Vance Wood

I have been kind of sitting on the sidelines during most of this exchange but it dawned on me that people are complaining about something being not good enough, or as good as it used to be, or something else it now is or never was. Good grief. When I started growing bonsai there was no Bonsai Today, no Bonsai Europe, no BCI, no ABS, no MABA, no International Bonsai, and no INTERNET. There was no Warehouser collection, no National Arboretum, and no bonsai nurseries. We did not know what Akadama was, Yamadori, Kanuma, Shimpaku Junipers, none of it. It was a waste land like right after the earth cooled. We struggled with making up soil mixes, improvising tools, looking for pots and trying to fish our ways through all the Bovine Scatology that passed as Bonsai literature--one or two books.

If in our collective wisdom we judge that those things mentioned above are inferior and without offering a viable alternate solution we are inevitably doomed to returning to the good old days where men were men, and real men made there own soil, and bonsai was pronounced banzai. We ought to be thankful we have what we have and if we think it could and should be better then we should contribute to making it so. Anybody can sit on the sidelines and bitch.

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The only finished bonsai is a dead one; me 1992 MABA Des Moines Iowa