BonsaiNurseryman

Our Message for 2007

The 2007 Catalog is Up!

It's been an interesting year. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would have to say that my life now revolves around getting older. I hit the big six-o this year, and I think this has come harder for me harder than any other decade other than hitting thirty (remember hippies?: you can't trust anyone over thirty). I was depressed at thirty, but this is different. I haven't got time to get depressed! Susie and I are well into the planning stages of retirement, which will be here in another six years. Oh, stop rubbing your hands together, there won't be any gigantic fire sale  of Evergreen's trees forthcoming. The nursery will go on until I die, I guarantee you that, and that is probably a good twenty or thiry years off.

But I do have to change my ways. Time is no longer this endless ocean of possibilities. It has become a finite commodity, something I can no longer afford to waste. I have to work more efficiently, and plan around phasing out of construction projects and growth. I want to go out busy, but I want to be busy on my terms, not someone else's, or captive of this business. So things will change. In future years, there will be less emphasis on propagation and more emphasis on training and finishing trees. More time for travel too. All of this will take a sea change in how I work. I have started by slowing down. I don't rush at anything anymore, it isn't worth it. Several times a day, I find myself losing it, going faster than is enjoyable, and then asking myself "Where is the joy in this?" That's pretty much all it takes to get me back on center again.

I still have some unresolved planning issues such as how to handle those truly manual and grudging chores that I can't do, or don't want to do anymore. At this point, hiring someone is out of the question, so I have to go about it obliquely and somehow find a way to make more money, so I can hire someone part time. I really prefer to work alone, and have worked alone most of my life, but that just has to change, for at least a few hours a week.

Interesting questions now arise about how long things last. When I put the new roof on the house, is it going to last longer than me? I hope so. Will my '84 Toyota truck with 239,000 miles on it live for another two decades. Not so sure about that one, but I am going to give it a go. I can still rebuild engines with a little help, the rest of it is hanging in there pretty good. Most of the nursery structures will probably start to expire about the same time I do, so that will be ok. I will need less of that kind of infrastructure at the end anyhow. I want to sitting in the studio wiring little trees more than being out there in the sun. I probably have one more dog from puppy size in me (us). I agonize over the thought of leaving a dog alone in this world without me, although I am making preparations for that too. You might think that this stuff is depressing, but actually it isn't, it's liberating. A whole new phase of my life is beginning, and with any luck at all, it can be the best phase. Afterall, I still have my mind, and it just continues to get better, even if I can't remember my phone number sometimes.

So, I guess my message to all our customers for 2007 is, prepare to see less material in the future, but better material in the future. And bigger too. At long last, I think I am getting a handle on actually getting some of the larger stuff up to snuff so I can sell it. Especially look for larger and more developed pines to start to come on line. There's a lot of them out there, and many will be repotted this year and offered up for sale by this fall. More junipers are coming along too, although it will probably be 2008 before more of the larger stuff is ready. Meanwhile, expect to see a few more cutting grown Japanese maples come down the pike. I love growing those little guys, and the new propagation greenhouse is showing great potential for starting these if I can just get enough wood from the stock plants. That's exciting stuff.

Well, Happy Holidays, keep your face to the sun,  your back to the wind, and make every moment count.

Brent

Fruitcake Weather

When I was a kid, we were lucky enough to have Christmas traditions started by our family. Not generational traditions, but rather things that we started and did most Christmas seasons. Some traditions lived longer than others, some were weather dependent like ice skating on the nearby gravel quarry ponds. Mostly these were little things, but they were special to us. We had a toy mailbox bank that was army green, as they really were in those days. We would put money in the bank all year long, and at Christmas we would open the bank and count out the money. It would be used for our summer vacation in Illinois. One time we even saved $90, a fortune.

We gathered our own holiday greens and often even cut our own tree from along the railroad tracks outside of town. My father, a railroader, always felt comfortable about this, since he was likely to know anybody stopping us and asking us what we doing. We also went north to see the enormous decorated Holly tree that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opened to the public during the holiday season. My sister and I baked cookies with our mother, and we always had raw oysters chilling in the icy shade of the back porch. Christmas week, we would always reserve one night to bundle up and go for a family drive around the city to see the festive Christmas lights that proud homeowners would string on their homes and property.

We also had TV traditions. We always had to watch 'A Christmas Carol' on Christmas eve, the same old classic version with Alastair Sim. We would turn all the lights down low and watch it in the dark to make it even spookier. We also looked for new Christmas shows; there was at least one new one every year, but usually they were the usual pablum. Then one year, 1966, we happened to watch ABC Stage 67 production of "Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory". Geraldine Page won an emmy award for her role as Capote's "cousin" in the depression era story of making fruitcakes. This was one  of those life changing stories that goes to the heart of your very being. It's the tale of the magic of youth and the richness of life instead of riches. Capote narrates the sad tale of his youth as Buddy and his eccentric "cousin" who doesn't have a name in the story, in making fruitcakes which they give away to their special friends.

The popular one hour production ran each season for several years afterward, and then began to fade away, resurrected occasionally on PBS. Then by the mid 70's it had disappeared completely from the world of TV. In the meantime, I had grown and left home, our little traditions only a memory for me as well. But I still remembered them and I really missed "A Christmas Memory". Then one Christmas season about 1975, I was in the library thinking about the story and remembering that it was adapted from a Capote story. I found it! I took the novella off the shelf and went to one of the big plush chairs next to windows in the setting afternoon winter sun and spent a wonderful and tearful hour reading it for the first time, but with each word I was seeing Buddy and the old woman. For several years after that, reading it at Christmas became my new tradition.

But reading the story wasn't the only tradition that started that year. I started making fruitcakes. I found a recipe in an old cookbook, They were terrible. I certainly didn't send cakes to my friends that year. But since I lived alone, I had acquired some pretty good cooking skills, and I began adapting the recipe  to what I thought a good fruitcake should be. I still have that original recipe, but I have changed it so much it bears little resemblance to the original. I have been making fruitcakes for thirty years now, sending them to friends and family as my Christmas present to them. Not something that I bought either a trifle or a trinket, but something that is a part of me, a piece of my history.

For years the fruitcake batch grew until it was a 30 pound mass of batter and perserved fruits. But this is the first year that it will shrink. Friends move and lose touch, relatives have died, others can't eat sweets anymore. But still, I woke up this morning and the ground was hard and white with frost, and I thought "It's fruitcake weather!".