Club News - September 2018

Meeting - September 21 @7pm

Jerry Carpenter and David Muir - Creating a Tanuki

Tanuki is a technique for joining a living plant to an interesting piece of deadwood so that over time the joined plant appears as a natural part of the deadwood. Our September meeting will feature the team of Jerry Carpenter and David Muir discussing the requirements and technique for creating these unique and somewhat controversial bonsai, as tanuki are not recognized as a legitimate bonsai in Japan. Because of time constraints, Jerry and David will not complete the tanuki during the meeting, but the prepared deadwood stump and parts for construction will be raffled off, and the winner can complete the project with Jerry's help. Members are encouraged to bring possible deadwood and/or live material they are considering for their own tanuki.

This is a tanuki shown at our 2014 show

For more of an introduction see Creating A Tanuki Bonsai by the Bonsai Learning Center.

Monthly Tasks

Each month there are a number of tasks you need to do to your bonsai – from repotting, to fertilizing to spraying for pests. We have put together a checklist, customized for the San Francisco Bay Area to help you. This checklist is adapted from earlier work by Mitsuo Umehara.

This month: September Tasks

August Garden Tour Recap

by Lynne O'Dell

The warm weather greeted thirty plus members through the three diverse gardens on our tour this year. Richard and Barbara's garden burst with a mix of beginning bonsai to sculpted trained trees. It is obvious that they both love and are committed to their bonsai. Next stop was to Dave and Rita’ new garden format where they have refined their collection and moved benches around from a couple of years ago. Their koi pond, as always, is an amazing feature. We ended at Tami and Bang’s garden. It was obvious that they both have put a lot of love and work into their garden. Bang showed us his many urban collected trees and Tami’s forte is other horticultural flowering gems. Everyone settled into an exquisite BBQ array of meats, salads, cheeses and desserts.

Kusamura extends a big thank you to our hosts for taking the time and energy to open their gardens for our tour. It was a day of camaraderie, interesting trees and great food.

October Field Trip and Club Meeting

Your Board met last week and hashed out priorities for the next six months. One goal is to provide new members with basic bonsai skills and to increase the numbers of saleable trees for our annual club show. One way to acquire bonsai trees is to develop them from nursery stock by initial pruning back and shaping prior to repotting. The following two events are open to all club members and we’ll ask senior club members to act as guides.

October 13 – Car-pool field trip to Calaveras Nursery in Sunol to purchase nursery stock trees for yourselves or for your club donation to our club show sale. You will be guided on how to select nursery stock for bonsai.

October 19 – Workshop Club meeting: Bring Nursery stock trees and you’ll be guided on cleanup and styling.

In preparation for these two upcoming events, we think you might find an article written by club member Jerry Carpenter helpful - Finding Bonsai Material at the Nursery