Recent content by casey

I gotcha. I'm just wondering if that "rule" is based on foundational principles of art and design, or if it's based more on recently prevailing cultural conventions.

This would mostly be true for low fired pottery like earthen ware and terracotta like you mentioned. Many mid-range stoneware and higher fired ceramic bodies like porcelain absorb negligeable amounts of water. Also, because the pots are not traditionally glazed inside, the low fired clays like...

I sometimes wonder if this aesthetic guideline has been around for hundreds of years or if it's one of those relatively late fads that didn't come about until the early/middle part of the 20th century.

I watched a Kaizen video in which Graham Potter suggests only removing the third year needles on Scotts pine. The work in the video was done in late summer. Potter goes on to say that some practitioners remove second-year needles but that it weakens and endangers the life of the tree. I guess...

Does anybody have advice on digging a large tree like this? I suspect that once I get down in the earth, I'll find a single large tap root and few feeder roots anywhere. I'm in a weird location and don't have access to pumice or even bonsai soil. I do have access to a huge pile of rotten leaf...

Collected Canadensis Because of their availability to me, I too have become curious about the viability of Eastern Hemlock for bonsai. I collect them from shady damp cliffs on a farm in central West Virginia. Many of them grow on a very shallow bed of leaf mold. Most with...

In my opinion, you should sort out the root situation first. Aside from losing some taper differential (assuming tip top leader), leaving a leader sacrifice for a bit too long has very little downside. The beauty of leader sacrifices is that they don’t usually create bulges and inverse taper...