The Bonsai Blog of David Fairbanks

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.

Bonsai in the UK looks towards Japan a great deal for information and in the current climate, it is becoming increasingly more accessible. We especially look to Japan for knowledge, yet it seems to me that we have failed to learn some of the basic lessons that Japan has tried to teach us, and these are so important that until we do learn them we are restricting our own development as a national Bonsai scene. It’s hard to say exactly what I mean, and the best single phrase to sum it up that I can think of is “We fail to see the bigger picture”. We focus on the here and now, where as in Japan there is more time spent thinking about the future.
I, probably like you, am a subscriber of the publication Bonsai Focus. In the most recent issue there is an article featuring one of Kobiyash’s most talented students. He is styling an Itiogawa Juniper and planting it on a rock. So what is the important lesson of the article? The way he creates the Jin? The placement of the branches? The methods used to plant onto the rock? Although these are all important, the most important lesson is given before the plant is even touched.
In the future thinking world of Japan, they understand that tied into the development of Bonsai, is the development of the people who do it. We are always reading about the next great masters currently studying and even get to hear about a few from the UK who are following this path. Yet in the UK we don’t learn the lesson.
It can be said that as far as a Bonsai Nation is concerned we are young in comparison to Japan and therefore do not have any such system in place. It is a fair comment, however if you switch focus closer to home you can see that in comparison to some of our European neighbours we are miles behind. France, Germany and Italy all have structures like this in place and they have been of great success. Salvatore Liporace, created the Studio Botanico in 1986 and there are now many artists who have passed through Studio Botanico and are now at the top of there profession.
There is currently only 1 single educational structure that can be compared to this in the UK, this is run by John Hanby and is in its first year. Hopefully this will continue to do as well as it is doing so far. There are many famous Bonsai Artists in the UK, with far more information than they are able to accurately and concisely teach in books. The level of knowledge in the UK is very good, especially amongst the older generation of artists. There are many people in the UK capable of giving young and talented artists a structured formal Education in Bonsai.
In Japan, the majority of trees shown in the large exhibitions have been in a pot for over 30 years, which give or take, is a generation, and they know that for these to be maintained and developed in the future there needs to be people with the knowledge and skill to do so.
Here in the UK, again we don’t learn the lesson. We have some great trees here, many famous trees that are known throughout the world. We don’t have a plan in effect for the long term future of these trees. It will be a shame to see some of Peter Chan’s Maples to end up sold off to the highest bidder, regardless of there credentials to own and maintain these important works of art.
Peter is just being used as an example here, as his Maples are among the best examples of their species anywhere and nationally should be seen as important historical works of art. We didn’t leave the Constable paintings to fade and disappear into time, it makes no sense that we should allow our nations bonsai art to.
Yet again thought, this is the bigger picture, and we don’t seem to like it. It is also very possible that we do see the bigger picture, but choose to ignore it. Maybe we are blinded to the bigger picture by the evil that is money?
Do the current Artists not care if there trees are seen for generations to come? Would they rather sell them for what they can than see them maintained for the future generations, even if to do this the trees are not sold?
What’s really more important the Art or the money? Unfortunately it seems the answer is money, when you consider that passing on information costs nothing. Artists do charge people for lessons and classes and such, and this is understandable. But when it comes to the time when the knowledge in my head needs to shared or be lost forever, money doesn’t matter.

Hello all

I did say that coming soon would be my first rant, and here it is. I’m the kind of person who says exactly what i think. This is something that has bugged me for a long time, and something that i want to share with you.

So, whats the problem?

Firstly id like to show you this picture.

This is the business end of a Pinus Thunbergii “Suchiro Yatsabusa”, a dwarf cultivar of Japanese black pine and one that is well suited to bonsai cultivation. Like most cultivars of Japanese pine, they are rarer than rocking horse droppings in the UK. This one for example isn’t listed by the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) plant finder as available anywhere in Britain.

No, i don’t want to gripe about the lack of availability of cultivars. I know that they can only be reproduced by grafting, meaning there is a limit to the amount of them and this is something that i understand. You need root stock, good quality scions, and time, and even then you are not guaranteed success. All of these factors, tied together with the fact that there is less than a handful of people in the UK who graft pine cultivars makes for a limited availability of plants, and that is fine. However what really makes me mad is the next picture.

This is the other end of the same plant. The graft is 7cm from the soil line. Bear in mind that this is a Yatsabusa variety, this is practically useless for a future bonsai. I have also dug down in the soil, and there is another 3 cms of trunk below the soil line, meaning that there as 10cms between the roots and the graft. Shoddy. This is one of 10 different cultivars i obtained from the same source, and the grafts were all equally as poor.

Ok ok, not all plants are grafted for use in bonsai. You go to garden centers and you will find a whole host of plants with similar poor grafts. Yet this plant was purchased from a bonsai man, who runs a bonsai place. I wont mention names as that isn’t cricket, however find it astonishing that someone who knows what is required in order to grow good quality Pine Bonsai turns out plants such as this.

As i have already said there are very few of these in the UK, and for reasons we have already discussed. Surely the focus should be placed on the quality of the few plants that are successfully cultivated, especially if there intention is to be used for Bonsai.

Brent Walston is a man i have great respect for. He runs a place near Kelseyville, CA, called Evergreen Gardenworks. They propagate and grow rare and unusual plants for bonsai and landscape use. His articles have taught many in the online bonsai community much, and i owe a lot to him for the lessons i have learned from his words.

http://www.evergreengardenworks.com/pinus.htm

The above link is to Evergreens Gardenworks, and in particular a list of there pine cultivars that they have available. Most of the cultivars has a picture next to it. Look at the quality of the grafts. Outstanding. Brents grafting talents are well known, and there are waiting lists for many of the cultivars he deals in, as is the demand and respect for the final product. I would strongly recommend anyone to read through the articles on his site.

So, what is it that enables Brent to create such good quality grafts? Simple answer is that he can be arsed to. He knows what is required to grow larger cultivar Pines. He knows that if the grafts are no good, the bonsai that result from them will be no good either. But so do growers from the UK. Yet we are still happy enough to turn out these poor qualiy grafts.

This will have a knock on effect for the quality of bonsai we produce in the future. Our future bonsai are only as good as the material we use, and at the moment we have to source from overseas and pay import charges in order to have good quality Pine cultivars.

I have already realised that in order for me to grow the pines i want to i will have to start from scratch. I have sourced 20 cultivars of Japanese black and white pines, including many cork barked varieties, which are being grown on as stock plants for scion wood. I have a thousand J black pine seeds to grow rootstock for future grafts. I have a field to allow me to grow them on. More importantly i have the time, and the attitude to do the job properly.

If anyone reads this and thinks, hang on a minute, i think hes talking about me! Ask yourself this, is the quality of your plants as good as they could be? If the answer is no then i am indeed talking about you, and you should be ashamed. More to the point, you should be asking yourself why.

Regards

David Fairbanks

Hello all and welcome to My Bonsai Blog.

This is me. Im a 26 year old Bonsai enthusiast from Staffordshire, England.

This picture was taken on a recent visit to Peter and Dawn Chan’s nursery.

This is me standing in his growing fields. Some of these trunks are thicker than my legs! And im a big bugger!

I hope to use this blog to record my learnings and travels in all things bonsai, as well as encourage discussions.

This will be updated on a regular basis so do be sure to check back often. Coming soon is my first public rant, and an interview with John Hanby.

See you soon

David Fairbanks