Bonsai's future

Still the question of bonsai future is in doubt. This last post kind of illustrates it, a lady is given a bonsai as a wedding present. This is not a bad thing but I am still struck by how few people that are actually involved in doing/growing bonsai. From my point of view I don't understand why more people are not doing bonsai but it is what it is, a kind of back water off the mainstream of American activity of video games, texting, sexting, and eating bad food.

Vance Wood wrote:From my point of view I don't understand why more people are not doing bonsai but it is what it is, a kind of back water off the mainstream of American activity of video games, texting, sexting, and eating bad food.

and that is a very good thing !

i have been part of many "off the grid" activities, most from the very beginning... (punk rock, great lakes surfing, early days of skateboarding and being the first to get snowboarding allowed at a ski resort in wisconsin)

and every single one of those things are now common as muck...

and the end result ?

it all gets watered down by over exposure, over acceptance and over promotion, with un-needed corporate "sponsorships" that really just want to cash in and get their piece of the pie...

perfect example is surfing on the great lakes: nobody outside of the lakes even heard of it until a few individuals started yelling "hey - look at us !!! we're surfers too" and before you know it, the annual "gathering of the tribes" over labor day weekend in sheboygan wisconsin becomes unnecessarily sponsored by CORONA of all things, and they take what was once a gathering of maybe 50-75 friends and turn it into a party with billboards and the whole she-bang... to the point that the guys and gals that belong there cant even get a parking spot to their own gathering and the old time locals simply stopped coming because of the circus that comes with corporate sponsorship....   

i mean, do we really want to see quality bonsai available at walmart ???
(by "quality", i dont mean the crappy half-dead gingsing ficus that they probably already carry)

sorry for the tangent, but mainstream acceptance of something truly unique is a bit of a sore spot for me as i have never seen anything good come of it...

maybe thats just an american viewpoint...

maybe the populations of other countries/cultures know how to embrace something beautiful and unique without spoiling it.

whew...

again, sorry....  

You're not likely to see quality bonsai turned into The Joby Nooner any time soon, it takes too long to make a good bonsai especially if you don't buy one and are oblivious to the amount of time it took to get it to a marketable state.

well, i wasnt really referring to "specimen" trees, but more like mass produced, quality, pre-bonsai stock material
(done in the same manner as the thousands of landscaping japanese red maples that flood the garden centers every spring)