Tobias

if you mean "becomes yours" literally, then of course if becomes yours the second you take win it or buy it. I have assumed, however, that you mean more than that. i take your question to mean when can you take credit for it.

it occurs to me that some of us (you guys, not me) do some really good work, and thus should receive much credit for the work you do on your trees. however, generally that work is limited to branch placement, branch design, and ramification (and of course dead wood work, maybe nebari work, other maintenance and design improvement etc.). but, how many of us can take credit for trunk design?

every great bonsai i've ever seen, many of them largely developed by you folks, has had a wonderful trunk. the issue is, on most of the bonsai we work on we have not created or styled the trunk. in fact, the trunk is usually too large and set for us to really alter it much at all. thus we can never totally take full credit for almost every bonsai any of us will ever own, because we are just working with the trunk we've been given.

of course that brief explanation downplays the awesome bonsai work you guys do. you do lots of complicated crazy stuff i don't even fully understand (yet). but, in a sense, we can't ever take full credit for most of the trees we work on.

as for the snobsai (which i've somehow, in my rant, managed to avoid until now) you clearly can't take full credit for it if you're just maintaining the shape you've purchased or won (althogh doing the maintainance work is nothing to scoff at). and, as i said above, even if you totally rework the tree so that the "master" doesn't recognize it anymore, you can never take credit for that beautiful trunk, which contributes so much to the beauty of the tree, which you were never able to significanly alter.

just some hasty thoughts, that are hopefully related to what you had in mind for this thread.

peace,

toby

__________________
~Self-proclaimed dendrophile!