FredL

Ron, it's always a pleasure to read your musings. They convey a sort of live-and-help-live spirit that is not all that universal in this day and age. Count me among your fans!

I've seen many articles in Bonsai Today that deal with the make over of material that most of us would take to be pretty low quality. I find myself wondering if the challenge implicit in mediocre material helps stimulate new and novel approaches and designs that benefit the artists that employ them and the rest of us that marvel at unexpected beauty found in unlikely places. I'm still at that stage where I'm accumulating lots of material, much of it without obvious high potential. No doubt, I'll move into a more selective mode soon; in fact, clearly am already. Sounds like I'm following the same track you have before me. But, one thing I'm curious about: I wonder whether any of the material you collected early on turned out to have more potential than you recognized at first. I wonder whether you collected material at random that at one point didn't look like much to you and then, at a still later time, turned out to be a pretty decent starting point after all. As you went along, did you discover potential that you missed at an earlier stage?

Fred