Originally Posted by saint

With a name like Saint I'm going to play devils advocate here....


I tend to feel very strongly about my trees that they are MY trees, I collected them and I style them. Yes I do get help from the teacher but he'll tell you that I don't like him cutting MY trees. I have several trees that I have gotten from other people including Arthur Atkinson and every one of them I have changed (some not as successfully as others I will admit) point was I made them MINE, I put my personal stamp on them, they are an expression of MY efforts.

As a result of this the thought of letting someone else style MY trees and then me taking credit for them would seem to me like cheating. If Mr. So and So made all of the aesthetic decisions on the tree and all I did was water and maintain, it's really his tree!

So maybe MY trees don't look anywhere near as fantastic as a Kimura, its MINE and I derive a great deal of pleasure from that.

Perhaps Andy does have something in that most bonsai competitions in the west are really artist competitions, that's okay. In Asia the opposite is true you can buy a Juniper for U$30,000 and win competitions from the next day, however if (in my wildest fantasies) I had that amount of money to spend on a tree I wouldn't, because it wouldn't be MINE, I'd just be maintaining someone else's tree.


.... and that's not why I do bonsai.