i know that Vance. in Wisconsin probably the only bonsai nursery i know of would be in Milwaukee. there may be one in Madison but i doubt it. even with that bonsai nursery and it being a supporter of our club, our club usually orders trees for demos from the East Coast or Florida.

I know that there are people who think that the local garden center is not the place to find bonsai material.

Treebeard wrote: My Point? Don't expect to fall over a stunning piece of material when visiting garden centres. In fact, don't even expect to find any mediocre material even after inspecting every plant in the place.

I suppose this is possible depending on where you live but here in Michigan this is not true. I suspect that the real problem is that the bonsaiist is going into a place like this hopping to find something that just jumps out at them as a potential bonsai. Going through every plant in the place is not simply walking up and down the lanes looking at every tree, its much more than that. If you are not willing to get your hands dirty and bend your knee this will be your experience as well. I have been through nurseries that others have told me had no decent material. After a couple of hours of serious looking I have come out with as many as ten decent trees to turn into good bonsai.

To me the garden center is the modern equivalant of in the wild collection, it can be hard work and often the results do not square with the impression the books leave the novice as to what they are going to find.

So here are the options we are faced with: Harvest from the wild. This is great and I highly encourage it. However; this is not possible for many that practice the art due to a variety of reasons: Accessability to areas where you can find good trees, lack of financial resources to travel to remote locations, and personal health issues which preclude such activity.

The bonsai nursery can be good depending on location or it can be non-existant for a majority of bonsai growers. Some of those that do exist deal with the kind of material that they can sell and in a lot of areas this happens to be tropicals, the ubiquitious house plant bonsai. If this is your thing then that's in your favor. If you are into temperate plants this may not be a great option.

Landscape harvesting is another option but the same issues that haunt collecting from the wild apply to this resource, location, cost, and ability to actually dig the tree/trees.

This leaves the many of us with the garden center maze or nothing at all

Another thing to remember is that wild-collecting trees is HARD! All the best trees are in locations that are inaccesible, and once you get there, they really don't want to come out of the ground. I recently found a wild-growing wisteria with a trunk I could barely get my hands around. After 8(!) hours of digging and pulling and cutting and tugging and sweating and fighting briars and running low on daylight, I had a huge trench dug around the tree, all major roots cut, a come-along pulling it to the side, and it still may as well have been lodged in concrete!

For the same amount of time and less than $100, I could have toured a half dozen nurseries and come up with some quality raw material. It wouldn't have been an 8" wide wisteria, but I would have had much more satisfaction.

It's all in what you want to get for your work.

Vance, I have several pairs of good jeans ruined from scrabbling round in the dirt. I am (or was when I did it) forever being frowned at because I would show my family up by digging in the 'mud' with my fingers and unceremoniously hauling plants from the displays and up-ending then to get a good look at the trunks.

Regards,

Chris.

"Another thing to remember is that wild-collecting trees is HARD! All the best trees are in locations that are inaccesible, and once you get there, they really don't want to come out of the ground"

Hard is a relative thing in collecting at a nursery or in the wild. All the best trees aren't really in inaccessible locaitons, nor are many all that hard to collect. It's the search that's really the hard part. Finding a collectible tree is hard and takes time. Only one in 300 or 400 is worth the effort and a smaller percentage is collectible without tremendous effort. Knowing which ones will come out without killing you or the tree comes with a little time and alot of time in the dirt.

For instance, (and no, I'm not bragging here, just trying to show how things can work out with a similar plant), I have a collected wisteria with a diameter of about 11 inches. I collected it in half an hour, in the woods about 1,000 yards from my house. Of course, I found it only after a couple of years of looking. There's alot of dense scrub forest behind the house and alot of wild wisteria . I'd collected alot of smaller wisteria before tackling the big one. In that time, I learned that Wisteria don't need alot of roots to allow them to recover, so you don't really have to dig a humongous trench or use traditional collection methods to get one. Severing the major roots six inches out (in the spring) all the way around is sufficient, if you plant it in moist soil upon removing it. They are aggressive in growth in the spring, so they bounce back in about six weeks.

Treebeard I did not mean to imply that you did not know what you are doing around a nursery, your gallery entrys prove your competance. My comments were meant to be for those who, by their actions, know who I am talking about, the old if the shoe fits wear it syndrom. But my point still remains firm in my mind, if it were not for the garden centers most of my material would be unavailable and therefore only existing in my imagination. When I was young most of my trees were harvested from the mountians of Northern California. Now that I am older and no where near California my harvesting comes from the nurseries. Some might say I will, because of my sources, never have a real world class bonsai. That may be true, and I really don't worry much about that, I grow bonsai to please myself. I am occassionally rewarded by people that think my trees are beautiful in their eyes.

Gday folks!

Vance makes a point here that is relevant to my Bonsai practice:

"...if it were not for the garden centers most of my material would be unavailable and therefore only existing in my imagination."

While I don't frequent Bonsai Nurseries much, and I only just attended my 1st Bonsai Exhibit late last year, it has been my experience that the material I am seeking isn't readily available. Some of you fine folk may have noticed that my interest in Bonsai has taken a turn towards Eucalyptus trees, yet at the Bonsai Society of Victoria Exhibit I saw NO Euc Bonsai. Sure, there were a few native pre-Bonsai being sold by the various club members (including a few spindly little Eucs) but by and large the trees I saw were the same old trees we see in Japanese, European and American Bonsai books. Don't get me wrong - some were of excellent quality, beautifully crafted and cared for, but they were not what I was after. Why would I want to fork out $$$ for a beautifully styled, delicate Japanese Maple that will likely end up cooked before the height of Summer?

Does the lack of proprietary Eucalyptus Bonsai stock mean that I am - ummm - barking up the wrong tree? Or that I have somehow been labouring under the misconception that there can be such a thing as Eucalypt Bonsai? Or that I should simply give in and support my local Bonsai Nurseries by buying overpriced, exotic stock trees that I don't particularly want, and will most likely kill? Hell no!

Many here might argue that the Eucs I have been posting are barely even potensai, and that it will take many years of my time in order to make them resemble 'finished' Bonsai. I would have to agree for the most part. It will take time, but so does anything worthwhile. In the absence of suitable stock, I have taken it upon myself to create the stock that I am looking for, and from there develop it into the trees I desire. If that means buying from garden centres and landscape nurseries, then so be it.

Then - of course - there's the whole argument about wasting one's time trying to create Bonsai from scratch. And the one about crappy, reject trees making for crappy, reject Bonsai. But I won't go into those here...

Thanks.

FlyBri.

Hey Brian: I used to get the old look down the nose, harumph and the occassional Mugos are just shrubs quote but I held on to my endeavours. Do the same, you'll find a way to make a good bonsai out of Eucys. Can't be much more difficult than a Ficus in some respects. There doses not seem to be too many ways to kill them, they have been trying in the Bay Area (San Francisco) for years with no success.

Thanks for the moral support, Vance. I'm pretty sure you didn't become the Mugo Man by taking 'no' for an answer.

FlyBri.

I was once asked if I had to have a house fall on me before I decided to quite: I said Yes.