Club News - September 2023
Jonas Dupuich – Bonsai Design
September 15 @ 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm
Our September Club meeting will feature Jonas Dupuich leading an interactive skill building discussion of Bonsai Design which will be useful for new as well as veteran members. He will cover:
- How to create a silhouette based on the shape of the trunk
- How to place primary branches
- How the crown relates to the key branch and leadoff the trunk
- How to shape the apex
Jonas began studying bonsai over twenty years ago and is a member of Bay Island Bonsai and has exhibited in such shows including the Artisans Cup, U.S. National Bonsai Exhibition, and the JAL/WBFF World Bonsai Contest. Last November, he and Eric Schrader coordinated the Pacific Bonsai Expo in Oakland. Check out his informative website Bonsai Tonight and his podcast Bonsai Wire.
We remind members to contribute items for our raffle and also snacks for our refreshment table.
Monthly Tasks
This month: September 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.
Beginning Workshop - Sunday, September 17
"There is no such thing as instant bonsai." Or is there?
A traditional bonsai is a representation of a full-sized mature tree in a miniaturized form. Generally, this means starting with material that is 10+ years old depending on the species and developing it over a period of many years. With this approach, there certainly is no "instant bonsai!" Faced with this reality, many people's initial enthusiasm to learn bonsai soon fades.
However, bonsai landscapes made from younger material take only hours instead of years to complete and provide an immediate sense of accomplishment.
The purpose of the morning session of the September Beginners workshop is to show how creating bonsai "landscapes" using younger plants in combination with other living and non-living materials such as ground covers and stones can bring instant gratification, teach basic skills, and fuel the desire to undertake longer-term projects.
Richard will present two different methods for creating landscapes, and discuss how to find the materials needed, most of which are inexpensive and/or free. If you have plants that you're not sure how to use, bring them. They may be destined for a bonsai landscape!
Details
10 AM - 12:30 PM
1 PM – 4 PM
Presentation on “Creating Bonsai Landscapes"
Participants work on trees with the assistance of the workshop mentors
Location will be announced by a separate email sent to all club members the week of the workshop.
Intermediate Workshop – Saturday, September 23
September is a great time to clean up Black Pines and White Pines. We’ll be removing old needles and unneeded candles and removing wiring. Experienced members of the club will advise. Please see Autumn Tasks and Winter Tasks in Black Pine Basics article. This is also a good time to work on Junipers so bring those if you don’t have pines to work on.
Location, Time and Cost:
We will be meeting in the rear parking lot of St Mark’s Episcopal Church – our usual location for monthly meetings. Please be there at 12:45 PM ready to setup tables and get to work soon afterwards. We will start cleaning up at 3:45 PM.
To help offset the cost of renting this facility we are asking everyone who attends to donate by using the on the event page.
August Member Garden Tours
The weather was so fine on the day of our Garden Tour, August 19, 2023, that we hardly noticed, since our eyes were full of spectacular trees in the gardens of Lynne O’Dell in Woodside, Christine Weigen in Palo Alto, and Michael Greenstein in Los Altos.
Each garden had its own style: in various zones of sun and shade at Lynne’s, in Christine’s large natural garden among established in-the-ground shrubs and trees, on Michael’s carefully designed, impossibly neat rows of benches under shade cloth. The trees were all groomed and ready to show off.
Lynne’s property of tall redwoods and pond is a spectacular place to show off her bonsai, which included several John Planting trees among many other conifers, deciduous, azaleas, and grape vines, the latter dug from her own vineyard just steps away.
Christine put clipboards by a number of trees, asking for advice about what next to do and members obliged by writing down their thoughts—discussion and stories thus stimulated as we sipped away at cool drinks and greedily scarfed down her husband Jeff’s homemade bread.
At Michael’s we had a chance to see several Kusamura legacy trees, among many other stunning trees he has developed for years, even decades. Michael is always keen to show off his Bougainvillea collection and to talk about development techniques and challenges to keep squirrels away from the roots of his trees (he puts screen on the surfaces of all his pots).
And then there, in view of Michael’s trees, we had a barbeque feast hosted by Michael and his wife Sharon, accompanied by a variety of salads and desserts brought by members. We visited from table to table to listen in and contribute to great talk, inspired by what we had seen to work on our own trees and garden designs. Many thanks to Lynne, Christine, and Michael. It was a terrific day!
Congratulations to Bonsai Rendezvous Scholarship Winners
This year Kusamura is proud to sponsor Camille Nuttall, David Kennan, and Molly Gibian in attending this year’s Bonsai Rendezvous. Each new club member will be granted $100 each to defray a significant portion of the travel costs and the registration fee. We also look forward to a brief report or presentation sharing something cool or new that our winners learned at this event to be featured in a future newsletter or shared at a club meeting.
If you want to stay the weekend, we heard there are rooms at nearby hotels. A day pass will offer you the ability to observe the workshops, see the exhibit, attend demonstrations, and shop the vendor area. For more information about the convention see the announcement and all program here: https://www.gsbfbonsai.org/2023-rendezvous.
Recommended Videos - Olives
It’s summer and the heat is finally cranking up for heat-loving species like olives. Major work on olives is also done in summer, including collecting, repotting, and pruning. There are many good videos out there on olives (including some too from Aussie Bonsai Bloke Sam Doecke from Australia of course, one of my wild outlier favorites; I don’t include him below but you can look him up easily enough). You may not know Terry Erasmus from South Africa, my first pick below, but you should. He’s a consummate professional. Shouldn’t be a surprise that my other two picks source their olives from Spain and Mallorca—all countries with a plenty of wild olives and the heat that they love. The Bay Area is also a good place to collect olives, which are not native but which are widely distributed, thanks to Spanish missionaries who brought the small-leafed Mediterranean olive to this region. Enjoy! Now is the best time to get to work on your olives!
Creating Bonsai from Wild Olives
This link takes you to the first in a series of 12 videos on many aspects of developing olives for bonsai. Terry may be the world’s expert on olives. Highly recommended. By the way, Terry was a student of Boon Manakitivipart.
Designing an Olive Bonsai Tree
This video is all about style and design of a special large olive. Discussion of what branches to keep and what to eliminate or reduce is easy to follow. Spectacular tree.
Olive Bonsai Demo
Focus here is on care, including the watering, placement, fertilizing, pruning, and wiring of Bonsai olives.
David Benavente | Bonsai Empire
October 29, 2021 | 33 minutes
18 minutes, August 2, 2022
Video Link
Newsletter Editor: Jenn Tan