Bonsai Foundations program

The 2017 Bonsai Foundations program for 2017 finished last weekend. I had the opportunity to participate in this round and loved it. I'd previously read the book - https://www.facebook.com/bonsaifoundations/ which is based on the course notes from the program. A great program which does a lot to help understand the the "whys" of a lot of what we do and give some compelling demonstrations ways of doing Bonsai in a manner more likely to give results we are happy with in the long run.

We are hoping that the program will be run again next year and I very much recomment both the book and the program.

We finished up with an outdoor re-potting session with Stephen demonstrating on some of his own trees and with some participants trees.

Some pictures from the July meeting

The July meeting involved a talk by Stephen on making our Bonsai look like trees and a demonstration of some remedial work on a tree that had been styled to the Western Universal Style (a small number of branches with flat pads of secondary and tertiary branching. Rhett did part of the critique while Stephens worked at wiring for the demo.

The demo tree after some initial work to change it's styling. No new branches at this point but the existing branches occupy a greater spread of vertical space.

This tree was the subject of a demo by Stephen. Initial work was done to rework the flat pads so that the branches had some depth to them and pruning to encourage further budding.

A presentation by Albert Garcia on natives as bonsai

I've created an album of photo's from the May 2017 meeting of the Club at https://www.facebook.com/1276498585694561/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1572526809425069

A great afternoon with an interesting and informative presentation and demo by Albert and a great range of trees on the display table.

Bonsai potting media mix

I was asked today about the location of the write up of the bonsai potting media that many of us use.
The link to it is on the Resources page and for simple access here