BonsaiNurseryman

Rules Addendum

A good thread started today on BonsaiSite by Ted on why the rule of the single apex isn't always followed by beautiful trees in nature. My reply below:

Ted

Excellent question. Wish we had more threads that discussed things like this because this is the essence of bonsai.

I'll speculate. Traditionally, the Japanese art focused more on conifers than on deciduous trees. Most deciduous bonsai were flowering bonsai and the consensus was, the form wasn't as important as the flowers (I never bought into that one). Most conifers, but not all, exhibit the single leader 'pine tree' outline. Since 'rules' reflect was is 'best' in bonsai, twin apexes were frowned upon. Twin trees had to divide at the base. This pine tree form was adapted to vertical deciduous trees as well, even if they didn't grow like that naturally. The visual reason for this is that the eye cannot follow a single strong line of flow if the crown is divided in two. It doesn't know where to finish.

We have moved away from the conifer dominance in bonsai, and particularly in the West, deciduous trees play a major role. Not only that, but Western species are sometimes very different from Eastern ones, giving rise to whole new forms. The two most common examples are the mature bald cypress form and the oak form. The mature bald cypress will have all its branches in the top of the tree. Having been topped by hurricane winds, the upper branches form a vase or cup at the top of the tree. The lower branches are missing entirely, having been crowded and shaded out when the forest was young and dense. This can be a very beautiful and graceful image, but it is nothing like any traditional Eastern form.

Similarly, the oak form is as you describe, is a massive trunk seemingly made up of a collection of large upward and arching 'subtrunks' (to use a term popularized by Walter Pall). Again, these are beautiful and majestic trees, but have no Eastern counterpart.

So, the classic 'rules' don't fit. You might think that these trees break the rules. But I think that's not the proper way to look at it. These are some of the forms of the new style(s) developing in the West. Rather than thinking of breaking rules, we need to develop a new set of rules that can satisfactorily reproduce what 'works' so well in nature on this side of the ocean. Walter has done an immense amount of work in this area, but the new 'rules' are still not really codified, and certainly not in the popular bonsai lexicon. Developing the new rules will take a great amount of observation and insight. Like you, I have been looking at, and studying natural trees (oaks mostly) for years, trying to develop a system for explaining why this form works and a way of communicating it. Not there yet.

Bonsai Forums Revisited

A sad day for BonsaiSite. They have lost Will, Grouper52. I don't know all the details. Will seems to have quit this forum a couple of times but kept coming back. This time he may be gone for good, but I hope not. Will is a talented bonsai practitioner and had much to offer this forum. He devoted many hours to posting his trees, making analyses, and answering endless beginner questions. But he dles have a thin skin, and that is a fatal flaw for a bonsai personality.

The loss of Will is just one more in a long line talented people who have given up on bonsai forums in disgust. Many of you are probably tired of hearing me talk about it, but this is a problem that concerns me gravely. I consider the internet to be the most powerful tool for education since the invention of the book. It is impossible to overstate the wealth of information that is available on virtually any subject. Not only the generally accepted, but also the deviant and the rebellious views can be found here. It is a wild and woolly frontier.

The passive part of the internet is no problem, for indeed it is simply an electronic book. It is a book that is bigger, deeper, and thicker than anything ever could be in print, and it is also accessible. Information is no good unless you can find it. Search engines, particularly Google, make finding anything a breeze, even in the arcane world of bonsai.

But the internet also has a darker side. Not only does it have what you want, it also has all the things you despise and revolt you. Most of us quickly become inured to the sex ads and the spam. We develop both software and mental filters to remove the obnoxious. But what we can't remove so easily is our  defenses and our reactions to personal attacks. The interactive part of the internet, particularly the forums, has the same kind of power to improve and educate just like the 'book' part. Indeed, if you just lurk, reading the forums is the same as reading the 'book', or sometimes like watching daytime TV.

The problem comes when we want to interact with the people who are writing on the forums. Even the simple asking of questions can elicit rude and impolite remarks if the newbie breaches some point of arcane etiquette that he can't possibly be expected to know. This is the world of the EGO gone mad. It is a door for the Walter Mitty in all of us to escape. But even though it is a virtual community, it is still the real world. We open ourselves up to all sorts of criticism as well as praise. Traversing these shark infested waters is not for the faint of heart. Just like in real life, some people can do this with ease, shrugging off a slight or rude remark. Others go Postal.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if it were just the egomaniacs who self destructed, in fact it would be a blessing. But this isn't the way it works. The egomaniacs survive. It is the sensitive who withdraw. Unfortunately, it is very often the most talented people who are the most sensitive. I won't name names, but in the early days of the forums (in fact there were only a couple then) a person I greatly respected and admired, a person that was a wealth of information, and who also was a scientist, this person literally self destructed in an ego battle with a supercilious sycophant. He just couldn't let it go.What a loss. I have seen it time and again since, although not usually in such a dramatic manner. So the loss of  Will is just another chapter in the story.

In the world of bonsai forums there is hardly anyone left from the old crowd. There is Vance, Al, and me and that's about it. Even Walter is only an occasional visitor these days to the forums, at least the English speaking ones. Now, there are still a small number of knowledgeable people who do yeoman's work  answering questions  and trying to raise the general level of knowledge. But for the most part, the most talented people have jumped ship. We are left with beginners, newbies, and the egomaniacs.

Somehow, through all this, I have remained. Sure, I don't post much anymore. I burned out on answering newbie questions years ago. How many times can you answer the same question without pulling your hair out? I still jump in to try to right a blatant error or try to inject some little gem of wisdom, but it seems to come less often as the months and years go by. This is my thirteenth year of participating in the forums. It's still an ego thrill for me. I love to see my name up there. I privately glow with smug satisfaction of being the guy who always gets it right. I don't even have to deal with the personal attacks and rude remarks, because there just aren't any thrown in my direction. I have lost it a couple of times in those thirteen years, but the instances have been exceedingly rare.

How have I managed this? I pick and choose very carefully. I only post when I have something to say that I know is true or I think will have a positive impact. I guard my reputation carefully. That's not to say I don't confront people and ideas, because I do. But when I do, I make sure that I know my ground and I always approach people honestly  without rancor. It isn't always easy to do. This is how I manage to stick around the forums, seeking out little gems and giving them back too. Each one is a little treasure, either to increase my knowledge, or to expand my reputation. I am a very careful person.

When will change come, if ever? The internet is still a very new place. My guess is that the community will eventually develop its own protocol unrelated, or at least different than what we experience in real life. This change will probably be generational. We are about halfway there. The rise of the forums has been as a phenomenon for only about ten years. It will take another ten years for the kids who grew up at the keyboard to fully mature and start making the internet cultural changes that matter. Most of the rest of us are too old to fully integrate the changes that I am talking about, but we can learn to adapt. It's just too exciting a place to simply write off because we get our feeling hurt.

Growth Principles

Today, I was asked for the name of a book that would explain pruning in depth for bonsai. I couldn't think of one. One of the best places I know of for this kind of information is from my website, but even there, the information is scattered among several different articles. This got me thinking again about my approach to bonsai development. I detest cookbook approaches and prefer to take a systems approach based on how the tree grows. It's the old give a man a fish parable. If you learn how trees grow, you can answer most of your own questions about when to prune, how to prune, and the effects of such pruning.

I discovered a most influential article on this subject about ten years ago. It set me on a path of analyzing everything I did when I had a pair of shears in my hand. For beginners, I can think of no better way of learning about trees, and I encourage you not only to read this article, but bookmark it and study it. It is a little dense and you may have to look up a few things and think about it a lot, but it is probably the single best source of a concise system approach to tree growth. Other than reading Naka's books, it is the best thing you can do to guide your development to right thinking about trees.

Kim Coder's Crown Pruning Effects on Roots

(This post was first published as a thread on BonsaiSite)

Rules, Once Again

Interesting and civilized (so far) discussion of bonsai rules going on over at BonsaiSite. Here is the link to the whole thread. My contribution below:

The most important bonsai rules still apply to that tree. It has a classical scalene triangle shape to the foliage. The foliage begins about one third up the composition, the apex is directly over the base of the trunk.

I have spent many hours talking with Walter about tree design and yes, about rules too. Walter (and myself and others) operate by rules, we just don't take them literally, but rather use the principles of design BEHIND the rules. For example, you could argue that the first branch on this tree is not one third up the trunk, but the FOLIAGE IS. I had a conversation on this specific subject in which Walter explained that on yamadori you usually don't get branches where you want them and often they are all at the top of the tree. No problem, you just put the foliage where the branch would be. Kimura also does this. The trick is to get the same result that the rules would give you without the same physical route for which the rules were intended.

Once again, like many of these discussions we gather at the poles of the dialetic. You don't get good trees following NO rules and you get stilted cookie cutter trees slavishly following all the rules. The rules are tools and you have to use tools properly. An artist that doesn't use tools is a fool and certainly not an artist. Learning the tools of any art or craft is the first natural step. After learning them, you incorporate them into your being so you can forget them. You don't ask yourself if you are following the rules, you go directly to result that 'works' once you have fully integrated the principles.

I don't get that people feel 'constrained' by rules. Rules give you freedom, the freedom to design intelligently (sorry, poor choice of words there). Just as tools give the ability to do more jobs. The better you get with tools, the better carpenter or painter you become. Integrating tools allows you to see beyond the literal application of tools, it lets you tweak them for drama or tension. It lets you find solutions to problems that don't have standard answers.

I mentally design thousands of trees a year. Give me any piece of nursery stock and I can design a decent tree in about thirty seconds to a minute. I can do this stuff in my sleep. I have done it literally millions of times. Typically I can find anywhere from three to five trees in any piece of raw material you give me. I can do this because I have integrated all the rules or principles of bonsai that exist. I have even developed a few of my own that no one else has ever vocalized or written. I do it with nursery material. Walter can do exactly the same thing with yamadori, because he has done it thousands of times. Neither of us sits down and makes a check list, let's see, first branch left, one third up, second branch right, back branch next...etc. No, we are way beyond that, but that's how we got to where we are. Now, we go right to the result, our brains are trained to skip the vocalization and go straight to the solution. In fact, I find explaining it a chore, since it takes so long to vocalize how I come to the conclusion of how a tree should be and the rules that are behind the conclusion.

The above paragraph is the stratospheric end of where the rules take you. But lets start at the beginning and see the continuity of the degree of rule use right from the start. You put a tree in pot. That's a rule. If it's not in a pot it ain't bonsai. For some folks that may be enough, but I would argue that we are talking about a lot more here. The tree has to be alive. That's a rule. A tree has to have some emotional effect, at least on the owner, if not others. That's a rule, otherwise it's a houseplant, not bonsai. A tree has to represent nature in some fashion or other. That's a rule. If it represents a car or a cat (and nothing else tree like in nature), then it's not bonsai. That's a rule. Then we have all the horticultural rules, but I will leave them out of this for the moment because those aren't really the kind of rules we are talking about. Ok, so for a lot of people, these are the only rules you need for bonsai. Fair enough, I can live with that if they can. But I can't see how you can argue that you created bonsai without rules, and some pretty important ones at that.

For most of us, this isn't enough. Let's visit again the rules that it has to elicit some emotion and it has to represent treeness in nature. This is the world from whence all the other bonsai rules come. Some people can do this naturally without either having read a bonsai book, just as some painters and sculptors can. This doesn't mean they don't follow rules, it just means they didn't have to to develop the skills to perform the two basic rules above. Not many of us are that talented. In fact almost none of us are. How did the list of the secondary rules come about (front branch, back branch, caliper, taper rules, etc)? They were not handed down on stone tablets. People looked at bonsai that satisfied rules one and two above (emotion and nature representation). They analyzed what made these particular trees 'work' and what made other trees fail the test. Trees that work in general follow some, if not most of the rules. They made generalizations, and these generalizations are valid within the context of form and styles being discussed.

What most people are talking about when they are complaining about following the rules is that they are sympathizing with artists that arre frustrated with works that are cliche. In any style this eventually happens and people strain to break out. Currently  we are seeing such a strong movement to 'naturalistic' trees and a rejection of the 'school of stacked green donut' trees. This isn't a rejection of rules, it is a desire for a fresh approach and use of the rules. The principles are still the same, but the codification becomes too rigid. But it is certainly not a rejection of rules per se. If you do that, you are simply lost. Even Walter has written on several occasions that creating a good naturalistic tree isn't a rejection of the rules, but rather a very sophisticated application of the rules that is much much harder to achieve than a cookie cutter tree, but certainly not an abandonment.

For beginners to reject rules outright at the start is ludicrous. Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but I am aghast at the notion that most beginners would have such a strong sense of native talent that they could accomplish rule one and two (emotion and natural representation) without any study of the art whatsoever. What are the odds? Isn't the major reason that this forum exists is that beginners are not satisfied with their work and want help to achieve what's possible from rule one and two?

The Next Step

I can't believe I haven't updated since March 27th, but then, I have been one busy boy.

I finished radiation and chemo on April 16th. I breezed through the whole process up until the last week or so. Then the promised diarrhea and skin burn kicked in. The last three sessions of radiation were called the "booster series" and boy they weren't kidding.  I got the same dose of radiation but the field was  shrunk to 50% to zero in on the tumor itself. This meant that I get a twice as heavy dose in the areas affected. The result was a nasty burn of the buns that took  almost a month to heal up.

But the payoff was better than we could have imagined. Last week I had a short colonoscopy from my new surgeon Dr. Kim and he says the radiation has nearly completely disintegrated the tumor. The only thing left is a small node that was the center. This gives him a lot more room for bowel resection and we can all heave a giant sigh of relief: No permanent colostomy. Next step is surgery that is scheduled for July 1. Below, I have made a record of the pre surgery consultation with Dr Kim which you may or may not want to read depending on your squeamishness or need to do more important things.

But first, I want to bring you up to date on the nursery and how the surgery and treatment will affect the business, as it is undoubtedly a major concern for customers as well as myself. I have been going like a madman. Since my buns healed and normal bowel function has returned, I feel better than I have for years. I have not wasted this time. We have been working from dawn to dusk trying to get the place in shape to function without me for two weeks as well as the odd days that I may be sick from post surgical chemo. I finished another seventy feet of bonsai bench for pre trained material, so that I have a place to store and care for trees that get photographed and placed in the specimen catalog of the website. Between the help of Dr. Bob, friends, wife, and a part time employee, we have actually managed to clean up the entire nursery and are basically weed and debris free at the moment. It has never looked this good. Hopefully it will never fall into a state of disrepair again.

I have upgraded the water system. The second well is in and functioning. The Jungle is organized, but the plants have not yet found permanent homes. This is my project for this month. I now have two injection ports for fertilizer that cover the entire nursery. I did the first fertilization with the new system this week and it works great, but still takes all day. I have kept up with business and have shipped a lot plants this spring, surprisingly so considering the depression level unemployment. I thank you all very much for your help in that regard.

I know that many of you are disappointed (once again) that the long promised specimen section of the catalog was stillborn, but like a phoenix, it shall rise again. Work on the plants continues, homes are being created where they will be cared for, and as soon as this ordeal is over, we will surely be moving in that direction. In the meantime, you are always welcome to inquire about your specific needs for plants. We have thousands of specimen sized plants, so just because it isn't in the catalog, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

It's subject to change, but right now, it looks like we will be shipping through June 28. After that we probably will not ship during the month of July while I am recovering, but July is dead month anyhow, so hopefully this will not impact your needs greatly. We will certainly be shipping again by August, barring complications.

The following is the plan for surgery and post surgery in detail for those that may be interested. The details are actually quite fascinating:

Susie and I went to see Dr Kim yesterday, 7/3/09 for the pre surgical consultation. Now, I have a pretty complete picture of what will happen for the rest of the ordeal. Surgery has been scheduled for July 1 at the John Muir Medical Center in Concord (just east of Oakland). I will probably be in the hospital for five days and it will take another week for me to get on my feet and be able to do light work. If I can really get that far in two weeks, I will be extremely pleased.

Soon after surgery, I will begin chemotherapy again. This will be a different kind than before and I may not get through it so easily. The chemo that went with radiation was to enhance it and was a continual low dose, so the symptoms were not severe, in fact, I hardly had any. This time around they are going after any cancer particles that may be floating around in my body. Instead of a continual low dose, I get a big pulse or infusion every other week. There will be eight of these, so it will take four months. I will have to go to Santa Rosa again for the treatments but only two times every other week. The first day I will get a big four hour infusion of drugs and also the portable pump to keep up the infusion for another 48 hours. Then, on the third day, I will go back and return the pump. During this three day period, I may suffer some bad side effects, but I really don't know yet, because people react so differently to chemo. My progress so far would seem to indicate that it won't be too bad for me. I may lose my hair this time though, don't know yet. Hopefully, for the rest of the two week period, I will be feeling semi human and be able to get some work done.

The surgery is much more complicated than I had imagined. First it is done with laproscopy or with a laproscope. That amazes me. Dr Kim says it is so tight in there, that using your hands is almost impossible without a huge opening. The radiation did such a good job of destroying the tumor that only a little central node is left a couple of inches up from my anus. This leaves him plenty of room for resection or reattachment of the colon. First he has to remove the rectum and about a foot of colon to make sure he gets all the cancer. Then, amazingly, he is going to pull down a good size section of the colon, fold it over and stitch it up along the outside and then remove the inner wall so that he creates a a cavity called a J pocket. This is reconstructive surgery. He is actually building me a new rectum. Since the rectum is bigger than the colon and acts a reservoir, this enlarged area of folded colon will serve the same function. His example was pretty good. Imagine you take a garden hose and make a severe bend in it, so that it bends back on itself and the outside walls touch for about six inches. If you could stitch the outside seams in this bend, it would stay this way. Now imagine that you can go inside the hose and cut out the portion of hose where the two walls touch. That would give you a cavity twice as big as the hose. Of course stitching the colon is a whole lot easier than stitching a hose.

Then, this J pocket has to be attached again to the anus. He has plenty of room to do this now. All this cutting and stitching will take time to heal, and there is a good possibility of leakage, which if it occurs, results in peritonitis or infection inside the abdomen. That is nasty and very dangerous. To avoid this, he will give the new section four or five months to heal. He does this by also performing an ileonoscopy (my spell checker doesn't know how to spell it either, it's a shunt to the ileum) or a shunt from the small intestine to the outside of my body. This is a small hole about the size of dime. A patch goes over this which has an attachment for a colostomy bag. The bowel movement will be diverted for the entire four months while the colon resection is healing. At the end of this period I will have to have a second operation to remove the ileonoscopy. But this is a rather simple operation where the section of small intestine is simply tied shut and pushed back into the abdomen. Only a day or two in the hospital while they wait to see if the operation works and I have bowel movements without problems.

I asked him about how normal I would be after it was all over. He says for the first year, I will be anything but normal, with multiple and frequent bowel movements, pretty much anything goes. But, by the second year, I should slowly get better and better. By the end of the second year, I should be almost perfectly normal.

As far as timing goes, I should finish chemo about mid to late October. Then I get a brief rest to recover and then the second operation would be sometime in November or December. So, it is going to take the rest of the year. All in all we are very happy with Dr Kim. He is compassionate and takes the time to listen and answer questions. He was very thorough in explaining all the ramifications of the surgery.