This year I had two trees in the Bay Island Bonsai exhibit and in each case a lot of work and time went into getting the trees to show quality. But the trees are only one part of the story.

Four years ago, only about a month after I had become president of the Bonsai Society of San Francisco, club members went on a collecting trip to Tiburon where an old Japanese Garden was being removed to make way for a large house and swimming pool. The weather that day was as bad as it could have been for being outside, windy and solid downpours of rain. We arrived early and went to work: I spent about three hours kneeling in liquid mud, digging around the bases of four different trees and removing them from the ground. I dug two mugo pines and two procumbens junipers. Ultimately, both mugos and one of the junipers died, leaving me with one very large procumbens juniper.

I cut the tree back when I got it home, removing a lot of the longer branches, then potted it up and watered and fertilized it for two years. The tree slowly gained more and more strength during the two years, but it was still sparse; I repotted it into a bonsai pot and allowed it to grow out for another year. Then it was finally ready to do some styling work. I started by working on the deadwood. There were three large stumps that needed to be reduced. The foliage was wired and thinned out; weak and dead branches were removed and foliage was removed to allow a view of the branch structure but at the same time maintain the outline of the branch. With another round of foliage thinning this past fall and a little more wiring the tree was looking good enough for show. In January I repotted it into a smaller container that was a good match for the style of the tree.

Knowing that I would be showing the tree I began to think about what I would need to go with it in the exhibit. I had made a few stands in the winter of 2006-’7, but they were mostly made after the style of American furniture. I started investigating the design and construction of Chinese furniture to see if it would be possible for me to construct a stand. I started first by making a frame and panel in the way that I found them constructed on antiques. The mitered corners are held together by a mostly-hidden mortise and tenon system. Once that was complete I started constructing a base for the frame and panel. The base contained legs and rails, joined together with 3-way miter joints. The exterior, although seemingly a simple meeting of three pieces of wood actually belies the complex joinery of the wood under the facade. It was a challenge to build the stand, from the joinery to cutting the curves and hand carving the small rounded beads along the bottom of the rails and the rosette pattern on the feet.

The oak tree that was in the show also needed a stand. The second stand I decided would be based on a simpler design, one where the rails of the table are also the frame for the panel. This meant that there would only be nine pieces in the entire construction, the panel, four pieces for the frame and four legs. Although it sounds simple, cutting the joinery took about eight hours, and another four to fine tune the fit. Then it took many more hours to shape the legs, add the bead and do the carving that gives the feet their distinctive shape. The swirly pattern on the face of the leg was the last thing, I enlarged the photo that I was working on from a Kokofu album so that I could trace it onto the wood. A couple hours later I had a decent looking pattern on the legs. Finishing the stand entailed a lot of time cleaning off machine marks and smoothing the wood, such that the application of a walnut stain and Shellac was quite fast in comparison.

The Oak itself I bought last year from an older woman who had had it for many years. The tree was originally collected by Tosh Subamaru, who was one of the first bonsai teachers in the Bay Area. Last summer I spent more than 15 hours wiring and thinning the tree which had been overly thick with branches, all clumped up at the top. The tree, even though it has been in a pot for over thirty years, had very few roots when I repotted it earlier this January. There was a lot of mud; I suspect this is why the tree lost a lower limb two years before I acquired it. I displayed the tree with a planting of succulents and fern, both native to Coastal California and often found growing under Coast Live Oaks. I put together the planting on a piece of Granite that I collected from the Sierra after I found the plants on a collecting trip in Marin County. The display, although simple, seems to represent well the coastal hills of California.

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