will have to be tilted and rotated as shown below. Because of the strong movement of the trunk, the tilt and rotation are very critical. It will take some fine analysis to get it just right.



What's left to do? You will notice that I did not repot the tree in this session. The last photo completes all that you can do at this time. Beginners want so badly to put the tree in a teeny bonsai pot, that they will invariably endanger the tree to do it. There is no good reason to do it. Bonsai is about patience, if you don't have the patience to do what's best for the tree, then you better take up knitting. This kind of work is only possible because the tree is in a larger pot with an established root system. The presence of the undisturbed root system will allow this tree to recover very quickly. By late fall, it will have filled out again and I will post another picture. I will not prune it all until next spring. It could be repotted in early spring, but it might be better to wait even another season to use it's vigorous growth to solve some remaining problems such as scar healing.

Next season, it can be trained exactly as if it is finished bonsai. The next step is ramification of the branches and formation of the apex. The apex right now is only suggested, it will need a lot of work, but since the apex is formed from small branches only, that can easily be accomplished in one or two years. This will be a nice little shohin tree in about two to three more years. For this tree that means about 15 years total, but from ordinary nursery stock, you could achieve similar results in about 7 or 8 years. Since nursery stock of this size is already about 5 years old, you can get a decent little shohin in 2 to 3 years from material costing about $7 if you can find it. You might have to look at 25 to 50 trees of all the same age to find one that has the potential of this one. That's why I don't sell such material for $7. I have already gleaned the best trees for advanced material. You can of course spend a lot more time developing good stock yourself, but then you need to know a lot more than I have outlined here, and you need to spend the kind of time that I have spent in corrective pruning over the years. Or you can do both, most people do.

The Lion

In the last post I talked about the mental and metaphysical aspects of walking in the early morning hours. There is also another side. It is primal and puts me in touch with my animal being. There are night creatures out there. I was terrified of the dark as a child. But as life goes on, the mystery and most of the fear get explained away. No bogey men under the bed, no horned green monsters lurking in the shadows, but there are always still some real fears that on rare occasions that cut right to the base instincts.

Being startled is not an unusual event. I come across skunks, jack rabbits, even a little fox that I have been eye to eye with numerous times. Even small birds in the brush can give me a momentary alert. Once, on a particularly dark morning last winter, I got the feeling that I was approaching something enormous. I couldn't see anything, but I knew something was there. I could almost feel the breathing. I stopped, took out the flashlight and clicked it on. There, not five feet away was a cow bedded down right beside the road staring at me with those big round eyes. Fowler's fences were down again. I smiled and moved on.

Perception also plays tricks on you in the dark. The mind desperately wants to explain everything it encounters, but without much light, it gropes wildly for a solution, like flipping pages to find the right answer. Shapes change and outlines rearrange until there is enough information for the aha! Then all the elements rearrange again in a fraction of second to recognize...a shrub! I love that feeling, that crystallization of elements to explain the unexplained. Not because it answers the mystery, but rather because it reveals that the explanation isn't always the answer. There can be an amorphous moment when there is no answer. That's how we lose our childhood, our wonderment. We explain life.

A few times in life we are blessed with being in exactly the right place at the right time, to have an experience we never forget. It happened on a walk about four years ago. It was late winter, and the return trip found the cold sun about an hour below the horizon. It was that half light when things are just becoming visible at a distance. I was approaching a series of sharp turns in the road away from all houses and buildings. As I approached the turn there was a sound that for all the world sounded like someone was skateboarding down the hill toward me from the opposite direction and approaching the bend. It was quite bizarre. Who in the world could be out at this hour skateboarding in the dark? In just a few seconds more I had the answer. We meet at the bend, and there not fifty feet from me was an adult male mountain lion. He saw me before I saw him and he was growling all the way down the hill. Ears back, eyes glued on me, three foot tail waving, he was sending me a strong message. I froze. The hair on my neck stood straight up. Now I know what the dogs feel when the hackles go up on their backs. He was not pleased. These are very secretive creatures, and I had somehow managed to walk right up on him. It was over in an instant. He kept those eyes on me the whole time until he got past the bend and into the chaparral and was gone.

I was stunned and elated. I had witnessed what very few people ever get to see. A magnificent predator in the wild, close up, face to face, both of us wondering if this was our moment. But no, we went our separate ways. He to munch on one of Fowler's calves and me to breakfast.

Walking

I don't sleep well during the early hours of the morning. Once my brain starts working, sleep is fitful, and I figure I may as well just get up. About ten years ago, I decided that as long as I was up I may as well do something healthful. So I started walking around 5am. For the first few years we were still living in Ukiah, a small city that is still big enough to have light pollution so I didn't get to see much of the night sky. Still, it was dark and quiet, a different place at that hour of the morning. The night sector of the labor force is just finishing up. The bakers are winding down, the paper carriers are finishing their routes, the truck drivers are lined up at the supermarkets. There is a kind of low level hum compared to the noisy traffic and twittering of commuter voices that will dominate in two or three hours. It is the world coming awake.

The discipline of walking not only gave me physical exercise, it also turned the restless churning of my thoughts into more productive activity. It is a great time to think and problem solve. Some of my best thoughts have come in that half light before the debris of the day's demands clutter up the mind. Unfortunately, most of this has radiated out into the universe on the back of the lost photons, never written down or recorded other than in my fuzzy memory. Too bad we don't have thought recorders.

When we moved to the country, I realized that the experience of walking the streets of Ukiah was but a minuscule glimpse of what walking at that hour could be. For starters, it is dark. It's not as dark as the moonless nights I spent in rural New Hampshire where you literally could not see your hand in front of your face, but it so dark that I can just barely see my white walking shoes. There are no street lights out here, and only a few houses have outdoor lights, thank god. On the darkest nights I can just barely make out the road ahead of me. Since there is only a car about every hour, I just walk down the middle or safely away from the dropoffs near the edge. It's easy to know that I am safely in the road because on the edge of the road my shoes begin to crunch the gravel that has been blown off the surface, a stone at time working loose from the asphalt.

I take a flashlight, but I only use it when a car comes so I can light the edge of the road without stumbling in the broken edge. The car lights completely blind me so I have to look straight down and hope it's an early commuter and not a late drinker. Fortunately there is usually one or no cars during the hour. It is so dark and quiet that I can hear most cars coming when they are still about half a mile away. Often the eerie headlights will light up the landscape before I can hear a car coming over the hill or around a curve. I'm sure all these early morning drivers think I'm crazy, especially with the hood of my sweatshirt almost always up, even during the cool summer mornings. I once had a nice chat with a sheriff's deputy who wondered what I was doing out there until he noticed how I was dressed and realized I wasn't a threat. I was glad he was there patrolling and doing his job. We joked about waking all the neighborhood dogs.

But the best part of walking out here is the sky. On those moonless nights, especially in winter when dawn is still a couple hours off, the sky is pitch black overhead except for a littering of stars as if broadcast there like grass seed. Each little seed bursting into a life of light. It's easy to keep track of our little part of the universe because there they are every morning, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and my favorite of all: Orion. I admit that I can't see any of the constellations except the really obvious, and Orion just can't be missed with that tilted square on his belt surrounded by most of the brightest stars in our sky. I follow his progress east to west across our morning sky from summer til the next spring, rising a little earlier each day. A few weeks ago, he was just peaking above the morning sky, barely visible against the already growing dawn. But by now, he is quite clearly visible well above the horizon before the first glow of sunlight.

Walking keeps me in touch with the universe in this way. Following the stars, the planets, the moon, the seasons. Marking time in this brief flicker we call life. It's a splendid backdrop to growing plants which are all nasty and wild, seemingly without discipline compared to the rigid mathematical precision of the cosmos. But they too have their cycles and they, without knowing, control my cycles. I am their Shepperd.

Branches

The nice thing about taking workshops is that you get exposed to ideas that you normally wouldn't find by yourself. You also get to discuss the pros and cons of different techniques to achieve the same goal. This is one of the things that I really enjoy about Jim Gremel's monthly workshops. Starting next month, I hope to post a report on whatever tree I take to the workshop. In the meantime, here is the essence of a discussion that I had with Jim about branch formation last month.

First of all, there is no dispute between Jim and I about growing the trunk first. Once the trunk is finished or nearly finished, then you begin work on the branches, at least for most deciduous trees. I pointed out to Jim that most of the trees that come from Kathy Shaner's workshops (and thus appear in the REBS Show), have relatively young thin branches that are wired to form curves right down to the tip. While the individual trees are pleasing to the eye, seeing so many trees dealt with in the same fashion is unsettling to me. Whereas the trunks are all different and wonderful, the branches are all pretty much the same. Part of the problem is that, as bonsai, these trees are still relatively young, with most branches formed only in the last five years or so. In some cases the branches were grown and wired in just the last two years.

I mentioned this to Jim and asked his opinion about forming branches like this as opposed to the clip and trim technique of adding one or two branch sections a year by pruning back these young branches. Now, I'm talking about major branch formation here and not ramification which is the creation of the tertiary branches on the finished major branch pattern. Jim said, yes, you can do it like that, but it takes too long.

I am not so sure. I have always taken the long view of bonsai anyhow, and forming branches in the same way that I grow trunks seems like a natural process to me. On the other hand, Kathy and Jim have a whole more experience than me when it comes to finishing trees. So, I am doing it both ways. On some trees, especially the ones I take to the workshop, I am following Jim's lead. On other trees, that are solely my own creation, I am, for the most part, using clip and trim for the major branching. When it comes to creating the apex and the secondary branching, I agree that it is just as easy to wire new shoots into place and be done with it.

Interestingly, when Walter Pall was here last Febuary, he leaned more toward the clip and trim method, and specifically recommended that treatment for my large sumo type cork bark Chinese elms, Ulmus parvifolia cvs. On those trees Bob and I headed back all the branches this spring leaving a stub, as Bob describes in one of his Blog posts. It won't be too long before winter is here and the trees are naked again so we can get a feel for how that is going to go. I will post some pictures and an update of those trees.

My trees suffered a long hiatus while the big move was going on. I pretty much just neglected them for six years. I kept them alive, but just barely in some cases, and all branch work just came to a halt. Oddly, this has had some beneficial results. It has made some really fabulous deadwood, the kind of wood that would be impossible to carve. It is extremely fragile and will need hardening. But it is wonderful to be working with these trees again, nursing them back to health and inducing the vigor necessary to get the growth to finish them. They still need a better permanent display area, but that may be coming next spring. Now it is in my interest to learn finishing techniques, and I hope to be able to give it the same kind of attention that I have given trunk growing for the last twenty years.

The Nature of Time

Lizzie Contemplates the Nature of the Universe

Bonsai is all about time. It's a way for us to mark time, just like a clock, only more like a calendar. We have these bursts of activity when a tree will change dramatically by our deft hands. Then we have a long period of recovery when we have to slap our fingers to let it be. You don't get bonsai overnight unless you buy it. This is so hard for Westerners to grasp; it isn't our culture. We want it now and we want it easy. And it must truly be torture for the young who have such a slowed sense of time. For them, life is infinite. But as we get older it goes faster, making the progress more tolerable, but alas also racing toward the end.

I think a lot about time; perhaps that is the thing that has glued me to bonsai. It doesn't seem to be a conscious attraction. As I said in an earlier post, I didn't even get into bonsai for the art itself, but rather to learn the techniques for landscape. And I guess I was never really passionate about it either, in the sense that I just had to have a particular tree. No, it's been like an old friend, a comfortable set of clothes. It has taught me many things and it has taken me in a direction that I have always wanted to go. Isn't that what friends do?

One of my favorite books (and the movie) is Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut's tale of a time traveler. And I am fascinated with the cosmos as well as the nearly infinitely small: I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe twice! I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but I don't believe in God. I believe this is all we ever get. When you're dead you cease to be, just as you didn't exist until you were born. This doesn't sadden me; it is my motivation. If I only get 80 or so years of this heaven on earth, you better believe I am going to make the most of it.

Here is a little remembrance that I posted on BonsaiSite in Feb 2005:

Have you ever tried to watch trees grow? Some people would equate it with watching paint dry, but as a child, I was fascinated by such things. At age six I heard or read from somewhere that trees were really snakes that emerged from the ground and had frozen. I suppose I already knew something about plant growth, but nonetheless, I couldn't stop thinking about the possibility and would spend many hours in the woods wondering about how the process would work, and would they ever become snakes again?

Coincident with this mystery was my wonderment about time. Time is so slow when you are a child. I used to do things like try to see the minute hand on a clock move. Whenever you watch it, it's motionless, but if you turn your back and do something, it will move when you aren't looking. School days would be soooo loooong and boring, watching the clock just made it worse. But on a rainy day I remember watching a pencil float down a little rivulet that formed next to the sidewalk. Since my desk was next to the window, I probably watched that little bit of pencil for an hour as it would hit a little stretch of clear water and race maybe an inch or two, only to be jambed up by some tuft of grass at the next turn. As the rivulet swelled a bit more, it would be freed and move another inch or two. I admit I didn't learn a lot about Columbus or Thanksgiving or whatever that day, but I still remember that little bit of pencil gently following nature's course.

It was about this time in my life, maybe I was seven or so, that I devised an experiment. I was convinced that I could understand the true nature of time if I could just get a good anchor point to which I could refer, and then make enough observations back to that point. I decided to stare at a penny to mark the beginning point. It was about eight o'clock at night and all was dark except for the bright glare of the overhead kitchen light. I took out my penny which was brilliant in that light; a clear definite image in my pink little palm. I stared at it for almost a minute, making sure that I could remember this anchoring instant. After that minute, I referred back to it as I watched a bit of TV and got ready for bed. At first it was like watching the minute hand. I must have checked back sixty times before going to bed.

The next day, the memory was still fresh in my head, but now it was beginning to be like watching the second hand. Clearly time was passing. I began getting a sense of intervals eventhough they were only hours at this point. Eventually, I was checking a couple times a day, refreshing my memory of that exact instant by picturing that penny in my hand. Then months starting going by. I was remembering it weekly and duly noting how long ago it was and how often I was remembering it. Then years.

Then decades.

Then a half century.

It was just about 52 years ago that I stored the memory of that penny, and I am still marking time by it. And yet too, it was only yesterday.

More on Cuttings

Chinese Elm Cutting

A good question came up today on Bonsaisite.com about Juniper cuttings. Here is the link, you can scroll down to my post:

http://forums.bonsaisite.com/index.php?showtopic=5649

Each species has its little quirks when it comes to successful cutting propagation. I used to keep detailed notes about each one. I filled little notebooks with this information. Now it's all stored in my brain. I don't even have to look up hormone concentrations for hundreds of species and cultivars now. Years of playing with these little critters has made it second nature for me.

And yet, each year before I do a particular species, I do think about it. What worked well last? Is there anything new to try? In cutting propagation, as in most aspects of plant growing, the learning cycle is measured mostly in years. If it doesn't work this year, you don't get another chance to try it until next year. By the time you have results, it is almost always too late to try another crop that season. This is an extreme test of patience. Some species, like English hawthorn, Crataegus x media cultivars, stem cuttings take three years to root! It is quite a feat just to keep the cuttings alive that long.

One of the most exciting learning experiences for me was solving the puzzle of rooting Japanese black pines, Pinus thunbergii. These are very difficult to root, and require very close attention to detail. They get too wet very easily and rot before rooting. I take the cuttings in April and rooting doesn't start until about August. That's a very long time to keep a conifer species under mist. Most of the cultivars I just graft, but grafting is an inferior solution for the Nishiki or cork bark black pines. Growing them from cuttings puts the corky wings right on the surface of the soil and even the surface roots will cork!

I haven't rooted any of these pines for about six years now. The move made it too difficult and I still don't have the greenhouse set up for it. I am trying to use the propagation greenhouse for a little bit of everything until I build a larger one for overwintering. This means it is full of overwintering plants when I need it for conifer cuttings. This won't be solved soon, but hopefully it will in the next two years. I would dearly love to start more pine cuttings. The last batch that I did also contained some Japanese white pine, specifically P. parviflora 'Zuisho'. This is the one everyone wants as cuttings. It turned out that they were very easy to root and were even faster than the black pines, but getting them out of the greenhouse was another matter. The transition to our desert heat and low humidity just made them curl up their little toes. And keeping them in the greenhouse doesn't work either because that just rots them. I will also have to build an aftercare greenhouse or segregate an area of the proposed larger greenhouse to harden off the cuttings. I need to do this for the grafts too, so it will happen eventually.

One of the truly great disappointments in the new location is that it is next to impossible to grow most Prunus species here. The spring freezes are devasting to them and there are fungal problems and fireblight as well. I am still figuring out that one. It is so frustrating because I had just solved the cutting propagation problems for P. mume before I moved. I had big plans for introducing new cvs and really ramping up production. Alas, it was not to be. I can't even get enough wood from my stock plants to satisfy the waiting list each year. I may have to give up on mume, but I am going to give it several more years first. I may be able to figure that out too.

Cutting Propagation

Cuttings are done for another year. Lined out in nice neat little rows, happily enjoying their intermittent mist shower every few minutes; they represent the future of Evergreen Gardenworks. Selling starter plants will remain the bread and butter of the nursery for many years to come, and cuttings and seedlings are the source of those plants. Bob said the other day "It's like getting plants for free". Yes, it is, but like everything else it does have its costs, not the least of which is twenty years of experience.

I did my first cuttings in the late '80's. I was thinking about landscape propagation rather than bonsai. I had no idea where to get rooted cuttings, and thought how hard could it be? I constructed a 2 foot by 6 foot propagation 'case', a wood frame structure covered with plastic that sat on a bench. The front opened so that you could insert and remove the flats. It held four 17 x 18 inch propagation flats. I installed heating cables in a sand bed and made a mist system using a balance screen. When the screen is dry it is lighter and rises to close a switch activating an electric water valve. The mist comes on and wets the cuttings as well as the screen. The wet screen is heavier and moves down opening the switch contacts and turning the water off. You can actually buy a commercial model of this setup, but I had much more fun making one myself. My cuttings of course, would have been better off with the commercial model, but live and learn.

All things considered it worked pretty well and I learned a whole lot about environmental conditions for successful cuttings. The basic problem was that it was just too hot, even with the mist and cracking the doors open. It was very difficult to regulate conditions in such a small structure. But I did manage to propagate a pretty broad range of perennials and landscpae ground covers. My very first crop was Santolina a common woody perennial ground cover in the West. I was on pins and needles after sticking the cuttings. I would torture them each day, pulling them out to see if they rooted yet. After about two weeks, I was rewarded with beautiful little crystalline white roots. I was hooked. I have had a crop of summer cuttings ever since.

That's not to say it's been all roses since those first rooted Santolina. Cutting production is quite complicated and a little bit of black magic to boot. Some species are sublimely simple, others are maddeningly frustrating. I was, and am, a plant nerd. I wanted to propagate everything. At one time I was propagating over a thousand species and cultivars. At the high point, it was 75,000 cuttings year, most of it done by myself and a part time helper. My 400 square foot propagation greenhouse could load 25,000 cuttings at once, and I would turn it over at least twice a summer. Looking back, I must have been mad to crank out that much material.

Then nature decided to cut me off at the knees. Business was pitiful in the beginning and all these plants that I was propagating and growing were beginning to pile up around me unsold. I then made the best and worst decision of my life. I decided to propagate for another grower. The attraction was his vast collection of plants. It included rare plants from all over the world, many available nowhere else. The plant nerd in me salivated over having access to that collection. But along with all those rare plants came all the rare diseases and pests they harbored. My once pristine nursery became a breeding ground for diseases that didn't even have names yet. It was a nightmare. The worst of many problems was a rare variant of an obscure fungal disease of the genus Cylindrocladium. No one was even quite sure of the species and identification was difficult. Treatment was virtually impossible. The insidious aspect of this disease is that it had no visible symptoms on growing plants. The problem was that it attacked a wide range of plant species only during the callus stage of cutting propagation: a propagator's disease. I tried every fungicide known to man. I had experts from the big chemical companies coming to my tiny nursery and giving me free samples of things to try. Nothing worked.

Eventually, things got so bad that I couldn't root anything. I felt just like the mushroom growers who get weird diseases. They burn everything on the property and move. The thing that I loved most in the world was in danger of disappearing from my life. In the end there was no silver bullet; I retreated to the basics. I stopped using all pesticides. This problem was not going to solved by me, it was going to be solved by mother nature. I was just going to have to ride it out until this thing mutated or some other organism mutated that could help control it. I became super clean, washing the cuttings with a bleach solution after a 15 minute high pressure shower. All the flats and surfaces were bleached, and the greenhouse was disinfected every week with Physan. Cuttings that were stressed in any way seemed to be the most susceptible, so I did everything I could to make sure they didn't overheat or get too dry or too wet. Things weren't a whole lot better, but I was able to root some cuttings eventhough the percentages were quite low. I had the feeling that I was at the bottom of the pit, but I might be able to find my way out.

Then I had a mini satori. One of those wonderful little ideas that are stored away waiting for their time to come. You have to understand that by this time I was obsessed with this disease. I even dreamed about it. I was thinking about my friend and part time employee Kathy with whom I had these wonderful horticultural discussions. Kathy actually had a degree in horticulture, my degree was from the school of hard knocks. Then I recalled a discussion a few years earlier about fungal diseases and how opportunistic they are. Conditions actually have to be just right for fungal diseases to flourish. They need a narrow range of light, moisture, and yes, temperature. I was so obsessed with eliminating stresses on the cuttings that I was ignoring the effect of temperature on the fungal organism itself. The revelation was: maybe I could shoot past the ideal temperature of the disease, which was obviously in the range I was keeping the cuttings, between 70 to 80F during the day. I began experimenting, and I found that I could keep the cuttings alive at temperatures over 100F if I just kept the humidity high enough, around 100%. The beauty was that I also saved a lot money on electricity by not cooling the greenhouse as much. It worked.

Slowly but surely I began making progress. It was really difficult keeping the cuttings that hot and not have them dry out, but eventually I learned how to manage them. It was like Christmas every day, whole flats of cuttings rooted, something I hadn't seen in several years. Eventually, mother nature did take her course and things got back in balance. Now I don't even try to be super clean. I let the good bugs and the bad bugs fight it out, but I still do propagate at 100F. It has become so easy to do it that way and cheap! My new propagtion greenhouse is 14 by 30 feet and for the last two years I haven't even had a fan or cooler. I just crack open the doors and open the vents during the day. In addition to the intermittent mist I have installed a fog line down the center that operates from just the line pressure of about 60 psi. I am going to install a cooling system, in fact, I am rebuilding the evaporative cooler right now, but this will only be used to keep it down to 100F. On really hot days now it gets to 110F in there and that does stress the cuttings. The cooler will also allow other types of propagation.

Production these days is just a shadow of what it used to be. I did it all this year in a little over two weeks in late July, forty flats, or about 3,600 cuttings, just enough to keep business at the current level. That's the nice thing about selling retail only, you grow half as much for twice as much money, and you get the money up front. I guess I am getting older and wiser.

Japanese Maple Seed

I get asked about Japanese maple seed frequently. Since it is almost time to collect seed. Here is how you go about it:

First, a very large percentage of dried Acer palmatum seed that one purchases is not viable. I have spent hundreds of dollars for seed with almost zero percent germination. I finally began getting good results when I started collecting fresh seed myself. It is not clear to me what happens to Acer palmatum seed after it is thoroughly dried, but it makes it extremely difficult to germinate. It may increase the effect of the germination inhibitors, or it may just kill the embryo outright. If you have to purchase seed, make sure that it is fresh or has been stored cold without being overly dried.

It is very hard to find seed companies who will do this. One company that is aware of this problem and will do its best to ship viable seed is FW Schumacher, http://www.TreeShrubSeeds.com. Most seed companies, like the warehouse mail order nursery companies, depend on the fact that most customers will blame themselves for the failure of the seeds or plants. Thus they dry the seed because it is easier to store it that way.

Take for example Acer rubrum, Red Maple. It is a known fact that Red Maple seed is killed outright by simple drying. It ripens in the spring soon after flowering and seed formation. It germinates in ten days to two weeks after it falls, or after it is moistened and kept warm, without any other treatment. Yet check any seed catalogs you have around to see how many will still sell it to you dried. Some of the largest and most well known in the country will gladly sell you dead seed. In fact this is my test for a reliable seed company. If they offer dried Acer rubrum seed, I won't purchase any kind of seed from them unless I am desperate.

Back to Acer palmatum. Fresh seed should be stored for three months in the refrigerator at about 40F after soaking. This will neutralize the only inhibitor present, and the seed will begin to germinate while still in the refrigerator. If it hasn't begun to germinate at the end of three months, it is either not viable (dead), or the storage treatment has caused the need for a warm pre-treatment. Some cultivars of A. palmatum, particularly the dissectums, most likely contain an inhibitor that will have to be broken broken down at 70F as well.

Do not plant the seed until it germinates. It is much easier to give it cold and warm pre-treatment if it is kept in paper towels in a thin plastic bag. After the cold treatment (without germination), keep it at 70F until it germinates or until three months passes. If it does not germinate in three months, it goes back in the for another three months. It is not uncommon for Acer species to have multiple germination inhibitors. It took almost two years of cycling between 70 and 40F for me to completely germinate some hybrid Acer japonicum seed.

To keep from cycling dead seed for years, periodically check the seed with a cut test. Carefully cut open a few seeds and check the kernels. Most Acer seed has a very hard woody shell, so do this carefully. I find concave branch cutters work very well at opening the seed coats without risk of cutting your fingers off. If there is a hard little kernel inside that is cream colored with a thin brown skin, or if the cotyledons (primordial leaves) are partially formed, you have viable seed. Dead seed is easy to detect, the kernel will be brown and mushy. Sometimes the kernel will be absent althogether, this means the seed was never pollinated. I keep opening seeds until I find some solid kernels. If I have opened twenty or thirty without finding a single viable seed, it is a good bet that the lot of it is bad.

One cautionary note on pre-treatment. The seed should be kept moist, but not wet. There is a very fine line between the two and you must learn that difference. Viable seed will usually contain anti-fungal compounds, but improper handling can overwhelm them. Wet conditions will leave a visible film of water on the inside of the plastic bag, and mold will begin to grow almost immediately. Moist conditons will feel almost dry and very little mold will grow, even after weeks of storage. Remember, it is the water inside the seed that is important and necessary for germination. The moist medium is just insurance that the internal moisture is maintained.

Paper towels are neat and clean for seed pre-treatmnet, but are particularly prone to mold formation. They can be moistened with only a few drops of water. They make handling of very small seed convenient, but other media is better for larger seed such as maple seed. Slightly damp peat moss can also be used and it does have anti-fungal properties. I prefer vermiculite; it does not support the growth of mold (it is mineral) and provides a nice water reservoir. The procedure I use is to drain the soaked seed completely and then mix it with an equal volume of dry vermiculite. The dry vermiculite will absorb all of the surface moisture and provide an adequately moist environment for the seed for the entire three months. Additional moisture is not needed.

October is usually the best month to collect your Acer palmatum seed. You either pick the seed off the tree at that time or wait until the leaves drop. Doing the latter makes the job easier because the seed falls after the leaves, and that little bit of extra drying time doesn't seem to make a difference. You can collect seed from green species Acer palmatum or from one of the many cultivars. The green leaf species offspring are very uniform. 'Bloodgood' is an excellent source of Red Japanese maple seed, and is what I use. Dissectum cultivars usually don't give uniform seedlings and many won't have the typical threadleaf, but the seedlings are always interesting and usually quite different from each other. Seed from dissectums can be a bit harder to germinate, so expect lower rates.

Seed Surprises

Here's an oldie but goodie. I will occasionally dig through my old email files to find nice little experiences like this one:

2/21/97 Acer campestre Seed

I got one of those surprises today that I dearly love. I was walking by a flat of Acer campestre seedlings (Hedge Maple) and It appeared to be full of germinating weeds. Upon closer inspection it became apparent that I had a whole new crop of Hedge Maple seedlings in this flat, the second year after sowing the seed. Now I know that Acer species often do this, and I have written about it before, but this was amazing. Fully half or more of the original amount of seed is now germinating uniformly. The flat is dense with new little cotyledons. This seed came from one my own trees so I know it was not overly dry, but I did pick it pretty late in the season. So perhaps there is something to my theory that drying Acer seed triggers a second seed germination inhibitor.

The way this works is:

• A chemical inhibitor (the cold/moist inhibitor) is present that prevents germination. It is broken down by a cold spell (usually three months at 40F) in the presence of moisture.


• A second, and possibly even a third chemical inhibitor is present. There is at least a second cold reactant inhibitor and possibly a warm reactant inhibitor that must be broken down first. This is evidenced by the massive uniform seed germination after the second winter, but before any substantial warm weather the next spring.
• First winter: cold/moist inhibitor is broken down: no germination.
• Next summer: warm/moist inhibitor is broken down: no germination.
• Second winter: second cold/moist inhibitor is broken down: germination
  

The interesting thing is that not all the seeds (obviously) have the multiple inhibitors, or at least in sufficient quantity to delay germination. This is evidenced by some germination (approximately 50%) in the first year.

>>>

Growing from seed is almost as magical as growing from cuttings. Each species has its little germination quirks, and the only way you find them, other than reading books, is to carefully observe and record what you do each year. However, Norman Deno has done a fantastic job of describing and categorizing these processes in his Seed Germination Theory and Practice. I used to have trouble germinating Taxodium distichum, bald cypress, but then I read in Dirr and Heuser The Reference Manual of Woody Plant Propagation that a fifteen minute soak in ethanol helps. I tried it and by golly I got the best germination ever. I do every time now and haven't been disappointed since. It makes sense. Species have evolved these little tricks over millennia to make sure that the seed doesn't germinate while on the tree or too soon after falling. I had noticed that the bald cypress seed was sticky with resin. Undoubtedly it takes a little time in the swamp water to decay that resin; a treatment that it doesn't get under artificial germination. Ethanol easily dissolves that resin which probably contains the inhibitor so that only the moist cold inhibitor is left.

Sometimes, well rarely, it is easiest just to leave the fruit on the plant for the winter. This assumes that no creature will eat it, or some other vagary of nature will destroy it. I discovered that one spring when I was collecting quince fruit, Chaenomeles, to start some seedling trials for new introductions. I had failed to gather the fruit earlier when I should have. It remained on the plants all winter and was nice and soggy by March. When I opened some of the quince apples, surprise!, the seed had already germinated in the nice dark moist interior. These seeds did give me some really interesting offspring, one of which I introduced: Chaenomeles 'Contorted Salmon Pink'.

The Move

Susie's first words after we inspected the double wide mobile that was to be our new home were "I'm never going to live in there". I took it as a challenge. It was at least twice as large as our house in Ukiah; it was peaceful, quiet, and secluded enough that you could walk around naked and no one would notice. I loved it. Before Susie loved it, we has to remove about a ton of ugly orange shag carpeting, tile 1400 square feet of floor, paint all the old dark paneling and install a big glass door in the middle. It took awhile, but eventually she was nearly proud to call it home. We started out by coming over on weekends and 'camped out' in the new house while we did the necessary work. We brought the dogs too. Old Tooter thought it was great, he would think anything was great as long he got feed there. Old Liz was another story though. She would have nothing to do with the new house. She would come in to eat, but she would sleep in the van at night. She didn't start sleeping indoors until the nights got cold and we brought over the old woodstove that she used to curl up under. Then it was home.

All the time we were working on the house, I was taking a worried look around at the property. There was so much to do. The property had nothing in place for a nursery except that there was a good well. We tested the water and it was pure and sweet and it could produce at least 40 gallons a minute at 30psi. But there was no decent pump, and only one water line. The fencing was a joke. We managed to fence a small area around the yard to keep the dogs in, but we would need massive deer fencing to have a nursery and landscaping. Most of the nursery infrastructure would have to accomplished before I could begin bringing any plants over the mountain from Ukiah.

So, we started. We borrowed as much as we dared against the property to begin the nursery project. We put in a 2 horsepower pump and a big pressure tank. We graded about a thousand yards of soil to make the property drain properly. We tore down the old barn before it fell down. We smoothed out the slopes and dips to make areas for lining out the plants. My friend Salvador and I worked every weekend for about two months putting in a seven foot high deer fence around six acres, almost a quarter mile of fence. My neighbor ditch witched all the trenches for the miles of pipe that had to be layed. I designed and built a three thousand square foot shade cloth area for the larger plants and two 96 foot long shade covered hoop houses for the liner plants. Project after project, year after year the work progressed. With a fat bank account and lots of labor it was a six month project, but doing it nearly single handedly on a limited budget made it a five year project.

After about four years, we had enough finished so that I could start bringing over plants from Ukiah. In this climate, you don't just haul plants over and plunk them on the ground. No, it doesn't rain in summer here. All the irrigation has to be in place before you dare set out any plants. So, block by block, I layed out the irrigation and the emitters and the sprinklers. As each area was completed, I would bring over another batch of plants from Ukiah. Thousands of trees came over in my GMC with the six by twelve foot utility trailer behind. Hundreds of trips. At one point the gasoline bill was $400 a month, and that was before $2 a gallon gasoline. It was endless. That went on month after month, and then, year after year. Finish another area, move some plants. In all, it took six years from the time we bought the property until I finally made the very last trip and closed the old nursery. I could hardly believe it was true. Every half hour I would stop and say to myself "I don't have to go to Ukiah anymore!", and a big grin would light up my face.

The Nursery Under the Mountain

I remember the precise moment that I became a nurseryman. I was 36 years old and between real jobs, not that I have had all that many real jobs. I quit my last job as a paralegal with Legal Aid and was doing free lance paralegal training and writing manuals. I became close friends with one of the other trainers, Sandy, and we were walking toward her house near the Castro in San Francisco. It was one of those beautiful sunlit mornings in the City when the air is crystalline. I had been playing with houseplants and gardening for years. It was such a pleasant diversion from dealing with people's problems. We were talking about this and I found myself saying "Yes, I think horticulture is going to get me". And it did.

That was 23 years ago now and a lot water has gone under that bridge. I started a landscape maintenance business, then that evolved into landscape installation and even design. I started taking horticultural courses at the Junior College and eventually even became a certified Community College horticultural instructor. I started a small nursery to supply my landscape business, and soon growing plants took over my life. Bonsai didn't attract me as an end in itself but as a way to learn how to prune. In the landscape maintenance business pruning means one of two things, round or square. I knew there had to be a better way. Bonsai was that way.

But bonsai is addictive, and I soon found myself ensnared by the spiderweb of rules that governs the creation of tree art. It is so simple and yet so difficult. You look at a bonsai and it might have only five branches and a trunk. How hard can it be? But given a piece of raw material, a beginner, any beginner, feels like a dunce, lost, without a clue as where to begin. So, what started out as a study in pruning soon became the only thing that really interested me. Landscaping became the way to support my habit.

There were many pitfalls and disasters along the way. At times it was excruciatingly difficult to keep up the effort. There was no money in small nursery operations, even less in bonsai. Mother nature had a seemingly endless supply of challenges for me. But slowly the challenges were met, the problems were solved, and all the things that I had to do just to support the bonsai habit were abandoned with each new success. For almost two decades this struggle took place in Ukiah California at my little growing grounds of less than an acre. It was time for a change.

Then it happened. In 1998, after another epic struggle, Susie managed to secure her inheritance from her aunt. We had enough money to move. We looked desperately for a location in beautiful Mendocino County, but we could find nothing within our reach. Grapes had caused the usable land prices to skyrocket. Reluctantly, we begin to look in neighboring Lake County for a new nursery home. We spent each weekend for months driving all over Lake County, working from a list that a wonderful little old lady realtor had drawn up for us. We kept getting farther and farther from Ukiah, expanding the circle of potential properties. The farther out we looked, the more I worried. I was going to have to move thousands of trees.

Finally we started looking for property around Kelseyville at the foot of Mt. Konocti, an ancient dormant volcano that rises straight up from the south side of Clear Lake. I had once flown over it in a small plane and had seen the three vents still visible after ten thousand years. It is quite impressive and undoubtedly a source of great power to the native peoples. We drove out Kelsey Creek Drive which makes a big loop to the north and comes out just south of Lakeport. We were going to look at a piece at the end of the loop before it starts back to the highway. I had no idea how far it was. We drove three miles through typical rural one acre plots with houses next to the road, boring little pony ranches, but with great views of that mountain. Then the road drops down to the side of the creek and starts climbing a rock wall through an incredibly narrow canyon. The road is literally blasted out of the rock cliff. No houses, no people, nothing except the steep forested walls of the canyon and the swift boulder strewn Kelsey Creek far below the road. It was dark cool and quiet, an amazing contrast to what came before. It was about a mile before the canyon opened up into a beautiful tiny round valley, not more than a mile across. The entrance is guarded by a sentinel rock precipice topped by an ancient fir tree. There were houses along the road, but only on the creek side. The north side was open grassy meadow studded with valley oaks. It was quite magical.

Another mile, just before the property we were headed for, there was a large parcel, relatively flat, that had just been tilled for hay. Beautiful rich freshly tilled earth. There was a for sale sign at the corner. We went past and up the hill to the piece we had intended to see. It was a disappointment. It was off the valley floor, covered with chaparral and would require a massive clearing operation to become a nursery. But on the way out, we took down the number of the piece below. It was very tempting. For some reason, it wasn't on our list, so we stopped by the realty office on our way back. Yes, it was for sale. Ten acres on the creek, two dwellings, funky but livable. Flat land with water in full sun at the foot of the mountain. The asking price? Exactly what we had. Evergreen, Susie, Brent, and the dogs had a new home.