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Originally Posted by Graydon
I am trying to advocate that these new people selecting their "masterpiece stock" get help from someone that knows their @ss from a hole in the ground - that's all.
All the book smarts won't help that much - for example let's say a local club member named Jimmy reads every bonsai book he can find. He has learned every japanese style name and can even use the Japanese word for informal upright. He knows he wants a pine (or a maple or a cypress or a hornbeam) so he goes to a nursery and picks out a tree. He thinks it has a good trunk (criteria #1) and it has a nebari of sorts but they are all tangled(criteria #2) and it has branches - duh (criteria #3) and the tag on the plant has the growth habit so we are good to go (criteria #4). Now Jimmy goes home and starts root pruning in July and clipping and wiring and all the other things the big boys do - only with his book smarts - no hands on ever. Lucky bastard doesn't kill the poor thing - he just maims it for years of suffering and recovery. Then the regret sets in - maybe I should have paid attention to how this plant grows for a year or two before the pruners hit the branches.
Sensei - please help me pick out a plant for I do not know wat I am doing. How hard would that have been?
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Wow.... serious chunks of that comment look SUSPICIOUSLY like my conversation with Ron on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of a nursery surrounded by WAYYYYY too many cool lil Mountain Hemlocks.
I wanted to find something new for spring... I went to my favorite local nursery and was just blown away when I found a group of 30+ Mountain Hemlocks. all of them were about 3 feet tall with near perfect taper. Most of them were pretty straightforward, you could see a lovely formal upright coming out of almost all of them.... then there was this one....
It had some slightly unfortunate handling at some point in it's life, where the pot must of been seriously tilted. The tree grew at a strong slant with all this awesome nebari anchoring it down to the pot to stablize it. But while the idea of it captivated me, it seemed a little out of my league.
So here I am.... stumped by the idea of playing it safe and getting something that would be easier for me to "see" the bonsai within... or get something unusual and be a little more bold than my normally conservative nature will allow. So I flip through the contacts of all the BT buddies I have called for one reason or another... and there was Ron. I knew it would be evening hours over there, but I was lucky and Ron picked up....
We went through the merits of the trees.... and in the end encouraged me to get the one he could tell I was most intrigued with.... the slant. He had me describe it to him in detail to where he felt pretty safe that I was getting a healthy lil tree.
Then I blurted out how I thought it would be MARVELOUS with the new Dale Cochoy pot I had just bought.... Ron put the brakes on that conversation. He started talking to me about the best interests of the tree... how he could already tell that I was going to love this tree... and that meant biding my time. He told me that potting it was the one thing I really did not want to do to it this year. That if I cared about the tree, I would care enough to wait. It wasn't going anywhere. He talked to me about stressors that effected the tree and how it would recover from various tasks. That if I chose to style and pot all in the same season, I would so stress the tree, it might take years to bounce back. So he said... Take it home... play with it... go ahead and do some styling on it. Enjoy your tree... but wait for anything else. Don't even think about potting it until next year.
Needless to say... that conversation was worth it's weight in gold. I can personally attest that Ron knows his arse from a hole in the ground...
As to the tree... it is a serious personal favorite of mine. It's still in it's nursery pot. It got a haircut and a bit of style... and it is well on it's way to becoming one of the true prizes in my humble collection.
Could I have blown it on my own, without having heard such excellent advice as I was given? Heck YAH! I'd call Ron again in a New York minute if I was similarly stumped in the future. Becuase I garontee... I would of been foolish enough to believe that I could pull off a major haircut and a potting in the same season.... silly girl that I am.
Thank you Ron.
So to end... Graydon... you are absolutely RIGHT. Everyone needs a mentor they can call on to help them navigate through choices and tasks. I am certinally thankful for those who lend themselves in that fashion for me.
Kind Regards,
Victrinia