Page 61 - Tạp chí bonsai cây cảnh BCI 2015Q4

Top left and right; This photo of the tiny informal What will happen to them when I can no longer
upright boxwood appeared in a bonsai magazine care for this small number? In recent years a bonsai
in 2000. In October, 2015, it is still only 10” tall enthusiast 40 years younger than I am has been help-
from the top of the pot to the top of the tree. ing me and learning. That’s where they’ll go.
Aren’t bonsai supposed to look like survivors?
This one is. Look at the bark and you can see the If I were to make only one suggestion, it would be to
fissures are much deeper. make arrangements to pass your bonsai on to some-
one else. A woman acquaintance of mine in Santa Bar-
bara, California did this by inviting her friends over to
choose a bonsai from her collection and take it home.
It solved two problems: how to reduce her work load
and how to make sure her bonsai lived on.
Henry Rand Hatfield, an early theorist in Accoun-
tancy, said “All machinery is on an irresistible march
to the junk heap.” So are we. Most of us don’t like to
think about that, but there’s no sense in being like the
proverbial ostrich and burying our heads in the sand.
If you have the forethought to plan for a will, then plan
for the future of your bonsai.
The second suggestion would be not to get in over
your head. A man here in San Diego liked bonsai but
had no ability to grow them. So he bought them. He
paid high prices for good bonsai but had no idea what
to do with them. Thieves helped him get rid of some
of them so he had cages made that would keep the
remainder safe. He hand-watered them as long as he
could but when I offered to set up an automatic wa-
tering system, he declined the offer. The result: the
collection died.
I did not want to get in over my head. My skills
never progressed beyond the intermediate level. Al-
though I live in California where California junipers
are available, I never attempted to dig one or own one.
Leaning how care for a new species inevitably runs the
risk of killing one or more and I couldn’t see doing that
to these old trees that can live to be far more than a
hundred years old.
When the time comes to pass your bonsai on to
another enthusiast, you may want to take photos of
them to remember them by. Or better yet, take annual
If it is kept trimmed back Ultimately, my wife and I concluded that any bonsai photos and use them in a PowerPoint presentation if
hard, the leaves will reduce to materials I did not expect to use in the near future
about the size of the ‘Morris should also go. That meant pots, stands, slabs, wire, you have the software. If you haven’t done it yet, buy a
Midget’. The small size is the and everything except my books. They went. If you camera and learn to use it. Digital cameras now cap-
result of restricted root space, ture the date and time of the photos taken, eliminating
infrequent transplanting, and are thinking I was standing there crying to see them the need to add them to the caption on the photo. It
strong pruning. The top could go, you’re wrong. I was filled with a great sense of relief will improve your designs as you can look at your trees
be shortened an inch. that someone else would get to enjoy them and that without being distracted by the foliage.
Middle left and right; The other I would not have to struggle and stagger around to
boxwood, acquired in 1984, water them or put them in the recycle bin if they died. My wife and I have used the most photogenic
appears on the back cover of The few trees that I kept are at the left end of our bonsai—a different one for every year—on our
Saikei and Art. On the right is Christmas cards. Here’s our card for 2015.
how it looks in October, 2015. deck, take no more than 5 minutes to water, can be
Both the informal upright trimmed readily with scissors, and can be trans-
and the slant style are Buxus planted by cutting wedges out or by coring around
microphylla japonica. the roots. All of them have appeared in articles in one
bonsai magazine or another. None of them are show-
ready at the moment. From smallest to largest, they are
two small boxwoods, a 26-year-old bougainvillea cas-
cade, an Orange King bougainvillea tanuki, the top-
dominant chorisia speciosa started in 1986 that I have
fought with for at least 25 years, and a ficus benjamina
‘Little Lucy’ clump that is 22 years old.

October/November/December 2015 | BCI | 59