September is our annual club auction; this is one of our most productive meetings in many ways: for newer members it is one of the best chances to pick up material to work on for the coming year at relatively cheap prices. For veteran members it is a chance to clean out those yards that are getting full of material that you aren?t working on. Take a look around and think about which trees you simply glance by every time you water. Those trees are the ones that you will probably never get to?did you wire that tree? Did you buy a pot for it that will look good? I didn?t think so; so bring it into the auction and let someone else have a go at working on it. Change is good. Also bring any unwanted pots, tools, wire, soil or other bonsai items. Don?t forget to bring a friend to the auction too, all are welcome; and come a little early, we will be having some extra food and drinks for everyone to get the evening rolling.

I snuck away for a couple days at the beginning of August to go hiking. I always find hiking trips to be enlightening; there is so much bonsai inspiration out there just waiting to be discovered. The textures of the deadwood, the shapes of the trees, and the places they grow are all interesting and instructive. It doesn?t even have to be the high mountains. You can find inspiration along the ocean or even in your neighborhood.

I like to take some time to stop and sketch when I am hiking?but often I get too impatient to complete an entire sketch, so I take a photo or two from the angle that I like and then sketch from the photo when I get home. Sketching, I learned on the advice of John Thompson, makes you pay more attention to the details in a tree. You can take a photo and not really have to examine the tree, but to sketch you have to understand the way that the tree looks. Just to copy the way that the tree looks for a sketch you have to examine every detail. I find that if I try to draw a tree from memory, and then go back and look at it, that my memory has almost invariably deceived me.

I did quite a bit of work this past month, attending many bonsai activities in addition to working on my own collection. Thanks to all the members who showed up for our work party at Dorothy Day Community Center. I had a great time styling little junipers and cleaning up some of the trees in the garden. The club has scheduled another event at Dorothy Day for the fall it will be Sunday November 13th at 11am; if you haven?t made it down yet, consider coming in the fall for some food and bonsai work. I made it up to the Marin auction where I picked up a bunjin juniper for cheap?then I visited the Blue Oak Nursery in Modesto during a Modesto bonsai club meeting where Katsumi Kinoshita, sensei for the Monterey bonsai club was doing a demonstration. During our second Saturday workshop, John Boyce persuaded me to finish wiring my trees instead of what I typically do which is wire half of them. I spent about ten hours total wiring my large oak tree. The branches were all bunched together and straight before wiring?now they are more evenly spaced out and have that flowing rhythm and curviness of a great oak tree forming a large round canopy?so get out into you yard to wire up those trees and into the larger world to discover and explore both bonsai and nature.

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