Little visitor

Last night when I came home, my wife showed me a little visitor on my bonsai spruce forest. This bee was flying around for a long time on our balcony, seemingly looking for something. Then after careful consideration, it landed on this little spruce, attached itself with its "mouth" and begun cleaning itself with all six feet. When this was done, it went to sleep. I took a few photos of the bee. By the morning, it was gone.

Plum in flowers - again

My plum is in flowers again - actually the flowers have already begun to wither, that's why I didn't bring it to our show. The blossoms would fall even faster indoors in the warm. I whish it flowered just a few days later.

Not too much has changed since last year; but two small branches have died and are now turned into jins. Still a beautiful tree for me.

European hornbeam and hawthorn - two of the trees I'm exhibiting

Currently I'm exibiting four trees in our spring show - the small coreana from the last post, the big maple (Acer ginnala) and these two trees.

The small european hornbeam has now fully leafed out.


A five-trunk hawthorn - it's pretty difficult to photograph this tree because it looks cluttered on the picture even though in reality it's graceful and airy. I think of this tree as a clump of trees leaning over water, hence the little pot holding water and a white blossom it it.
The tree would look better in front of a white background but I didn't have a white background wide enough - this is a rather large group.


I have collected this tree in 2005 and originally intended to style it as a windswept. This side on the picture actually became the back side when I realized what a great feeling it has when you imagine yourself under its outstreched branches on a river bank.

Small corean hornbeam - update

An update of my little coreana from two days ago. Currently it is exhibited on our spring exhibition in the University of Horticulture.

Small corean hornbeam

This is a small corean hornbeam that I have bought last year. I pruned, wired and repotted it two weeks ago.
The first picture is as it looks now, the second one was taken two weeks ago during pruning and wiring.

Small hornbeam waking up

This is how my little hornbeam looks like tonight. I have repotted it this year.
I like the light, airy, spring feeling of this picture :)


Originally I have bought the tree in early 2006 when it had a fairly dense branch structure but branches were going in all directions so I have pruned away most of them.


This last picture is from spring 2007.

Dynax 7d

Not a bonsai but still not far. I loved the rhythm.
I have bought a camera last weekend and shot about 1000 photos, this is one of them.

A drawing by Rudi Julianto

Rudi Julianto from the Internet Bonsai Club was so kind as to share his vision of my hawthorn with this great drawing. Thanks a lot, Rudi, this sketch has made me even more enthusiastic about this tree!
I think I can get here in two years, at least I will try!

Big maple updated

The leaves are beautiful on this maple now -
little Anjou lilies unfolding.



With Homo sapiens for scale.

Hawthorns updated

Leaves are coming out on my hawthorns - here is an update of the one I have repotted two weeks ago.


The literati hawthorn looks like this now.

Three years of a field maple

I have acquired this collected field maple (Acer campestre) four years ago from György Rácz. Three years ago, in April 2005 it looked like this:


This week I have pruned and wired it. Btw. I had to realize again that its not a good idea to prune a field maple in early spring as it bleeds heavily. The photograph shows it rotated and with a new pot set in front of the tree, which I think would fit well with it (though maybe it's a bit big).

Spring is here

The leaves are coming on my Acer ginnala.

Some trees repotted

These are some of the trees that I have repotted this spring.

First, a literati hawthorn that's gonna look really great in about two years if I manage to create some branch structure on top.
I have collected it in 2006 but the first year it did nothing, not a single leaf has appeared. Apparently it didn't really like being moved but it was not obviously dead so I kept watering it (pretty unfrequently as it didn't use too much water). Then in spring 2007 it has sprouted, and I have wired it lighly. This year I have potted it up in an upright position.
The first picture is from March 2008, the second from March 2007.

Second, a hawthorn that I have bought in 2006.
The first picture shows how it looked like when I have bought it in 2006, and a video from all sides.



The second picture is still from 2006, after the first styling.


The third picture shows how it looks like today, after having repotted it last weekend. This is going to be one amazing tree! Now the roots sticking up high above soil level look stupid but I didn't dare to remove those, it will be done with time. It has a very good nebari under the current soil level, so once I manage to get rid of these roots up high, it will really be a killer one!


This is my Picea orientalis, which was a regular christmas tree. I have already posted its progression on this blog here.
This picture shows it after repotting. Of course I wanted to pot it up fully upright but the root structure didn't allow it, in fact I have removed a lot of roots even to be able to pot it up like this. I can only hope it will thrive.
The tree looked better last year after it was wired (see the above link) but the wire has begun to cut in some of the branches so I have removed those, and now for some time I'll leave it like it is, because I don't want to stress it any more.

Egyetemi Bonsai Club session - 2008.03.08.

Last saturday we had the first practical session with the club this year. Time for repotting, I took two trees and I have potted them up - a spruce and a hawthorn.

Here are some pictures from the session.


Three wise men.


Árpád Nagy is working on Zsófi's hornbeam.


The top of the tree has been removed.



Zsófi is repotting the hornbeam.


Zoli was working on his windswept hornbeam. It was pretty hot and humid in the greenhouse, and also a lot of people for too little space, so after some time I have moved outside.



Some of the finished trees: my picea, two buxus trees and my hawthorn.

Snow is here!

Today we had the first snow this winter.
This pine (Pinus sylvestris 'Saxatilis') was a regular nursery tree when I bought it three years ago and started working on it. Right now it is a mess that really needs wiring but I liked the patches of snow on its branches, so I chose it for capturing our first snow.

The snow has just arrived today but it is already melting.
I wonder what we will have by tomorrow.

My trees in 3D

It is quite difficult to capture works of such an expressedly spatial art as bonsai on a two-dimensional photograph. Branches that in reality are far away may seem cluttered and chaotic in the two-dimensional projection of a photograph. That's one of the reason why many times pictures of nice bonsais look awkward on a picture. To some extent this can be countered with lighting, I usually direct the light so that the front of the tree gets more light while the back branches are more in shadow, which makes it possible to convey a sense of depth.

However using anaglyph photography it is possible to create real three-dimensional pictures.

These pictures have been created to be viewed with the common red-cyan anaglyph glasses (you can buy cheap red-cyan glasses made from paper and colored plastic film).

The point in anaglyph images is to create two photos from a small distance (along a line perpendicular to the viewing direction) simulating the views of our two eyes, then copying these two pictures to one so that only the red channel of the left image is used and the red channel is removed from the right half. If you view the result with a red-cyan glass your left eye sees only the left image while your right eye sees the right image.
Such images can be created with any decent photo manipulation programs (e.g. Gimp) but you can also use specialized software to speed up the process. I have used the program called Plascolin on Linux.

My new Acer

Yesterday and today our club has presented the Bonsai Show 2007 in Budapest. I took part in the show with 3 three trees, but I'll report on this event on my exhibit blog (soon).
Besides the exhibition, there was a vendor area where plants, pots, tools and pre-bonsai material was sold. I have bought this very nice Acer ginnala today from Erik Tomko from Slovakia, and I just love this tree. I have always wanted a nice graceful maple, and while this ginnala is not exactly as graceful as a palmatum it is much more delicate than the field maples (Acer campestre) I have. Also it is more frost-resistant then the palmatums and has a nice red autumn color.
It has some faults, like the thick root on the right side, but overall has a great feeling and I will work on eliminating these faults. It looks like it has never been wired but grown with a clip-and-grow method. I will have to remove some weird branches and wire it next spring, but this is a very promising material and with time I hope this will be a very nice tree.

Preparation for the 2007 exhibit - part 1

This weekend the Egyetemi Bonsai Club (University Bonsai Club, named after the University Of Horticulture), of which I am a member of, is presenting its annual autumn show. I am preparing four trees for the show, one of which is this ash tree (Fraxinus).
It has beautiful autumn colors right now, from green through yellow to red. I can just hope that it will last one more week... Who knows, so I took some pictures of it now. It needs some moss and correction of the surface roots (I plan to hide some of the roots).

The picture above is from today, the one below is from May this year. The last picture show the way it looked like right after collection. The leftmost trunk on this picture has been separated from the tree this spring when I potted it up, and it thrived, so it will be a separate bonsai someday... From the original six trunks I have selected three for this design.

Work on a Juniperus stricta

I have bought this shrub in early 2005 in a garden centre. I liked its nicely tapering, straight, upright trunk and thought it would make a good formal upright bonsai.
Then I have started working on it and wired it for countless hours, up to the smallest twigs, but it didn't really work out. One problem was that I started with very low branches, which I have later realized were superfluous for the design. Second, I reasoned that with a formal upright tree only straight branches would be matching. The result was disappointing and I have pretty much lost interest in the tree, so it waited in the garden for a year. Then last year I have actually cut all the branches that I have wired because I realized they are too low.
A few days ago I started working on it again. After seeing pictures of old and huge sequoias in a book by James Balogh I realized that even the most upright Sequoias and Sequoiadendrons will have gnarly, curving branches with time, and this has influenced the new design.
By the way James Balogh's book, titled "Tree - a new vision of the American forest" is an amazing book, I enjoy it a lot. He has a unique technique of making panoramas of trees from different heights and positions, so when he stitches together the final image, the tree appears more-or-less as a whole, but the background is fragmentary. It sounds difficult to explain, but you can check it out here.
I have bought the book in Germany where the translated version is titled "Baumriesen", probably the publisher thought the original title would not arouse enough interest outside of America :)

The pictures are from 05.2005. and 10.2007. (Figure out which is which :-)

The styling is still pretty raw but I will leave the tree for now as it is to let it recuperate.