Saturday, August 6, 2011

Workshop with Gerdi and Hans #1

Gerdi and Hans have this fabulous collection near Munich, Germany. We had a workshop today. The task was to work on several of their trees together and bring them to a state wheres they can now continue to work on their trees alone. They will to work alone for a while and in a couple of weeks we will see what happened and do another workshop together.

The first tree today was an very old Japanese blyck pine (Pinus thunbergiana) on a rock. This is a very important bonsai. One cannot find many JBPs which come close to this one in Europe. It has been worked on in Japan many years ago and later on in Eruope by prominent masters. Today it looked very healthy and we discussed various ways of improving the tree. One could not really see the great roots over rock and the trunk. So it was decided to cut a major branch in front. Then the tree was cleaned, all old needles plucked. The lower right branch was pulled down with a strong guy wire to give much more direction and to make sure that the main branch on the right and the large branch on the left were not on the same height and of the same optical weight. Then we went up in the crown and edited every single pad slightly. In the top a few small branches were cut to make sure that the top would look light and not like a poodle. Then the moss was corrected and the whole tree was painted with biotreeclaener. Everybody was happy with the transformation and we will report about the future steps on this great pine.