The Bonsai Blog of Peter Chan

I must admit I am not a blogger. Perhaps I am lazy or just not used to doing it.

Well - at long last here is a short blog of what I have been busy doing these past two weeks.

Spring is just round the corner despite the cold nights we are having. For the past ten days we have had bright sun shine during the day, when the temperature goes up to 9 or 10C, but at night it plummets to minus 3C. But despite this fluctuation in temperatures, my Trident maples in the cool greenhouse (which goes down to Zero at night), have started to show signs of new growth. The buds are swelling fast.

I have been developing some large 10-15 inch diameter trunk Trident maples which we imported from Japan in 1990. They came in as severely chopped or truncated stumps and I have spent the past 17 years developing the leader and branches. You may have seen some of them in my recent books.

These pictures taken at our nursery last week, show us repotting the monsters. They should give you some idea of what they are like after seventeen years of development.

They have nice branches and excellent taper, but require at least two strong guys to lift.

We use large Huyuga soil 15-17mm size as a drainage layer, and then put a layer of 10mm Akadama on top of that. The main potting soil is the Double Line Akadama mixd with some sharp sand 3-5mm grain size. This seems to work best for us in our UK climate.

Will keep you posted as the Tridents begin to leaf.

They say that in England we have weather rather than climate. The weather changes from day to day - one day it could be pouring with rain and the next it could be bright blue skies.

It is December now - autumn is over and the trees are going dormant. Most of our bonsai are still out on the benches, but this is the time when we start working on the real trees that are growing in our fields.

I have always loved deciduous trees. The Japanese maples are my favourite, but the native European deciduous species such as the Beech, Hornbeam, Hawthorn and Field Maple are also wonderful. We make a lot of bonsai from these species. The only trouble with the decidous species is that they are seldom - if ever used for demonstrtions at Conventions and talks because you cannot easily transform one in the same way that you would do a Pine or Juniper. There isn’t the instant or Wow effect for an one hour demo.

Deciduous subjects take time. It requires time to develop a thick trunk, time to create and develop a taper and even more time to develop ramification.

What I will show you here is how we go about creating our Hornbeam bonsai.

These Hornbeams were planted here in 1995 as two year old seedlings. In just twelve years they have grown 15-20ft tall, despite repeated chopping of the leaders every other year. Most of these trees have 4-8″ diameter trunks.

Here we are just cutting them down to size. 90% of the tree is discarded leaving just the stump to regrow. In another month we will be digging them up with a bulldozer/excavator so that we can reduce the rootball to a manageable size. They are replanted in the ground to grow for another year. After that, they are dug up again and potted up into large containers.

Not all the trees grow uniformly. In this batch of trees there are some with 8″ in diameter trunks, others are barely 2″ in dia - and they are all the same age! Hornbeams have beautiful fluted trunks. Taper is easy to develop. In just three or four years we can produce a complete bonsai from these stumps.

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AIR-LAYERING HORNBEAMS

In May this year, I came across a Hornbeam that had been dug up two years ago. It had developed good ramification and a good taper, but I felt it was much too tall. So I decided to air-layer it in order to make a shorter bonsai.

So we air-layered the top as shown here.

Nice taper and branches developed in just two years from a bare stump.

Hornbeams air-layer very easily. This one rooted in just two months and look at the size of the trunk - over 5″ in diameter.

It was immediately potted up and we now have a lovely bonsai with good nebari, nice taper and excellent ramification.

The Bonsai Garden at Wisley

Many of you will be wondering why I have been so quiet since April of this year. Well we all lead busy lives. In my case, I was in Cyprus teaching bonsai during early April; I then visited Japan at the end of May to source good bonsai material for my nursery. In June I was in Malta teaching bonsai and in between all this, we have bee rebuilding the Bonsai Garden at the Royal Horticultural Society’s centre at Wisley in Surrey.

In the UK, there are not many large public bonsai collections that people can view like in the US. In 1998 my wife and I decided to gift  a major collection of  bonsai to the Royal  Horticultural Society to be permanently displayed on their premises at Wisley.

For those who are not familiar with the gardening scene in the UK, The Royal Horticultural Society is the largest and most prestigious gardening organisation in the country. The Queen is the Society’s Patron. Only recently she visited the garden to inaugurate the new £8million greenhouse. It regularly attracts three quarter million visitors a year and with the new greenhouse, the visitor numbers are expected to top a million.

At the RHS’s centre in Wisley, we were allocated one of their model display gardens to convert into a bonsai display area. We did this by making a few changes to the existing site. One of the first things we did was to introduce a few raked gravel areas to create a  Zen garden effect - very similar to what one would see in Kyoto temple gardens. We added three large Japanese garden trees and with just some artistic planting of shrubs and trees, we had the makings of a very suitable bonsai display area.

The picture above and the ones below, show what the site looked like for the past nine years. It is one of the very popular attractions for the many visitors who flock to the Wisley throughout the year.

The rebuild 

About two years ago, we decided that although the bonsai collection attracted a steady stream of interested and appreciative visitors, the garden would benefit from not just a facelift but a complete redesign and rebuild.The RHS agreed to let us do this and in February of this year the site was demolished and we rebuilt it again from scratch. However in doing so, I took the opportunity of involving the students who study at the college which is attached to RHS Wisley, in an interactive learning experience. I conducted a number of seminars on Japanese garden design and construction for the students, and throughout the rebuilding process, they   were involved in the project from design to final planting. Here are some pictures of the rebuild

In just two months we managed to rebuild the garden completely. The granite paths were laid by professional masons but the planting was done by our nursery staff and the Wisley students. These pictures show what the new garden looks like

New Bonsai Garden 

Inauguration by Japanese Ambassador 

The bonsai garden was opened to the public on 1st May and on 16th July the Japanese Ambassador to the UK formally inaugurated it in the presence of the Royal Horticultural Society President - Mr Peter Buckley.

Here are some pictures of that very happy occasion.

The bonsai collection consists of forty trees which are not all shown at the same time. Only those which are in good condition are put on display. As English people love a colourful display, I have used a lot of maples and deciduous bonsai together with the different hues of green from the Yews, Pines and Junipers to make the bonsai garden attractive. There is a large 200 year old Japanese Yew whis is on view. It has splendid jins and sharis on an almost hollow trunk.

In gifting this bonsai collection and garden to RHS Wisley, Dawn and I hope that it will make bonsai more widely known and help to change the negative image which bonsai usually gets in this country. After all these years many people still think that bonsai is cruel to trees. (By the way - I notice that in India and Bangladesh recently, bonsai is portrayed in a very negative sense. In professional circles, bonsai is associated with stunted development. So if someone is a non- achiever, he or she is referred to as a ‘bonsai person’ or ‘bonsai manager’ and so on. Highly derogatory if I may say so.)

If ever you have the chance to visit England we hope you will find time to see the bonsai collection at the famous gardens at Wisley. People in England love gardening and most people who visit Wisley love the bonsai display too.

In case you were wondering where these stunning pictures were taken - I will put you out of your misery. This was in Cyprus.

There are a few bonsai enthusiasts there but no organised club. I have been there twice to teach. It is a lovely place.

While I was away in India a fortnight ago, our nursery experienced heavy snowfall despite January 2007 being the mildest for over ninety years. The past winter so far, in England, has been extremely mild. Does this say something about global warming or is it just a freak occurrence? Our bonsai does not seem to suffer. Average temperatures in southern England are around 6C during the day and just above freezing at night.

Here is a shot of what Herons Bonsai - our nursery - looked like on 24 January this year.

The snow lasted just a day!

The small leaf Crassula which is grown extensively in India is excellent material for bonsai.

It has a compact habit, develops a thick trunk and takes to wiring very well.

Being a succulent, it does not require a lot of water and propagates ever so easily.

Lovely looking specimens can be created in a relatively short time (two to three years) from nursery material.

I have often come across massive plants over 4ft tall and with trunks as much as 6 or 7 inches in diameter. Here is one such specimen.