I had the pleasure of making it to the Monterey Bonsai Club’s annual show this year and I was not disappointed with the quality of the trees. A couple years ago I got a tour of Mr. Katsumi Kinoshita’s yard in Pacific Grove and saw many of his wonderful and old trees; but I had never gotten a chance to see them in a show setting until now.

Congratulations to the Monterey club for putting on a great show and for some great hospitality.

Mr. Kinoshita is widely known for his use of the native species of Monterey in his efforts to make bonsai. He has developed, over more than thirty years, techniques for maintaining and styling the Monterey Pine, Monterey Cypress and the Coast Live oak. Katsumi Kinoshita is a Japanese-born resident of Monterey, CA and has been living in there since 1955. He started collecting Monterey pine from their native habitat a few years after arriving and thus has some of the oldest ones that are bonsai.

I recently ran across two articles when I was looking through an old box of “Golden Statements” magazines which describe some of the techniques that Mr. Kinoshita uses with his Monterey Pine bonsai. Monterey Pine is similar to Japanese Black pine in that the needles are naturally longer when the tree is not trained. Both articles cover the care of Monterey pine but differ slightly in the details about when to perform candle cutting.

The critical instruction in the first article is this: “The trick is to cut back the candles that develop each spring to five or six needles in length in late June or during July and to remove back to its base any candle that appears to be especially vigorous. Under this regimen, the needles will be reduced to the desired size in only a few years. Kinoshita cautions that the procedure should be used sparingly or omitted altogether in years when the trees are repotted.”

Quoting the other article: “The Monterey Pine responds well to heavy pruning by sending out lots of new foliage. Mr. Kinoshita lets the spring growth elongate, but he cuts it off at the end of June. Subsequently, he allows two buds to develop at the tip of each branch. In the fall he removes the old needles.”

Mr. Kinoshita’s trees were the highlight of the show for me. In particular the three Monterey Pine, and one Coast Live Oak. Age is the hardest thing in bonsai to capture, it takes many years for the tree to show its age naturally, and it takes a careful hand to bring out the qualities in a tree that make it look older. Each of the Pines had very old looking bark, much different from the bark seen on Monterey Pines growing around the city and nearby. The needles were short, due to his training techniques, and the branches contained only enough foliage to make them appear complete. Each small branch was visible making the entire structure of the tree apparent. This is in contrast to the full lush style that trees in traditional Japanese shows exhibit, obscuring the finer structural elements in favor of a full crown of foliage.

Walter Pall wrote an article about Mr. Kinoshita’s Oak tree, which was exhibited at the GSBF Convention in 2003 (scroll down if you click the link), talking about how the viewer is engaged when looking at a tree. Mr Kinoshita’s oak is certainly unique and ugly, but beautiful at the same time.

There are some interesting differences between the trees that I saw in this show and trees of the same species that I see elsewhere. I have a Monterey pine in my own collection. It is not as old as some in the Monterey show, and it does have good bark, but the bark is more plated and less flaky. In the same vein, The bark of Coast Live Oaks growing in the Monterey area have a lighter colored and smoother bark than the same trees growing farther north here in the Bay Area.

Seeing a show like this inspires me to go out and collect trees from the local hills and then work on them for 30 years. I encourage you all to do the same. Have a vision and spend the time and effort to accomplish it.

No Tags