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Originally Posted by bonsaial1
Spend a day with Kenji Miyata repotting a dozen mixed trees. He will show you dozen ways to repot them. Spend another day pinching and pruning a dozen mixed trees and he will show you two dozen ways to do your task. If any one is caught into a rut that repotting bonsai is pull-cut-replant, pull-cut-replant, find another magazine to read cause you have been lulled into a false sense of security. Whats good on one tree this year will not be the same on that same tree next year. I am sure John at Vonsgarden learned many things from Marco during his week with him. Probably many things he had not even thought about.
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Nobody here should think that
there is only one way of doing the above mentioned tasks. Sure, there are many ways of doing them, it could be a dozen, as you mentioned, but eventually you will cover them all, and then all you can do is to repeat the techiques in the subsequent issues of BT.
There are many people who are only concerned with techniques, and not much else. Granted, good techniques are vital to the creation of bonsai. But the problem is, there is more to art then pure techniques.
Pick up any art magazine, take painting for instance. See how many articles deal with a step-by-step technical description of how to create a world-class painting.
None.
If they started doing that, 90% of the subscibers would cancel their subscriptions. They don't care how paintings were created. They want to see the work of art, and talk about it, that's all.
Same with any other art forms. They all have very sophisticated techniques, but no magazine talks about them.
Bonsai is, of course, light years behind those art forms, but as its popularity grows, there are more and more people who want to admire its beauty and see them as works of art. And, just as with other works of art, they care less about how these trees were created, and more about their artistic value. So, a bonsai magazine needs to keep up with the times and shift its focus from technique to art, trying to find a balance between the two. You are trying to satisfy both the "art" and "technique" crowd, but you will never be able to do both at 100%. That is the dillemma.
I remember the old days when every bonsai gathering started and ended with talking about rules and techniques to the crowd. Fortunately, this is slowly changing now. There are people, like Walter Pall, who recongize that there is more to bonsai then showing how to wire and re-pot.
They actually want the audience to have some fun! What a blasphemy!
There are always the nerds who thrive on the technical side and sit the whole thing out from the beginning to the end.
Then there is the other half of the crowd who after an hour of watching a guy wire and clip, they start yawning and they leave. They don't care.
This is the mixed crowd you have to please as a magazine. You want to please the techno-nerds but you also want rest of the crowd to have some fun.
And guess what: the crowd who get bored to death and leave, those are the ones with the big money. They would be the "collectors", the "patrons", the ones paying the bill, if only we wouldn't chase them away with the boring details.
The ones who only care about the techniques, are of course the cheapskates. They want to create bonsai from scratch, and never pay more than a few hundred dollars for a tree. If the bonsai business relies on their money exclusively, it will be barely enough to get by.
P.S.: Anyone who REALLY want to learn techniques, should get a teacher or take workshops. It's not a magazine's job to do that. A magazine can only get you a taste of that.