On a typically British August Sunday I found myself in John Pitt’s oversized (but too bloody low) outbuilding, hiding from the typically British rain. We had spent the day working a tree and talking bonsai, and the subject got on to the soon to be implemented ban on importing Juniper due to the high percentage of rust infections on this years imports.

We were talking about the ramifications of this, such as increased prices of what is currently available here, and the eventual decrease of quality stock. I said to John that in the future I will be working better quality juniper material than the majority that is imported currently, as I have been taking Itoigawa cuttings in mass for a few years now and have several hundred young plants.

I told him of my plans to field grow around 30% in my land, and the rest of them I will peel and wire repeatedly to grow top draw container grown Shohin material. He looked at me like I was crazy. Peeled? I continued to explain that these tight contorted Junipers that get imported are grown by peeling the bark and wiring new shoots in the ground, and that this produces some of the best and most expensive nursery grown Juniper material available in Japan.

The conversation then moved on to why nobody in the UK was using the techniques used in Japan to grow material here. This is where the conversation ended, as my wife had arrived to pick me up, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this since.

Why is it that we copy Japanese practices and techniques for styling trees, but nobody is using the techniques that they use to grow material? I take that back, I said nobody, and that isn’t true. Recently some people are experimenting with growing pines in double layered colanders, and Brent Walston from Evergreen Garden Works in the US has been growing suitable Japanese pine cultivars from cuttings for some time. But that is about it.

For example, Satsuki are currently very popular in Europe and better quality ones have started to be imported from Japan. Yet to my knowledge (and I have searched extensively) there is no one in the E.U growing Satsuki whips. I am now doing, in small numbers due to the complexity of Satsuki propagation.

Thinking about it logically, Japan isn’t that cheap. Add to it export costs, shipping, import tax, nursery mark ups, and probably a dozen other overheads, in the UK you can pay over double the cost price of this material in Japan. Almost all of the major overheads would be removed if the source of the material was within the E.U. A lorry is bigger than a shipping container, as well as cheaper and faster.

One of the most important benefits would be that these being grown within the E.U there would be no quarantine times, meaning that nurseries could order stock, and have it on there benches in days or weeks, not months and years.

I am good friends with an owner of one of the UK’s biggest nurseries and am familiar with how his imports work. In May/June he goes to Japan to select his stock, it arrives in January/February the following year, and then can be in quarantine for a further 6 months afterwards. Looking at it from a supply and demand point of view, it seems completely ludicrous that a business is reliant upon such a long winded (and as the mass burning of Junipers by DEFRA this year has shown, a relatively risky) supply chain.

There are people in Europe who do grow and supply material to nurseries in the E.U and UK, but the methods used for growing evergreens are little more complicated than wrapping a whip (regardless of species) around a cane or stick, and leaving for 10 years. These sell for £200-£400. This produces semi-decent material (My entry into last years KoB contest was grown in the E.U by this method), but if better techniques were applied within the same timescales material can be produced that sells for £800-£1200, and rivals the material that comes from Japan.

Im not complaining here, this isn’t another one of my rants, I simply cannot understand what the reasons are that this does not happen. Tell you what though, if any Bonsai Nursery has a few acres spare, and wants to grow Japanese quality material using Japanese techniques, then I am available for work (hehehe).

As always, your thoughts and opinions on this would be appreciated.