About Me

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I have 15 formal Bonsai trees ranging from 5-25 yrs old which include conifers, deciduous', tropicals, and shrubs. i try and buy one of everything and i dig up whatever i can find. if you want to get into bonsai quickly, find the book call POP BONSAI by Lisa Tajima. go out and buy a little rosemary shrub, prune it down and expose the branches and you're on your way.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Why Bonsai?


Why you may ask? Why not?

I have always had an affinity for plants and trees. I have always been drawn to them, the unusual or uniform shape of their leaves, the shape of the trunk, the way they twist with the wind and towards the sun....

When i was a child i tried to be interested in plants but the only access i had to potted plants were the flowers my mother would grow on our porch. While i liked flowers, i never liked the ones my mom had because i never saw the point. sure, they're pretty, but they die in the winter and you have to start all over again next year. with my juvenile brain it had never occurred to me to look past that and look at the rest of the trees in my yard. as a kid, trees were more for climbing than anything else and i cherished the sticky sap on my hands and the thick woody scent that followed me around for the rest of the day. i was a weird kid who did nothing but study my surroundings and play with LEGOs. i would find myself rolling around on the slick wood floor of my big house staring deeply into the rings of the wood imagining i was in a vortex being sucked into the center of the trunk or that the rings were mini highways i could drive my car down, zig-zagging around knots and other imperfections of the 100+ year old wood.

still as a teenager it never occurred to me that i had the power to grow my own trees. with my parents divorced and living in separate households, i could not trust them to water a plant if i had one. my room was my only safe haven and i felt that if i had any plants outside, somehow they would be abused, mowed, dug up, or otherwise defiled. because of that i never bothered to start my own collection.

i am only 20 years old but i felt like i have been doing this for a long time. it wasn't until i moved out of my house and had my own place that i realized for the first time that i have the power to do whatever i wanted. that's when i made a trip out to the Portland Nursery in the middle of winter, bought a Serissa and a Zelkova, came home to prune them (BAD idea in the winter! i have learned my lesson) and promptly killed them. (Jump to today: the Serissa is dead because they tend to enjoy tropical climates, the Zelkova is doing fine, but the 5 branches it had when i bought it have all died. it is currently growing two new branches from it's trunk.)

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