Ben Oki on Plastic-sai

Ben Oki is one of my favorite people in the world. He is so kind and very funny, as we see in this next clip:

Ben Oki at Kansas City

Ben Oki made his annual April pilgrimage to Kansas City to work on Japanese gardens and hold a Master Weekend at the Bonsai Society of Kansas City. It's hard to believe this man is 80 years old, he works like a horse! He is the curator of the Huntington Gardens bonsai collection and travels extensively throughout the U.S. as well as keeping his own collection.


Here Ben is working on a tree he has provided for the club. It is a Japanese black pine he grew from seed for the last 20 years.


His first step is to take off the strong new candles. They are so long this early because the weather in southern California is so warm.

At this point we see the tree wired and the roots shortened to pot the tree. Ben wired the trunk in order to bring the top a little toward the viewer. It had been leaning back too far.

The next tree is a little Ponderosa pine from Golden Arrow Bonsai. It's in great health but just a bit loose in the pot.

Ben brought the leading branch up for a new apex, cut off one branch, et voila, "instant bonsai." Of course it's instant in that the elements took about 90 years to create this tree. Instant to us.

Korean Hornbeam repot

Mark brought his Korean hornbeam for some help in repotting. This tree was purchased several years ago from Bill Valavanis at International Bonsai Arboretum. It is a collected Korean hornbeam stump that was then grown for ten years in the ground before being imported to the U.S.

The main defect in this tree is its field-grown trunk, which is obviously the middle third of the trunk line. It lacks any kind of taper, and has some movement that is without doubt, man-made. Other than that, the tree shows great potential to be a great tree.

One could chop the trunk two inches above the collected trunk and regrow the trunk in successive cut backs, but that would require at least 15 more years of work on the trunk alone, with much of that time in the ground. A better solution might be to train some foliage across this bit of trunk to disguise this flaw.

Mark and I repotted this tree in approximately 2003 or 2004 and put it in this pot. At that time, it was bare rooted and potted in the oval mica, which was the biggest pot we had available. It would have been better to build a grow box specifically for this tree, but time did not allow.


In the ensuing years, Mark has repotted the tree several times, always putting it back in this pot. Like many enthusiasts, he was a little worried about being too aggressive with root cutting. This tends to produce a tough root mass that is difficult to work with. Fortunately, in every other way, Mark made this three extremely healthy and vigorous, providing a good bit of material for this repot.

Following the guidelines in my article, "Repotting an Established Bonsai," we removed the tree from the pot and set to work on the roots.

This tree has an excellent nebari which we wanted to expose in the repot. The roots were fairly tangled, so we set about sorting them out. The angled tweezers included with most bonsai tool sets work so much better than a chopstick in sorting out roots. They are gentle to the root tips, and there are two ends instead of one, which really helps in moving the roots.

The point here is to encourage every root to move in a direction directly away from the trunk. Crossing roots are either moved or removed. In other words, if you can redirect a root without damaging it, do so. If you cannot, you might want to get rid of it.


This tree is in excellent health with an abundance of fine roots, which provide the tree with its nutritional requirements. The nutrients provided by fertilizers (along with oxygen and water) are absorbed by the root hairs and transported by the xylem to the leaves, where photosynthesis transforms them into carbohydrates. The carbs are then transported to the roots via the phloem.

Mark sorting out his roots.

We work on the base of the tree, seeking to remove all the old soil and direct all roots toward the edge. If roots are coming directly from the base or moving underneath the tree, they must be removed. All roots under the base of the tree will ultimately raise the tree in the pot.

For trees in the ground, large roots perform several functions. The first is anchorage. Large roots keep the tree stable in the ground and enable the root hairs to be secure and do their work. Another is the storage of carbohydrates for less-than-desirable environmental situations. Both of these uses are negligible in the bonsai pot, where we tie the tree into the pot for stability and feed heavily with fertilizer to provide the tree with what it needs. Therefore the most important roots for bonsai are the root hairs.

Here we are using the water jet to remove extra soil and ease the root sorting. It's a process of manual root removal, washing with the hose, and repeating the process. In this case we used the hose twice. With nursery material, more trips to the hose might be necessary.

When a bonsai has a tremendous amount of fine roots, one can be fearless in arranging and trimming them. When a tree has sparse or incomplete roots, one should be careful to keep as many as possible.

Viewing the tree from beneath, one can see the trunk base where the roots have been worked previously. Good work on the base of the tree guarantees future ease of root work as well as a flat root ball.

The final image.

The tree is repotted into a glazed Korean pot. It's not the ultimate pot for this tree. Ultimately, this one might take a glazed or unglazed oval pot. The branching is immature and needs to be rebuilt, but with the root work done today, branch work can wait a year.

Pavement Ends Fellowship

The cars began arriving at 9AM sharp! By noon we had ten thousand trying to get in the doors...well we actually had twelve sharp bonsai enthusiasts! What a great day. It was a bit cool, but everyone had a great time.


Frank Kroeker brought some Japanese black pines he's been growing, and just about everyone brought something to work on.
Each of the trees Frank brought had something to like. They were all about twelve inches tall, and had some nice trunk movement.
We worked throughout the morning, had lunch, and continued until about 3 PM. It was fun and I know I enjoyed every minute. Below is the ending point on Ciro's tree from two weeks ago.


And this is how far he has gotten by the end of this week. A few short hours will finish this initial styling, and then he can begin to work on ramification. His tree is vibrantly healthy, a great job! He still has some branches to pull down, which will fill the hole on the right side.


Dan's beautiful shimpaku juniper came from Brent at Evergreen Gardenworks. Brent does a fantastic job of growing trunks for bonsai. He is quite knowledgeable and always willing to share what he knows. Dan contacted him and told him he was coming to the workshop, so Brent sent something that was perhaps just a little directed at giving me a challenge...Brent, you win!

We spent some time on the tree. I showed Dan how to brush the flaked bark with a brass brush, which will expose the live veins if there is dead wood on the tree. We also worked on cleaning it out from the suckers and weak material to get a better look at the tree. What a magnificent trunk! The only difficult part here is that the large branches are very hard and go out to the edge of the foliage. This one will take some studying.



Frank has a brother, who'da figgered? Todd lives very close, in Topeka, and he brought a few things with him to work on.

Bill also hails from Topeka, and is working on a nice little Scots pine we have been looking at. Today it went from 18 inches tall to about 8. In this photo from left to right: Ciro, Randy, Phil, and Bill.

Ben Oki on Naka-sensei

I found this video of Ben Oki in my files. He speaks about his mentor, Naka-sensei.

Ume

I purchased this tree at the 2007 Bay Island Bonsai exhibit last January. It was potted fairly deeply in a throwaway pot. During the growing season I wired and pruned three times, working to develop ramification.


In October or November, it and the other trees went into the cold frame for its long winter slumber. As can be seen below, it definitely leaned toward the (tentative) back of the tree, although the provisional front was only chosen until I could repot and see the nebari.

The tree had some possiblities for deadwood from old pruning cuts, so I was pretty excited about it.


So here's the tree as it came out of the cold frame this spring. It was a very hard long winter, the worst I can remember in many years. The pot split horizontally all the way around, and the back side fell off. It was time to do some work anyway, so I decided to get started.

My first job was to carve the deadwood some. I wanted to reduce it considerably, but I am not ready to introduce uro or cavities yet. So I just reduced it with the Dremel and then set about with a hammer and set of gouges to try to make it more realistic. Following the carving, I pruned it back a bit, and removed the lowest branch on the right, which made the image too static.

Now is time to repot the tree.The tree was well prepared as bonsai material. The nebari was awesome and the roots spread out evenly in all directions. There were plenty of fine feeder roots and the tree had grown tremendously. I did find that this tree needs a little more summer protection, the leaves suffered from the heat and sun last summer.

The base of the trunk had been reduced before, but it was time to do it again. The resulting root pad is very flat. I was so pleased with the quality of this tree! I don't have a photo of it, but I ended up sealing these cuts with grafting paste, the green sticky stuff.


I potted the tree up in a glazed Korean pot, and the roots just barely fit within it. I tilted the trunk to a more upright position, in that it tended to lean away from the viewer fairly severely. The nebari now shows well, and I think the tree is well on its way to becoming a beautiful bonsai.A few words about styling: very old ume bonsai are often shown with just a few branches. This is a valuable image, but by far not the only one available to ume. This one will be more vigorous with more branches.

First Spring Workshop at Pavement Ends

Wow! It was really good to have some folks over to work on trees. Robert, Ciro (Atlas), and Vic (VicN) are with me doing the "National Enquirer-point-at-what-we-are-shooting-anyway" pose.

This is a pretty nice Japanese black pine owned by Ciro. The plan was to wire the tree and give it a good styling. Ciro came after lunch, so we only got partly finished. I beg indulgence over the wiring of the first branch.
Here's that first branch brought down, and the back branch down and to the left. I suggested to Ciro that we remove the first branch because the tree has wonderful upper movement and I think there is far too much space between this one and the next.


If you notice the blinding whiteness out the windows, you will realize that it snowed pretty good the day before, so we moved inside in the 8-degree (Fahrenheit) temps. Hard to heat the shop.

There's Robert, Tom (ksbonsai), Bill (BillKCMO), and Vic (VicN) looking over some of the stuff we want to work on. We never got to the little junipers.