Phutu...one little tree at a time.

3/28/2004 My bonsai club had it's annual spring show last week. I only managed to be there for one out of the five days and I was so busy that I didn't even take any photos. I only had two trees that I entered in the show, the little maple and my elm. Next year I hope that I will have quite a few more. If all goes well, my cascade pine should be ready for its first show by next spring, and I am hoping to have my little black pine ready as well as my maple again. I was looking at the photos of the maple from last years show and now and I was surprised at the improvement that it has made in shape and refinement. Anyway, for a few photos of the show you could go here...hopefully there will be more in the future.

A couple weeks ago I took Romi and went on a nice little hike up in Marin county. It was a pretty cool little spot. Fortunately, it didn't suffer from the main problem that a lot of these regional parks have: they are usually overrun with cattle so that all the native plant life is beaten and eaten to death and all that remains is a bunch of dead trees and rutted hillsides with almost no grass. Around the Bay Area there are billboards advertising California cheese. The billboards show "happy cows" with black and white spotted cows arranged so that their spots make happy faces. One in particular is really annoying to me; it shows two cows in the foreground with a field and a dead tree in the background. While trees do die naturally, cows tend to cause premature death in the trees that they hide under during the hot afternoon hours. They compact the soil around the base of the tree which causes the roots to be more easily infected by fungus and root rot. To add insult to injury, the cows eat all the seedlings that a tree produces so that once the large tree is gone it will never be replaced. If you go to the Happy Cow website and look around a little you will find a calendar of the images that I am talking about.

Anyway, thankfully, there weren't any happy cows in this park; which meant that there was a lot more happy grass and some happy trees even. I found one enormous Coast Live Oak during the hike. The limbs on one side came out of the trunk and swept down to the ground where they rested with the ends leading back upward to form the lowest part of the outer canopy. You could walk right up one of them to a saddle area on the trunk where many large branches broke off. I was so amazed by the tree that I sat and just gazed at it for a few minutes, taking in all of the architecture of it. If there had been cattle in the area all of the lower branches, whether touching the ground or just within three feet of it, would have been bare of growth, or just rotted away.

This morning I went with John Edwards from the bonsai club to a guy's house in the Twin Peaks area of San Francisco. We ropotted a very old pine tree that he has, it was apparently imported from Japan a long time ago and at one time belonged to Admiral Nimitz. I had a great time doing it and got a bottle of wine out of the deal...not bad for a mornings enjoyable work. 3/10/2004
2/10/2004
1/15/2004
12/26/2003
12/13/2003
11/18/2003
10/26/2003
10/13/2003
9/20/2003
9/14/2003
8/13/2003
7/29/2003
7/19/2003
7/8/2003
7/1/2003
6/3/2003
5/29/2003
4/22/2003
3/18/2003
2/27/2003
2/18/2003
2/15/2003
1/31/2003
1/21/2003
12/18/2002

The list grows ever longer.

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