Ang3flr3 and Victrinia, I did not mean anything by bolding your names I just wanted to be sure you seen I apologized to you both. You gals have sure had much more experience studying under various people. My only experience with Bonsai study was when I started.
My dad was a contractor subbing painting structural steel used in the space program in Fl. We were staying in an old motel in Cocoa Beach Fl., looked like an old Holiday Inn which they now rented by weekly or monthly rates which was right on the beach. There was an old asian man living there who also worked with the space program, he had rented the room to the left of the staircase and had about 25 or so Bonsai of various sizes sitting where the sun would hit them on a bench he had built. I was warned by the owner not to cross the little gate he had made closing his upstairs garden off from the rest of the motel guests.
The stairs went up halfway away from the building then turned left and went up the other halfway to the floor we lived on, my family at the other end from his garden. I would take my basketball and throw it up the top and it would bounce back down the stairs and usually make the bounce off the wall and come down all the way. One afternoon it bounced wrong and went over his fence and bounced down to the end and knocked over an ancient azalea in bloom, this tree was beautiful, trunk bigger than my arm and loaded with small pink flowers and was at the very end of his space.
I jumped over his fence to get my ball and seen the tree was knocked over and the soil spilled everywhere and the pot was broke! He had an old bucket sitting under the air conditioner he used to catch water he used on his trees so I took the plant and stuck the roots in the water thinking it might keep it from drying out as my grannie would do this with her Iris in ohio when moving bulbs.
He came home each night about 6:00 pm , this man looked like a real ass, always a frown on his face. I waited for him and when he stepped out of his car I introduced myself and told him what I done, at first I thought he was going to smack me and he sprinted up to check out the tree. He was actually thrilled I put it in the water and he went to work removing the flowers and the one branch that had broken. I told him I would help but he said shoo and waived me away. I watched him look at the pot and it seemed as if he was going to cry. The next morning after being smacked by both mom and dad and punished for life from my basketball and the beach I was awoken at 4:30 to apologize and offer to pay for his pot.
The old man, he may have been 40, but to a 10 year old he looked ancient, he told me that pot was bought by him as a child for his grandpa and was not replaceable. I felt like shit, that evening I offered to help him with finding a new pot and handed him my $24.00 dollars I had made mowing lawns. He refused the money and said I could help him clean up his work area, so for the next few days he would remove a few pots and I would clean the wood and paint it with a stinking brown stuff that I still do not what it was, seemed like a smelly stain though.
He turned out to be a great guy, he just never really smiled, a few weeks went by and he brought the once beautiful azalea out and it was a skeleton, tiny little leaves growing where beautiful flowers once flourished ! I again apologized and he said, I thought just to ease my guilt, that I actually saved the tree by placing it out of the sun and in the water. I told him of my granny and her prize winning Iris and my plants I grew back home. He then allowed me to help him with little things with his Bonsai, telling me why he done it and working on a small little azalea, which was actually the branch that broke off the tree I knocked over.
One day I was looking at the azalea that was getting more filled out with green growth and he pointed out a scar on the trunk and said " you know what happened there " and then explained that a very " naughty little boy " had knocked this plant over and broke the branch off his granfathers azalea! he then told me his father was that boy and that tree had been in his family for many years and I was the second " scoundrel " that had knocked it over and broke a branch and that now I would be part of that tree, and his family's history, that was when I noticed that he smiled in his eyes.
Over the next few months I watched the little branch grow and he showed my how to wire some branches on an old juniper, he showed my how to cut a piece of dried bamboo in half and smash it and spread it out to weave some of the fibers through it and make a screen to keep new soil from running out the bottom of the pot. I had a lot of fun talking to Mr. S, thats what he told me to call him as I could not pronounce his name. Then we had to move on to Texas and I had to say goodbye. He hugged me and said I was a great help and a good boy. Then he gave me the azalea we worked on. I had that plant until I got married and it disappeared as so many others I have had over the years have done. I have never tried another azalea, it just would not seem right as my memories of that plant are actually of that great old guy who never smiled, except for his eyes.
ed
