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bonsaiTALK Master Chief
Join Date: Sep-2003
Location: Eastern MA
Country: U.S.A
Posts: 1,158
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My Day With Kenji Miyata
Hi all,
Well Saturday was a GREAT day. My club had a 7 hour workshop at New England Bonsai with Kenji Miyata. Now still being new to bonsai I didn't have many trees to bring with me. One of the trees I brought with me was a Japanese Maple that I got last year near the end of the season. The tree is very much a pontensi tree with not a whole lot of options. Kenji helped me chop the trunk where needed, and showed me the new buds about to sprout from the trunk that would be my future branches. He also helped me re-pot the tree from it's nursery container into a training pot, and worked over the root ball like I have never seen. He was very prompt to point out things in the root ball that needed to be cut off to allow for a nice flat root pad in the future.
Needless to say without bringing many trees I was done with what I brought in a short time, and went looking around the greenhouses for something else to work on. When I made my way back to the greenhouse we where working in, I noticed some Junipers off to the side. I asked Hitoshi if they were for sale and we went over to the table and told me the very fair price for these huge procumbens in 5 gallon pots. I chose the one that appealed to me the most and brought it back over to the bench.
Kenji made his way back over to me and looked at the tree with me and explained what options he saw in the tree, and asked what I saw. We took the tree out of the pot, and started to cut off some unneeded branches to get a better look at the trunk. We decided what style would look best with the tree I chose. I was in awe of how many different options he saw, and amazed at his simple instructions for achieving the result. Not speaking much English didn't stand in our way. The expressions on his face, and brief words like "wire here" "Jin here" and "straight no good" were perfect. I think being able to hear slight observations alone without much in-depth descriptions and reasons allowed me to make my own observations and enabled me to see what I have read in so many books.
Ok, enough babbling on, here are some pics.
Enjoy
Adam
First picture is of the juniper out of the nursery pot. I forgot to take any shots before 3 large cascading branches were removed, but you get the idea.
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