music~maker
Shohin
Interesting thread. Thanks for posting that video, Adair! I really enjoy watching someone as masterful as Bjorn do his thing.
Here’s my 2 cents on a few of the comments that jumped out at me.
abqjoe - It doesn’t have to be from seed to start at an early stage. Find some seedlings, get some nursery stock, whatever. Even if you mostly want finished trees, there is a lot you can learn from taking some early stage trees as far as you can. I have trees at a wide variety of stages, everything from saplings all the way up to refined trees, and I learn something from all of them. Growing trunks has taught me a lot about growing branches, and growing branches has taught me a lot about growing trunks.
MichaelS - Here’s something to consider. When you thin and adjust, you have lots of little choices to make. It’s not like someone hands you the instructions and says “here, create this” as if it were a set of legos. I would argue strongly that the collection of choices you make while thinning and adjusting IS the art. Adam Lavigne recently finished a blog entry with this quote: “Horticulture is science. The practice of horticulture is an art.” Couldn’t agree more.
All of the tools we have in our toolbox - wiring, bending, pruning, etc. are just that - tools. Every technique you apply leaves its mark on the tree, whether a small mark or a big mark. Collectively, those marks add up and become your artistic impression on that tree. If you could somehow carbon-copy the tree that Bjorn started with and create a dozen copies, and give each one to a prominent bonsai master, you would get a dozen different trees at the end, even if they were technically applying the same techniques. A tree like this has hundreds of little choices that get made during the styling, and those little choices are reflected in the character of the final tree. Not sure how that is anything BUT art, honestly.
I have a few trees now that take me a solid day of work to wire properly. There’s lots of technical things I do when I work on them, but I’m still making tons of little choices that impact how the tree will develop for the entire rest of the season, and in many cases, the entire rest of its life. I know for sure that if I handed the same tree over to somebody else that they’d do something else. There are just so many ways to skin a cat, and lots of them yield decent results. The way I see it, every pieces of wire applied and every cut you make is an artistic choice. The comment someone made about this video being 95% technique and 5% art is, well, really funny to me.
I could make a strong case that even the TIMING of when you do certain techniques is part of the art. For example, I have a japanese maple I’m working on right now that I’ve been waiting to prune because I wanted this season’s growth to leave it’s mark on the trunk first. I just checked it yesterday afternoon, and it’s just about there. I could have easily pruned it 3-4 weeks ago, and many people would have. But then it wouldn’t have looked the same as it does now. That was a conscious decision on my part, as will be the conscious decision to shorten the strongest growing branches by a few nodes to apply the brakes and maintain my trunk proportions. Sometimes I'll prune a few branches and leave others to run for similar reasons. These are all artistic choices.
Could not agree more, rockm. When we buy a trunk, we’re just buying a canvas that’s further along than one we either could have or wanted to create ourself. It’s what you do with it after you acquire it that matters. I grow a lot of my stuff from early stages, but when I buy things at more mature stages, it's so I can have the experience of working later stage material than what I currently have. I don't show my trees either, so I also find the idea of buying trees to collect accolades on somebody else's work pretty laughable. I just see interesting trunks that I can develop further.
If I work that material "my way" for five years vs. letting someone else work on it, at the end of five years it will unquestionably have my signature on it. Five year's worth of pruning and wiring decisions makes it unmistakably my tree. And when someone eventually takes over my trees, they'll receive a bunch of developed canvases to paint on and add their own layer of style to. It's just the nature of the game.
Here’s my 2 cents on a few of the comments that jumped out at me.
abqjoe - It doesn’t have to be from seed to start at an early stage. Find some seedlings, get some nursery stock, whatever. Even if you mostly want finished trees, there is a lot you can learn from taking some early stage trees as far as you can. I have trees at a wide variety of stages, everything from saplings all the way up to refined trees, and I learn something from all of them. Growing trunks has taught me a lot about growing branches, and growing branches has taught me a lot about growing trunks.
MichaelS - Here’s something to consider. When you thin and adjust, you have lots of little choices to make. It’s not like someone hands you the instructions and says “here, create this” as if it were a set of legos. I would argue strongly that the collection of choices you make while thinning and adjusting IS the art. Adam Lavigne recently finished a blog entry with this quote: “Horticulture is science. The practice of horticulture is an art.” Couldn’t agree more.
All of the tools we have in our toolbox - wiring, bending, pruning, etc. are just that - tools. Every technique you apply leaves its mark on the tree, whether a small mark or a big mark. Collectively, those marks add up and become your artistic impression on that tree. If you could somehow carbon-copy the tree that Bjorn started with and create a dozen copies, and give each one to a prominent bonsai master, you would get a dozen different trees at the end, even if they were technically applying the same techniques. A tree like this has hundreds of little choices that get made during the styling, and those little choices are reflected in the character of the final tree. Not sure how that is anything BUT art, honestly.
I have a few trees now that take me a solid day of work to wire properly. There’s lots of technical things I do when I work on them, but I’m still making tons of little choices that impact how the tree will develop for the entire rest of the season, and in many cases, the entire rest of its life. I know for sure that if I handed the same tree over to somebody else that they’d do something else. There are just so many ways to skin a cat, and lots of them yield decent results. The way I see it, every pieces of wire applied and every cut you make is an artistic choice. The comment someone made about this video being 95% technique and 5% art is, well, really funny to me.
I could make a strong case that even the TIMING of when you do certain techniques is part of the art. For example, I have a japanese maple I’m working on right now that I’ve been waiting to prune because I wanted this season’s growth to leave it’s mark on the trunk first. I just checked it yesterday afternoon, and it’s just about there. I could have easily pruned it 3-4 weeks ago, and many people would have. But then it wouldn’t have looked the same as it does now. That was a conscious decision on my part, as will be the conscious decision to shorten the strongest growing branches by a few nodes to apply the brakes and maintain my trunk proportions. Sometimes I'll prune a few branches and leave others to run for similar reasons. These are all artistic choices.
Could not agree more, rockm. When we buy a trunk, we’re just buying a canvas that’s further along than one we either could have or wanted to create ourself. It’s what you do with it after you acquire it that matters. I grow a lot of my stuff from early stages, but when I buy things at more mature stages, it's so I can have the experience of working later stage material than what I currently have. I don't show my trees either, so I also find the idea of buying trees to collect accolades on somebody else's work pretty laughable. I just see interesting trunks that I can develop further.
If I work that material "my way" for five years vs. letting someone else work on it, at the end of five years it will unquestionably have my signature on it. Five year's worth of pruning and wiring decisions makes it unmistakably my tree. And when someone eventually takes over my trees, they'll receive a bunch of developed canvases to paint on and add their own layer of style to. It's just the nature of the game.
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