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Originally Posted by Graydon
No groans from me, it's fresh and creative. I also see a photo of you (your avatar) holding a nice tree in a well selected pot so obviously you have the knack for that as well. What did you do first - normal pots or the creative alternatives?
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First, I better give Walter Pall credit for taking the photo I use for my avatar
He used it in a thread he posted in the IBC gallery, so I figured it was safe to use it here. The tree in that photo was collected from the same site as the juniper on the shovel; the pot is a Mike Hagedorn oval.
Back to your question though. When I started bonsai in 1989, Dan Robinson was my hero. I liked the idea of using collected material. I was living in the Ozarks of Southwest Missouri (Forsyth, Branson) and there was nothing in the way of bonsai pots unless you drove to Springfield, 65 miles away. There were a lot of ravines people dumped their trash down and lots of rusty old enameled metal dishes. These served as my first bonsai pots...free and recycled, what could be better?
I really wasn't concerned about whether my trees were in "official" bonsai pots or not, as my focus was mainly on the tree at the time. As I began to accumulate books and magazines, it slowly dawned on me that the idea was to get the tree into a bonsai pot eventually. So I went that route for a while. But I never lost sight of the fact that sometimes a bonsai pot really isn't always the best thing to put your tree in if you're focusing on the tree. And I'm a huge fan of Nick Lenz. When I saw what he was doing it almost made me quit, it was so good
I could have just said "I started with alternative pots first" and left out a lot of detail, but I think the doubters need to know a bit of the thought process that goes into using containers other than traditional when trying to understand what the appeal is in it. I'm a very informal person and sometimes people are disappointed by that. They want fancy elaborate speech and explanations about things and are put off by keeping it simple. They are the complicators and I will leave that to them. I like to be a facilitator and look for the simplest solution to my problems. I love low-tech and I like to have a good laugh once in a while. I see a lot of folks taking bonsai way too seriously sometimes and I think it's a real pity. Let's have fun with it and make a little fun
at it once in a while
