Photographs from February 2006 Tour

This group was completely out of comrol and was reverting to a shrub

It has always been a case that when a gift of Bonsai is given that the very best of the trees are retained if these are the better ones and those others are either disposed of or used for training purposes. Not every tree in a collection can possibly be the best unless it is a well-known excellent collection. Unless a gift on money to cover the high maintenance cost of a collection is given at the same time, there is no other option of course. In this case many of the trees had been neglected probably due to Lyles ill health and when I saw the Bonsai I realised that they need a great deal of work to recover Lyles initial ideas. This year I asked that some of the trees be removed from the collection, as these were never going to be accepted as Bonsai and the better trees that we were restyling now made these trees look even worse. They were not wasted however as these could be planted outside in the ground and grown on as shrubs in the Dawes gardens. Maybe when they were fully-grown and full of growth, the curator may decide to lift these once more and make then into Bonsai again.

In this section I have included a few of the trees that we managed to do. We worked as a team as part of my remit was to train Keith, Jeff, Ken and others to enable them to look after and maintain the collection when I was not there.

Lyles Pine: The large Scots pine in the background of the photo of Lyle is the same one that we are presently working on. Lyle had not moved the tree since he planted this as a 20-year-old garden tree some 25 years previously. Lyle had bored a hole right through the rock to allow for drainage and we discovered this when we took the rock apart. Why did I want to do this? Well Lyle was experimenting with root over rock and the tree had not actually fully attached itself to the rock and was unstable apart from the taproot that had grown through the hole in the rock. The original planting was perhaps not the way that Lyle would have thought out later in his years of experience. The only way we could make sure, that this tree would have many more years of health and vigour was to carefully part the tree from the rock, retain 90% of the roots and replant the entire tree in a Bonsai pot. Through the images, you will see that this was more of an engineering job than replanting. . The finished image was worth the hours of effort though.

AFTERCARE: Spray three times a day for at least six weeks to keep the humidity levels up (like a giant cutting) and water to keep the soil damp. Please note that if this regime is NOT kept up then some of the finer growing wired tips will dry out and the tree will check .

Don't feed for six weeks and then half strength high nitrogen every two weeks to assist in bud growth. Read my books to learn about feeding and watering regimes.

Using the picture gallery: Click on a pic for a larger image and description -If you also run the curser over each image you will get a short description without clicking on the image-coming next week

Bonsai Teacher