Articles And Stories: From the President: Posts

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by Eric SchraderFrom The President
Mar 29th: April '05 A warm welcome to all of those members who joined our club after seeing the show at the Cow Palace. I saw the show for the first time about three years ago and decided to join. Bonsai is a wonderful way to connect with the world around you, be it people or nature. It will make you pay attention to the weather like never before, appreciate the angle of the sun and its variation through the year, and learn about all those fascinating full sized trees...  read more »
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by Eric SchraderFrom The President
Mar 4th: February was a busy time for me. I started the month off by working on my little pine. I've had it for a couple years now and it is really coming along. I repotted it, tilting the angle a bit further to the right; then I removed the top in favor of a branch that I bent up and around to become the new apex which increased the taper and the movement of the trunk. In the process I was hoping to shorten the tree a little; It's right on the edge of what people consider shohin...  read more »
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by Eric SchraderFrom the President
Jan 29th: I took the beginner's workshop that John Edwards taught this past summer. From it I refreshed my knowledge of the basic styles and techniques in bonsai and took away a one gallon Shimpaku Juniper....(I wish someone would settle the whole shimpaku as a variety versus shimpaku as all juniper argument for good.) I hadn't done anything to it since the workshop; I was thinking that I would let a few of the larger low branches grow for another year to fatten up the trunk before I really did any styling...  read more »
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by Eric SchraderFrom The President
Nov 28th: Many thanks to Marco Invernizzi for his assistance and advice in our November special workshop. My pine tree went from having just a mass of disheveled needles and branches on top to looking like a nice tree in training. Marco helped me select a front, modify the planned planting angle, clean up and jin three branches, raffia a large branch and wire all the major branches. I continued wiring the next morning on my own to move some of the smaller branches into place...  read more »
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by Eric SchraderFrom the President
Oct 22nd: I had a great time at the Valerie Monroe wiring workshop. This past February on the advice of John Edwards, who happened to be standing near me while I looked around, I bought a tall juniper at the Mammoth Fundraiser at the Collection North. It looked like a three foot tall drunken Christmas tree at the time. At the spring show I used it as a demonstration tree, it took me a couple hours, but the initial styling went well in my opinion...  read more »
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by Eric SchraderFrom The President
Oct 1st: Well, Fall is officially here and I can no longer pretend that the hot weather is still part of summer. This growing season has seen a lot of change in my yard. I relandscaped the yard and built new benches to support the trees; but more than that I saw a large number of my trees pass on. I find it very frustrating when a tree dies. My greatest loss was of my cascade pine. I had bought it a couple years ago and finally repotted it this spring...  read more »
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by Eric SchraderFrom The President
Aug 25th: I am feeling oddly disconnected from bonsai at the moment. August is always a hard month for me; I spend four weeks away from home. I spent two weeks in Humboldt county recently and on the drive up highway 101 I was surprised to see that some of the trees were showing fall foliage and dropping leaves. When I came home a few days ago I looked around at my bonsai only to find that there was an odd assortment of behavior happening there too...  read more »
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by Eric SchraderFrom the President
Jul 24th: From The President Well, as some of you know, I have the month of July off from work. This year I spent a great deal of the month landscaping my back yard. I had to relocate most of my trees to my front porch for a couple weeks while I was jackhammering cement out and building a rock wall and new stands for the trees. I have to thank Tim Kong and Jennie Low for the opportunity to get cheap landscaping plants...  read more »
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by Eric SchraderFrom The President
Jul 1st: Bonsai means different things to different people: that I learned while attending the basics class given by John Edwards a couple weeks ago. With so many people who are new to the art I found a great variety of opinions on what bonsai can be all about. Sometimes people who know the least are the ones that we can learn the most from. Basics class participants took a bushy Juniper and learned by doing an initial styling...  read more »
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by Eric SchraderFrom The President
May 29th: It's been a collection North sorta month for me and many members of the club. I wasn't able to make it to the weeding party, but I heard that everyone had a great time and that the Merritt College pruners and the docents at the garden that day really liked the pizza. Tim Kong gave me a hard time for not coming out...but some people have to work...I was over there a couple weeks ago on a Monday to help Bob Gould and John Castle with the construction of a new shed in the reserve area behind the docent house...  read more »
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