Club News -September 2019
Meeting - September 20 @7pm
Building Your Bonsai Stock Through Urban Collecting - Richard & Idris
Collecting from the urban landscape can be a very productive way to acquire good bonsai material. Our September program will go into detail about how to find, collect and care for trees dug from readily available local sources. No treks to the mountains required!
Members are encouraged to bring trees they’ve collected and share their story.
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
Our garden tour this year started with a stop at the San Mateo Japanese Garden followed by two stops at members homes never included on the tour. It was a really good turnout of club members and a lot of fun.
At Bill and Annette Daniels’s garden, we were lulled into a relaxing state by their outdoor fountain set amongst a beautiful display of bonsai on Japanese lantern style stands made out of cinder blocks. Along with labeling his bonsai, Bill has all his bonsai supplies very well organized and everyone agreed he has the “neat” gene. I myself was in awe of the Magnolia “Michelia yunnanensis” that was in bloom.
At Richard and Melinda Murray’s garden, we were taken back to the turn of the 20th century by Richard’s replica of a Steam Engine Village. Richard began his garden in 1973 and the railroad in 2000. The layout includes a sawmill, a slate query and replicas of three railroad bridges that exist in real life. The Hells Gate Bridge is patterned after one in New York that took over one thousand hours to construct. Richard says he has over two hundred and fifty varieties of trees in the landscaping and every major conifer is represented including a dawn redwood and a bristlecone pine. Richard thinks he has about five hundred trees in total throughout the landscaping. Most of the ground cover used is Elfin Thyme. And everyone loved the demo of his turn of the century train as it made its way along the tracks.
Kusamura extends a big thank you to hosts Bill and Annette Daniels, and Richard and Melinda Murray for opening their gardens for our tour this year. It was a most enjoyable afternoon and the food was great especially Melinda’s “killer” spaghetti and meatballs!
