Bonsai Trees Anyone??

[mr drinky]

I just bought three bonsai trees. Does anyone else do the bonsai thing? I am new to it.

Here are my new 'tree children'.

k.

 

[PierreRodrigue]

I did it for quite some time. When we got our dog 1 1/2 years ago, the little bugger up rooted all of them, and would run around the yard shaking the life out of them! It was something I enjoyed, and were great points of interest.

By the way, nice kitchen!

 

[Salty dog]

Yep, I've killed my share of trees. Looks like those are all tropical. Fukien Tea, Banyon and another Tea or star serissa?

 

[mr drinky]

Pretty good guessing. They are (in no order) Mount Fuji Serissa, Baby Jade, and Pink Serissa and are supposedly good for indoors.

k.

 

[Salty dog]

They are good for indoors. Watch out for bugs and remember your atomizer.

 

[mr drinky]

Thanks for the tips. The middle tree is seventeen years old, and I would hate to have bugs (or Pierre's dogs) do it in.

k.

 

[PierreRodrigue]

Yeah, Jazz is a big bug! She thinks if anything is "mine" and I'm not there, she has to protect it. That usually means it gets the crap chewed out of it.

 

[Jim]

I have a few Japanese black pines that I have raised from seedlings for 15 years and some eastern white pines I dug up in Pennsylvania about 20 years ago. The more I learn about these trees the less I realize I know.

 

[Salty dog]

Black pine = black gold

 

[PierreRodrigue]

I had a beautiful juniper I dug out of the sandhills, hiding in some cactus, 28"high, and 3" near the base, I didn't even need to wire it up. After 4 years of root training, got it into a larger bonsai pot. It was the first to go... I just bought some cyprus, trident maple, and black pine seeds that will soon start the stratification process.

 

[Vertigo]

Nice!

I just started dinking around with this a few months ago, and rooted a small pruning from one of my umbrella trees. It isn't much to look at right now, but I'm stoked it's working as planned.

Further updates in a year or two!

 

[Dave Martell]

You guys know that we have a smiley for everything, right? :bonsai:

 

[kalaeb]

I have killed my fair share of Bonsai trees. Apparently, wildly fluctuating temperatures are not good for them.

 

[TamanegiKin]

Nice trees, middle one looks really cool. I had a Japanese juniper, nana iirc. It died when I moved to TX, probably shocked it as it was in the twenties and snowing when I got here then it got horribly humid. Whenever I get back to L.A. I plan to try again, this time with a CA Juniper. I have some neat pics of Bonsai' from my visit to the huntington gardens in Pasadena this year.

 

[TamanegiKin]

Finally got around to uploading the pics from my trip to the huntington garden.

 

[mr drinky]

Those are amazing. I would love to know how old each of them are. Btw, the middle tree is doing wonderfully, but the other two had a rough trip and lost a lot of leaves. One is finally coming back, but the other is still struggling. I have a moisture meter now so I can make sure they are properly watered, but the winter sun up north is short. I should have ordered them in the summer instead.

k.

 

[oivind_dahle]

I love your kitchen dude!

 

[Jim]

The photos from Huntington Garden make me want to burn my trees.

 

[jmforge]

Was anyone else's first thought "I wonder how many small handle scales I could get out of that maple tree?" :lol2:

 

[mr drinky]

I love your kitchen dude!

Thanks. I love it too, and it was the reason my wife and I bought this house.

k.

 

[WildBoar]

Shoot -- missed this thread before! 2 islands rock. Leathered granite tops?

 

[Lucretia]

Tried and failed with bonsai--in part due to a tree-eating feline. Now I'm attempting Niwaki. That way I don't have to worry about the care and feeding of inside plants and can still try for some sculpted trees. We just can't have plants in the house with this wretched cat. I've been trying to breed some roses and had seedlings coming up on a windowsill. Thought they were disappearing due to damping off fungus; they were actually becoming cat chow.

We're fortunate enough to live near the Pacific Rim Bonsai collection in Federal Way, Wa. AMAZING place--some of the specimens are hundreds of years old. This rhododendron (photo from Coenosium Gardens website--more at http://www.coenosium.com/PacificRim/pacificrimcoll.htm) supposedly originated in 1485.

 

[bprescot]

Man! I could probably just stare at that guy for hours.

And this guy is what I always imagined the Yggdrasil would look like. Might have to scale it up by a thousand, but yeah. Geez, never cared really about bonsai until I saw these. I get it now.

 

[Jim]

Here is an interesting story, (and website) to poke around in.

http://www.bonsai-nbf.org/site/japanese2.html