BonsaiNurseryman

Our Message for 2012

Well, it's been a long and hectic year. I apologize for not keeping you informed, but in addition to the usual deluge of work, I have had to deal with my ailing father, something most of us have to do sooner or later.

Dad was 91 last year and still living independently in his home in Florida. Mom died three years ago, and Dad just didn't want to go on living without her. But he wasn't willing to give up either. He was a tough old bird. I was flying out to see him twice a year and trying to do what I could to keep him at home. In May he fell in a freak accident and fractured his pelvis. We had talked several times about how long he could keep living at home, and I told him that as long as he didn't fall he could probably keep on going. But he did fall.

As so often happens with the elderly, this was the beginning of the end. Fortunately, he was placed in a very good nursing home and he grew to enjoy it. The staff was great and he was the most popular resident there. The only problem was the $6,000 a month bill. At that rate he would quickly burn through his savings. Also, the place was small and crowded and the food terrible. It was our extreme good fortune that a new Veterans nursing home had just opened up in the area and there were plenty of vacancies. This place was wonderful. There were wide aisles, brand new room, several outdoor areas with automatic doors, a great cafeteria with decent food. There were even therapy pets.

We got him in the Vets home about the beginning of September. I had been flying to Florida about every six weeks to care for him and handle his affairs. Despite all our efforts to keep him going, he began to go downhill, suffering from bouts of congestive heart failure. I made my last trip in early November. He died quietly in his sleep two days after I arrived. Everyone said he was just waiting for me to get there, and I think there's some truth to it.

Since then, I have been handling his estate and it has kept me pretty busy, but it's almost over now, and I will be able to give my full attention to work again.

I feel like I'm crawling back out of my cave now and can start writing again, and being productive again. Healthwise, I have been terrific and am just about back to 100% considering I am 65 now. My last CT scan was clean and there is no sign of cancer. I had a bad bout of back trouble and saw a physical therapist. It turned out to be an important life lesson- I can't stay healthy any more without really working at it. The therapist taught a series of stretching and strengthening exercises that I continue to do religiously. The difference has been amazing. I am now able to do things I haven't been able to do in years, although, I still have to be really careful. Now I have to find a way to do part 2 and develop  a regular cardio exercise routine to increase my stamina and keep the heart healthy. I was riding my bike, but now that it's winter, it has been almost impossible to keep it up. I may have to resort to one of those silly boring exercycles, but if that's what it takes, then so be it.

So, now for the good news. A number of financial improvements (not the least of which was turning 65 and getting Medicare), have allowed me to get a steady stream of part time help. Between the help and my improved health, we have got the nursery in better shape than ever before. We have been here almost thirteen years now, and finally it is all coming together. Our greenhouse project was finished this fall, and now we are working on getting all the one gallon pre bonsai elevated on benches so they can get weeded and pruned regularly without bending over. We have pruned back every larger plant in the whole place to prepare them for final branch work and sale, even my mammoth 25 year old maple collection. There are some to die for trunks out there. Having them cut back and pruned regularly now will make their care much easier. And YES, there will be hundreds of additions to the Specimen Catalog
I have just updated it to remove the sold trees and new additions will start to be added shortly. You response has been terrific. We have sold over half of the specimen trees and have many satisfied customers.

Here are just a few of the trees that will be added this spring: more big elms, more 'Hachi Gen' pines, 'Mi Nishiki' pines, five gallon size Shimpaku junipers, assorted smaller deciduous trees, big Japanese maples (hopefully). Our system for maintaining, photographing, and listing specimen trees is almost now complete. It was a huge effort, but well worth it. I hope you all are as excited about it as we are. Almost no other bonsai nursery on the web has really been able to pull this off successfully. It will give you access to material that is almost impossible to otherwise obtain.

The new greenhouse is a critical part of the specimen plant process since it will give us another way of protecting trees from late spring freezes. It will also allow to once again offer more Prunus species. It will take a few years to build up our stock again, but this year we will be offering Prunus mume in limited quantities. These will not be ready to ship until June, but if you want these, you should order now to reserve your trees; they won't last long.

Grafting has been just about impossible the last few years due to my illness, but I have found another black pine grower for understock. If these trees are as good as those from our previous supplier, we should begin grafting pines again this fall. It will be two to three years before these new grafts are ready to ship, but in the meantime there will be many more specimen sized cultivars for you to choose from.

Last, but not least, we will begin to dig some trees out of the field this winter. These will also be listed in the Specimen Catalog but won't be shipped until summer or fall. We hope to dig 'Paul's Scarlet' hawthorn (cutting grown, not grafted), crabapples and possible some 'San Jose' and 'Shimpaku' junipers. Our goal is graft over the monster 'San Jose' junipers to 'Shimpaku' eventually, but we will offer some for sale now so you can do your own grafting, or leave them with their own foliage.

Now for a look at our new 20 x 48 foot greenhouse, both under construction and the finished job. The first photo is the finished floor, a leveled bed of sand covered with chicken wire (to keep out the rodents) and ground cloth. A concrete floor would have been nice, but way out of budget for us. The second photo shows the steel bows attached. The finished greenhouse has double wall plastic and eight foot wide doors for natural ventilation for most of the year.

Trunk Movement

Here is my response to a post on BonsaiSite. You can read the whole thread HERE.

I don't think I have ever wired a trunk, or certainly not very many. I think it's much better to do it the way nature does it: trunk dieback, only we call it trunk chops. Wiring a trunk practically guarantees that you will never get taper, and taper in my book is just as important as movement. The only way to get taper from a wired trunk is to grow sacrifice branches, and they have to be in the right place: at the base of the bend or it will look unnatural. Chances are, wired trunks are going to look unnatural anyhow most of the time because rarely can you bend a trunk severe enough to make it look like nature did it, that is, with a trunk chop. Wiring may have a place with tall very slender trees where taper is unimportant, such as bunjin, but this is a very limited class. I think this is why you can't figure out what to do; snakey bends are just going to look like Chinese junk that have been wrapped around a bamboo pole. Another place where wiring a trunk may be appropriate is to wire the base of a young tree so that there is a very low turn. That's wiring in a single bend. This works because a tree will almost always buttress at the base and create the taper for you. Above this point, it won't happen. This is frequently done in pines, although low chops will give you the same effect with even greater taper.

One of my cardinal rules of bonsai styling is to trace out a trunk line using every branch of the tree. No low branches? That's where you start: do what's necessary to get them, which is using a higher chop to induce lower branching. This is absolutely essential in pines where once you lose low branches, they are most likely gone forever, but it's important for other species too. If you do this, you are already thinking and planning using principles of taper and movement. Changing the trunk line to make it go through a branch creates both movement and taper simultaneously. Everything above this point is junk except for its use as a sacrifice. If you are lucky, the branch/new leader will have secondary branching that will give you a another change of movement and taper. Rarely will you get a third section of movement from tertiary branching unless you have very advanced material.

How do you start? At the bottom of the trunk and move up. At the first branch, imagine that the rest of the tree is now gone and what the trunk would look like through that branch. You can manipulate it of course, most frequently by tilting the tree to make the base trunk come out of the ground at an angle and the new leader more upright. But you can also wire the new leader up or down to create less or more movement. Then imagine the next trunk section coming low off of this new leader. Is there a secondary branch there? If not, you will have to induce one.

Once this is done, put that image away and try another one. This time go up the trunk PAST the first branch (which will probably serve as a sacrifice instead) and imagine a trunk line through the SECOND branch. Is this better or worse than the first image? Then with the third branch, and so on. Probably ninety percent of the time you will use the first or second branch. Now the stunning realization of this is that when you are looking at raw material, the vast majority of the wood and foliage you are staring at won't even exist in the finished tree! Hopefully, this will change your perspective when analyzing potential material.

I HATE SPRING!

Sheesh, it's been months since I've posted anything. Everybody loves spring except those of us in the nursery business; there's never enough time, and everything has to be done NOW. But the rush is almost over and I can finally stop and catch my breath. The good news is that I am getting stronger and have been able to keep up with the work. Stooping and bending is still difficult, and I still have peripheral neuropathy in my feet that drives me crazy, but I can work three or four hours before I have to take a break and do something easy for the rest of the day. Hopefully, the bending and stooping will get easier, although it's now a race against time before the body gives out due to old age. Medicare kicks in in July and I am feeling my almost 65 years. The problem with my feet may never get better; one of the wonderful side effects of chemotherapy.

So, the good news for you, our customers, is that the Specimen Catalog really has got off the ground. Not a lot of species included yet, just Chinese elms and 'Hachi Gen' Japanese Black Pines, but there are a lot of them. Both have been selling well even without any announcement, so if you have been waiting for these, you should act quickly. I just updated the section today to show which are already sold. It's very rewarding to have folks so excited about these incredible plants. I am excited too, and motivated to keep adding more now that the spring rush has slowed down. The next large section will probably be the five gallon Shimpaku junipers. I have about twenty of them that are pruned and ready to go. I want to get them photographed soon before they break out in new spring foliage so that you can see the trunk lines and structure. This summer, I will photograph everything again after the flush of new growth begins to fill in branching close to the trunk. Later this summer, I will try to get assorted other deciduous species added.

The new greenhouse project got interrupted by the late rains and then the spring rush, but I am about to get back to it. It's a half size, 20x50 foot structure that will finally gives room to overwinter the few delicate things we have, and give me a warm dry place to work in winter. I will try to get pictures soon of the frame. The ground posts are in and waiting for the steel bows. It will be a double wall inflated poly greenhouse with passive (water bag) solar heating and maybe some active solar as well. I should be able to overwinter a few Prunus and Wisteria stock plants, and also overwinter all the tender new rooted cuttings. I really want to offer a few mume cuttings again. I have a few 'Peggy Clarke' listed in the catalog this year, but they will go fast. Cold greenhouse overwintering seems to be the trick in our fickle freezing late spring weather. It was below freezing just one week ago, and this is zone 8! The overhead sprinklers have worked wonderfully so far this year in protecting the rest of the nursery. As long as it doesn't fall below about 28F, we should be ok. It's the price we pay for living in a beautiful, but cold deep valley.

We are getting a volunteer helper for the month of June from Canada! He is another bonsai nut who took time off from his real job to study several months in Japan, and now wants to learn the basics of the bonsai nursery trade to round out his education. It's a great opportunity for both of us.

That's all for now, but I hope to get back to you soon with the greenhouse update and cutting propagation news for next year's selections.

 

Our Message for 2011

It's the start of a new year in many ways for me, and hopefully for the better. My surgeon pronounced me 'cured' in December, and my oncologist will be seeing me only two or three times a year to make sure that everything is still ok. I am back to working now, but manual labor is still limited to three or four hours a day and I am still not up to speed in terms of strength and endurance. That will still take several more months. Knock on wood, I am probably as normal as I am going to get. There's no getting around getting older (65 this year), and this means I have to work smarter. No more abusing the body in heroic efforts of grunt labor.

And to that end, the nursery is getting leaner and more mature. If you are a long time customer, you have no doubt seen the catalog offerings diminish slightly each year. We will also stop selling tools sometime this year. But having said that, the offerings won't change much from here on out, although some things are not going to be offered in smaller sizes. It is time to develop the massive amount of mature inventory that we have and concentrate more on specimen trees. I still hope to get a decent amount of this material online, starting this year. I know, I have been saying that for years, but this year, there is a sizeable number of plants that are advanced far enough to be sold. I just finished pruning the pines, and there are some fantastic trunks that were revealed. The plants are a little naked right now, but that is best for seeing the possibilities, so I will photograph much of it this spring and followup with a second set of photos after the new growth emerges this summer.

So what's coming out? The long wait for cutting grown specimens of Pinus thunbergii 'Hachi Gen' and 'Mi Nishiki' is just about over. These will probably be the first specimen pines offered, starting at $150 and up for twelve year old cutting grown material. A limited amount of cultivars may also make it to the website this summer, including a few larger 'Hayabusa', 'Brocade', and 'Yatsubusa' black pines. We also have about fifty 'Shimpaku' junipers in five gallon size that will be soon cut back and offered this spring or summer. These are great workshop trees with 1 1/2 inch caliper trunks and great branching. These will start at $150. I have been selling a number of 7 gallon ancient mugo pines at the nursery and hope to offer some of these as well. These trees are over twenty years old and have had considerable training over the years. I have been pricing these at $200 each and folks have been gobbling them up.

The big field grown maples that I got from Randy Knight of Oregon Bonsai have finally begun to get some branch taper and ramification. It has been quite a struggle since our area isn't really suitable for Japanese maples. But that struggling has finally turned them into fantastic, unique trees with four to six inch trunks, but they are only twelve to sixteen inches tall. These are starting at $400. Many of the 'jungle' rescued trees were repotted and pruned last summer and are now ready to go. There are many one and two gallon deciduous trees in this lot. Specimen one gallon material is starting at $75. And lastly, a good deal of field grown material can be dug this year, although I may not get around to doing more than a handful of these since it's so much work and there's so much to do. But this stuff just keeps getting bigger and better. From this area you get unique offerings like three and four inch 'Paul's Scarlet' hawthorn trunks that are CUTTING grown, not grafted, and a half dozen different cultivars of cutting grown crabapples with large trunks.

And what about the future? Well, I put about fifty cedars in the ground last year, and an equal number of black pines. There are about forty 'San Jose' junipers in containers and in the ground with enormous trunks of six to eight inches. These are real monsters that are still  being pruned for back branching and will make awesome specimens with either their own foliage or grafted over to 'Shimpaku'. These are probably too big and heavy to ship and will be available for nursery pickup only. I will probably began to unload a lot of my larger Japanese maples soon. It is just too difficult to protect this much larger stock from our spring freezes. I need to cut them down to size and start moving them.

We have plans for a larger greenhouse soon, hopefully this spring, and that will be our last nursery construction project. It's been a long road since 1998, and I'm glad it's almost over, and none too soon! We still have work to do on the house and property, but the pace is definitely slowing down and my time and energy can go into more plant development. Bonsai is a funny business. If you want to make money, you sell a jillion little crappy junipers in $2 Chinese pots with zero long term interest in plant material. But if you really want to do BONSAI, then you spend your life developing one or two crops. Since I was in my thirties when I got started, it has been a single crop and little more. Inventory isn't just stuff you sell, it's passing on life to friends. You try to charge as little as possible to make sure it goes to good homes, but you have to collect for half a lifetime of care. It's a tough call.

Life Starts Again

 

I keep putting off this letter. So much has happened in the last month or so that I guess I'm a little overwhelmed by it all. First of all, the hospital experience was something that I will never want to do again. Sixteen days in the hospital, from September 1 through the 17^th. Even when I left, I was very weak, but I just had to get the hell out of there. As usual, little went right as my body rebelled against invasion as it did the last time. The surgery went fine, no problems there, but my colon that had been lying dormant in my belly for over a year just refused to go back to work. “Lazy colon” the doctor called it. This meant that I could only eat tiny amounts of food at a time or it would back up on me and cause pain and bloating.

 

The cure for this is to get the patient up and moving as soon as possible, which was fine with me, except that every time I took three steps I got lightheaded, nauseous and threw up. It was a week before I could walk from my bed to the door and it took about five minutes to make that fifteen foot trip. The nausea was almost a constant condition the whole time I was there and no one could figure out why. Drugs helped a little but not much.

 

The first week there was a lot of abdominal pain, both from the surgery and my bloated colon. They kept trying to get my off the epidural (spinal block), but it was the only thing that would control the pain. I can't take the usual painkillers. Dilaudid is really the only thing that I can take for pain, but I had to take so much to control the pain that it just slammed me. So we stuck with the epidural far longer than usual, about a week. At one point, I had such severe gas pains that I was on about nine out of the pain scale of ten, until they upped the epidural dose. But eventually the pain eased and the by the second week, I was off the epidural and had Dilaudid shots only occasionally.

 

The second week brought less pain but another unwelcome development in the shape of a wound along the suture line. I'm not quite sure how these things happen, since there was no infection, but for some reason, part of the incision just refused to heal and I had a small hole develop, about an inch across and three quarters of an inch deep, not really very large by usual wound standards. This had to be dressed twice a day for a couple days until the doctor decided I need a wound vac. This is supposed to heal the wound faster by putting it under negative pressure. It works by using a series of sponges and clear tape to attach a line to a vacuum pump. It removes any exudation from the wound and keeps it almost dry. The dressing is changed every other day. I had to use a portable pump version when I was released which was battery operated and fit in a bag that went over my shoulder. When sitting or lying still, I had to plug it in to recharge the battery. This went on for about another two weeks after I got home.

 

The staff at John Muir are wonderful. They did everything they could do to make me comfortable and get me well as soon as possible. I got to know the entire crew of doctors, nurses and CNAs; we were like old friends by the time I left. But I am sure glad to be out of there.

So, now I am on the mend. The wound is just a hole about the size of a Q tip and Susie cleans and dresses it once day. It should be completely healed in another two weeks or so. I am walking a couple laps around the property each day with Liz (the Lab) which is about a half a mile. And in the last couple of days, I have started doing a few light jobs. Almost feeling human again, except for the weakness from the lack of exercise. I will have this colostomy for life of course, which requires some mental attitude adjustments, and also opens the door to a whole new world of jokes. We are trying to look on the bright side, such as I will never have racing stripes in my jockey shorts again, never have to desperately search for a port-a-potty, can discreetly bring wind in public without fear of embarrassment. So, it's not all bad.

 

I'm kind of living the life of Riley (while it lasts) with Susie cooking, cleaning, packing the shipments, and everything else imaginable while I am regaining my strength. I even get breakfast in bed! We call it the breakfast club. Our bedroom faces east and the morning sun has been streaming in during this fine autumn weather we have been having. So, I'm in bed with my tray, Susie pulls in a chair and has her tea and toast, while Liz lounges on the bed with me waiting for her 'treats' in the way of scraps of toast. It won't last forever, but it sure is nice. With the thousands of things to do around here, I am starting to feel guilty and will have to get up to speed soon to keep my end of the nursery going. Susie is still officially unemployed with only three more months to go before benefits run out. There will soon be some serious job hunting.

 

The garden, which we have generously shared with the raccoons, crows, gophers, and other critters is still giving us some tomatoes, cucumbers, and a few squash since our usual late September frost didn't materialize this year, and the forecast is for another week of above normal warm weather. What a glorious fall!

 

Things Are Moving Fast

It's the opposite of 'hurry up and wait'. We've spent weeks waiting for a decision and figured that it would be at least two or three more weeks for a surgery date. So, my doctor calls yesterday and and says  he wants me in the hospital tomorrow. It's a good thing its the slowest time of the year for the business. I should be in the hospital for about a week and home early in September. Since Labor Day falls in the recovery period, we have made September 13 the next shipping day. You can continue (please!) to send orders, but I won't be able to confirm them until I return. Same for email. I am always happy to answer your questions, so don't let this stop you.

Thanks!

Brent