American Bonsai at the NC Arboretum

Lovely Crepe Myrtle. I like the ginko too!

Arthur Joura wrote:Kev, my friend, I am beginning to understand the "snake" part of your on-screen moniker. Now I will have to keep a closer eye on you whenever you are around my plants. I am glad you enjoyed, in your own particular way, the American Hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana) whose image I posted. Perhaps you would like to see picture of *her* back side?

HEY NOW !!!
thats verging on inappropriate !!!
can't a gal have a little dignity around here ?!?!

but seriously AJ... can you really deny certain "stirrings" when gazing upon such an undulating beauty ?

and then there is this:

Arthur Joura wrote: Chinese Quince (Pseudocydonia sinensis) with its 2 ripe, pendulous, rounded fruits hanging brazenly in the open breeze (Kev? Kev???):

no prompting needed...
LAWDY LAWDY... CLEANSE ME OF THESE IMPURE THOUGHTS !!!
GET THEE BEHIND ME SATAN !!!

in all seriousness though, ignoring the scale of the fruit, it is beautiful non-the less and quince fruit will always remind me of the late great restaurateur JACK WEISSGERBER:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/obituaries/milwaukee-area-restaurant-owner-jack-weissgerber-dies-at-75-b9945605z1-213893091.html

he had a quince tree on the property of the seven seas restaurant and i attended many wine dinners there and every single one of them featured something with his quince, whether it be a tart, a chutney, or just a simple jam with cheese... i was lucky enough to get to know him very well over the years and after his passing, his head chef told me i would be allowed to take a cutting from the tree, but i have yet to be there at an appropriate time to take one...

as always, thanks arthur for sharing your collection... i call it "yours" with the full understanding of it being a public display and therefore funded as such, but i highly doubt that it would be as it is without you (and your band of volunteers !)

Beautiful trees as always Arthur!

I'd love to see a post dedicated to the Hornbeam that has Kevin.. stirring... lol. I would really like to hear about it's history. Did you design the tree entirely there at the Arboretum? -- Or a post about several of the native hornbeams you're growing would be very interesting.

Thanks to those who responded to my last post, way back at the end of November. Most of the time since then I was holed up in a secluded place, laying low and doing all I could to avoid the mass psychosis commonly referred to as "The Christmas Season", or alternately, "The Holiday Season". Only lately did I cautiously reemerge, as my hirsute friend the groundhog will next month, to look around and see if the coast was clear. Being now back to business, let me respond to the request from Dan W. for more information regarding the informal upright hornbeam bonsai whose picture I posted, the one that aroused Kevin's inter-species lust.

This American Hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana) is a sentimental favorite of mine, owing to it being one of the first bonsai I ever made myself starting from scratch. It dates back to the spring of 1994, which was the start of my second growing season as a fledgling bonsai curator. Back in those days I was doing everything I could to educate myself in this new field of endeavor, and I was literally reading "the book" at night and then going into work the next day and attempting to do the things I read about. When I say "the book" I do not mean any one particular one, although Yoshimura's "The Japanese Art of Miniature Trees and Landscapes" was the one I referred to most often. I also spent a lot of time with Harry Tomlinson's "The Complete Book of Bonsai" and Dorothy Young's "Bonsai the Art and Technique", but there were many other titles as well. So I would read things in these books and try them, and one thing I read about was collecting from the field a sapling tree that had attained a few year's size and cutting it down to a stump, waiting for it to re-sprout and then building the bonsai from that. It sounded promising so I tried it.

A year earlier at the Arboretum we had done a landscape planting along a newly built road to our newly built greenhouse. Most of the plant material was trees and shrubs we had grown in our nursery operation, but we also used a few American Hornbeams that had been collected from the woods by a man who at that time was our landscape crew leader. He had dug up eight or so trees that were roughly 6 to 8ft (1.8 to 2.4m) in height. Four of these were planted in this new roadside landscape and the unwanted rest were left to fend for themselves, crudely gang-potted in a large plastic tub left beside a random outbuilding. And when I say left to fend for themselves, I mean it - they were not watered or tended in any way. By the time I came to work that next spring with this idea in mind about cutting down a field grown tree and making a bonsai out of the stump, several of these neglected hornbeams had died and it was pretty obvious no one cared about any of them, so I asked if I could make use of whatever live ones remained. Permission was given. I rooted through the lot and found two that still had reasonable life left in them. These I took and cut down to approximately 6in (15cm) stumps and then potted them up individually in large plastic containers. When the landscape crew leader saw what I had done he said, "If I knew you were going to do THAT to them, I wouldn't have let you have them!" He was serious, too.

Back when I was doing this I had yet to learn the great value in photo-documenting all stages of a bonsai's progression, so I have no images of any of this part of the story. The first relevant picture I have is this one, made in the summer of 1995:



What is seen in this photograph is the abundance of stems and foliage produced by the stump after a year and a half of unrestrained growth. In truth, I do not know if this image is actually the stump that ultimately became the bonsai in question or if it is the other of the two I saved, but it does not really matter. At this point both trees looked roughly the same. I do know that I made this picture just before doing the first pruning of the material, wherein the rudimentary structure was initially laid out. Too bad I do not have a picture of that! In fact, the next image of this specimen I can offer is from 8 years later, in 2003:



(Here again I will take the opportunity to comment on the importance of making photographs of your bonsai on a regular, ongoing basis. Even if you think the tree is not changing much over the years, and particularly in the early stages when you might be tempted to think the tree is not developed enough yet to warrant photographing it, document your bonsai's development and you are likely to one day be glad you did. It is an especially sensible practice in this era of digital photography when there is little or no expense involved in taking as many pictures as you want. If worse comes to worse and a great bonsai fails to materialize, it takes little effort to delete the evidence.)

Looking at the above image it is evident that this particular specimen has followed a true course since its early development. That is to say, the tree was designed a certain way to begin with and has not changed so much over time, beyond the ramification and refinement it is hoped the passing years will bring to it. In my experience, this consistency is not so often the case.

Here is how this tree looked in 2005:



And here it is on display in the Bonsai Exhibition Garden in 2008:



Astute observers may notice the preceding three images show this particular bonsai in three different containers. The size of each container is approximately the same, the changes were made as I experimented in finding the right combination of tree and pot. Interestingly, all three containers are the work of Sara Rayner, whom I hold to be among the very best of American bonsai potters.

Here is another view of this hornbeam on display in the garden, in September of 2013:



I think this particular specimen has been on display in the garden every year since the garden opened in 2005. It might be seen as precient, therefore, that for the opening of the garden I made a logo image featuring this American Hornbeam:



As regards the styling of this tree, it represents the basic understanding I had of the informal upright form when I laid out the design almost twenty years ago. Again I was following "the book", so the branching follows the all too familiar pattern of branch on one side, branch on the other, back branch, and so forth on up the length of the trunk, starting about 1/3 up the height of the tree, becoming more closely placed together as they near the apex. The trunk itself moves first one way and then the other, zig-zagging in a predictable pattern of decreasing increments and gradually tapering as it moves upward. The primary branches do not stick out horizontally or descend as "the book" often prescribes, but that is not for lack of trying. In the early years I did wire the branches to try and override their upward growing tendency, but they were stubborn about it and after scarring a few of them I backed off. Wire scars on the smooth barked hornbeams are more or less permanent, and of course undesirable. As a result, this specimen has been largely shaped through the clip & grow method, especially over the last decade or so. In the meantime my concept of tree design, deciduous tree design in particular, has changed due to the influence of closing "the book" and studying the natural example instead. The mostly ascending branches now look right to me.

This springtime image from 2014 gives a good look at the structure:



To close out the story, let us return to those four American Hornbeams that were planted along the roadside at the Arboretum all those years ago, the brothers and sisters to this bonsai. Three of them were planted together on one side of the road, and the fourth was planted opposite them on the other side of the road, and they have all prospered. This image shows the group of three in autumn leaf, two being orange in color and the third yellow:



Yesterday I brought the American Hornbeam bonsai out for a family reunion:

Awesome story Arthur! Thanks for sharing about this tree. I love that you included a photo of the bonsai next to it's full sized sibling! Maybe in another 20 years you can do it again to show the changes in each....

Arthur Joura wrote:Being now back to business, let me respond to the request from Dan W. for more information regarding the informal upright hornbeam bonsai whose picture I posted, the one that aroused Kevin's inter-species lust.

sorry, but i stand by what i said: THAT IS ONE HELLUVA SEXY TREE !
(and if brian da chopper wasnt so web-silent, he would agree with a hale and hearty HARRUMPH !!!)
and thanks for the back story AJ... fills in some of the gaps for the old eye-lid bijou

in all seriousness though genuine thanks for the story... the longer i am into this the more the story of each tree becomes important to me... and you are spot on with your advice re: photo documenting our trees... i shoot throughout the growing season and when any major work is done and then just dump them into a desktop folder by month (i.e. aug 2015, sept 2015 etc)... then, now in the dead of winter, i can relax with a hot toddy and revisit this past season and sort them into each individual tree's folder... makes winter suck just a little bit less... (i only outlaid my process for the edification of those who think photographing may be a hassle... but like you said, digital makes it easy)

i hope this coming year allows you the time to continue to share both current work, and the history of some of the arboretum's trees...

(btw - i have a mesquite tree from frank sinatras front yard... so that has a cool story to it...)

Methinks Carolina Hornbeam and tree others great looking are.

Many feelings inside they give.

more yoda than cherokee/creek...

which is probably good (so as not to offend, which i doubt was your intention...)

That is a sexy ass tree so here it is......HARRUMPH!!!
Web-silence has been broken lol!!!

Very nice Arthur. We too, in Central Maryland's Baltimore Bonsai Club, are devotees of the Carolina Hornbeam and are fortunate to be able to collect them locally.

We need to start a thread on American Hornbeams. I'll take the initiative.

Happy New Year to all.

Augustine

beer city snake wrote:more yoda than cherokee/creek...

Ach! Cultural gaps, misunderstandings...  

Wanted to say that what was visible was deeply rooted in America to me. And proud, strong and firm.

A cliché maybe, but that was the picture that came to my mind, not Joe Di Maggio, Colonel Sanders, Huckleberry Finn, or even Ella Fitzgerald  

Also wanted to speak basic alien English, to avoid any lengthy 357,569,426 characters replies on the subject.

Although words have been my living, I much prefer when I can communicate with pictures or sound...





Corny, ain't it? But I love it!  

PS: I used to sing it and play it on the guitar, I'm trying to find the gist of it on the ukulele for my next school trip to England so everyone can sing it along in the bus

Ooo yeah!

BrianS wrote:That is a sexy ass tree so here it is......HARRUMPH!!!
Web-silence has been broken lol!!!

you GOTTA be kidding me !!!
brian... ?
brian who ???

hope to see another post in the next..., oh say... decade or 2

AlainK wrote:

beer city snake wrote:more yoda than cherokee/creek...

Ach! Cultural gaps, misunderstandings...  

no sweat... i would be hard pressed for a french reference with out the googles

I always try to give the botanical name for any bonsai I write about, but in the case of this Corkbark Elm I am uncertain. For years I used the name Ulmus parvifolia var. corticosa, only to be told by various authorities at various times that it really should be referred to as Ulmus parvifolia 'Cork Bark', or Ulmus parvifolia var. suberosa, or Ulmus propinqua var. suberosa, or Ulmus davidiana var. japonica. I have no idea what the right name might be, but if those who truly care want to fight it out among themselves and then let me know who wins, I will gladly call it by that name.

This elm came to us as part of the original donation that started the bonsai collection at the NC Arboretum, so I have been working with it since 1993. Here is what it looked like at that time:



By 1996, due to its robust growth habit, I was able to make it look like this:



Here is an image from autumn of this past year:



This is a popular specimen for us, mostly due to the character of the dark, heavy, deeply fissured bark. That bark has the added benefit of bulking up the trunk of the tree so as to make it appear much greater in circumference than it would if it had smooth or only moderately textured bark. This is another example of a tree I shaped early on in my career, following closely the standard approach for bonsai design as given in the various "how-to" books I was learning from, and I think it gets a passing grade as an example of a basic, deciduous, slanting form bonsai. It has attained a fair degree of ramification, but frankly that is not much of an achievement when elm is the subject matter in question. Here is a look at it bare of foliage:



Lately the look of this bonsai has become less and less satisfying for me. Part of what I find bothersome about it is how stretched out the top of the tree has become, a not unusual development that can happen over time without the grower necessarily being aware of it, until one day you look and it jumps out at you. Another nettlesome feature becomes greatly apparent when viewing the tree from the side:



As I was learning bonsai I was repeatedly instructed that the tree should be shaped so that it leans toward the front. This design idea was typically delivered with the picturesque advice that "the bonsai should bow toward the viewer" (like a good little Japanese tree!) I think I took the advice a little too far, not only with this tree but numerous others that I first did back when. Now my thinking about bonsai design has evolved to the point where I am much less committed to the concept of a bonsai having a "front", as such thinking leads too easily to looking at them and thinking of them as 2-dimensional objects, which they are not. Eventually I will write more on that topic, but for now I will simply say that too many bonsai I see look silly when viewed from an angle other than that which is presented as the front. This elm, my own work, stands as an embarrassingly obvious example.

What follows are a set of four images, comprising a 360-degree view of the tree after a recent structural pruning session. My objectives were to shorten its height, adjust its branching pattern to give it a more naturalistic feeling, and try to alleviate the appearance it has when seen from a side angle of being a diver about to jump off the high board. I think I was able to accomplish a good deal of all that, bearing in mind the wise words of my old philosopher friend Andy Faller, who was fond of reminding me, "we can't eat the whole elephant in one bite!"









Here is a side-by-side view, before and after:

 

And to finish, here is a comparison of the old crown and the newly restructured one:





I had to sacrifice a lot of the nice ramification, but a good deal of that should be back by the end of this year.

great example of some small changes making a big difference !
i hope you follow this up at a later date...

btw - i really REALLY like that pot that it was initially in (1st pic)...
is that pot still part of the arboretum's collection ?

and if so, is it just gathering dust ?

Great tree, great work.

Love the way the knobbiness proclivity of cork bark elms isn't too apparent in this tree.
Most cork bark elms start getting all lumpy looking if the buds aren't rubbed off and let grow too many branches in one area.
Very nice.

It's a chilly, gray, rainy day here in Western North Carolina. This is the view looking out from the building in which I work:



I like days like this, really, but they can be a little slow. So I check in on the IBC, see if there are any replies to my post the other day.

Woo-boy. It's as dead and somber around this site as it is out my window right now. I notice it's the same on the couple of other bonsai forum sites I know of, and one of them might even be finished. Wonder if bonsai forums are heading the way of the dodo, or if this is just the bottom of a cycle and it will come back around eventually? Oh well. As Kurt Vonnegut would have said, "So it goes".

The ol' IBC still has a pulse, though, weak as it is. Let me see, who's checked in lately...  Huh. Beer City Snake and our friend from France, AlainK, the usual suspects. Appreciate them though. Oh hey, look at this - M. Frary dropped a line, haven't heard from him before. I think he's on the BonsaiNut site, too, uses a picture of Godzilla as his avatar. Maybe if all the people left on Nut joined the few stragglers hanging around on IBC there would be enough traffic to make one decent forum. Won't happen though. We have to maintain tribal identity, right up to the point of extinction. That way someone gets to say they were the last one standing. Oh well. Might as well post something while I'm here, keep up appearances...

**********************************************************************************************************

I made a comment in my last post about lately questioning the whole idea of bonsai having a "front". I am still not ready to take the time to write about that fully, but I do want to briefly touch on that subject again now. Back in December was the 3rd annual Winter Silhouette Bonsai Expo in Kannapolis, NC. The NC Arboretum had a display in it, as we have each year of the show so far, and our display looked like this:



Insert here all the usual comments about the difficulty of getting a good photograph of an 8ft (2.4m) wide bonsai display with a hand-held camera and no supplemental lighting and of course it looked better in real life, but you get some idea of what it looked like. The intention was to honor the theme of the show and present a display reflecting the winter season. I was satisfied with it. Joe Noga, one of Bill Valavanis' old associates from Rochester who now lives in NC, was on hand and taking some excellent photographs, individual portrait shots, of all the bonsai on display.

Here is the tray landscape, titled "Graveyard Fields", from the Arboretum's display:



What a difference good photography makes! (Thank you, Joe.)

Here is a shot of the Dwarf Procumbens Juniper (Juniperus procumbens 'Nana') that was on the left side of the display:



What I want to make note of here is that the above image does not show what I think to be the primary view, the front, of this bonsai. When I have this juniper on display in the Bonsai Exhibition Garden I almost always show it this way:



I think it looks better when seen from this perspective, and that is why I call this the primary view. However, the other view of it is not bad, in my opinion. It is just not as good. When I was putting together the display for the Winter Silhouette show, the main piece I wanted to present was the "Graveyard Fields" tray landscape. I had it in mind that as a complementary piece for the other side of the display I wanted a tall, more narrow, evergreen bonsai. When I went looking through the collection for a tree to fill that position, however, all the potential candidates disqualified themselves. In a few cases the bonsai was not in what I thought to be presentable condition, due to wiring or need of wiring or some other reason, or it was too big or too small. In some other cases the tree was presentable and the right height but the movement it exhibited was from right to left, and for my composition I needed a bonsai with left to right movement.

I selected the juniper on the rock because it had the right feel to it, it was the right size, it was in presentable condition, and by turning it around from its primary view it had the right movement.

The reason I could turn it to present some view other than the primary view is because the tree was shaped as a 3-dimensional object, and not a 2-dimensional one. It does not have a "front". It has a view I think is the best, and that is the way I usually choose to show it, but it can be presented in other ways and still look credible.

Not being married to the idea of your bonsai having a front allows you flexibility in how you display it. I think that is advantageous.

Hi Arthur, still here....
I think some folks are still recovering from the "holidays"! I've been following along as usual, maybe should start a thread (or update one), it's been a while!
I do appreciate what you did with the elm, funny how a tree can outgrow itself, that's the beauty of the sport!
On fronts, I have quite a few trees, that I spent years developing from one side, only to find something equally nice on the other side. Gives the tree a fresh feel to the owner, and can be quite exciting.
Keep on plugging away.

Hi Arthur,

I really enjoy reading your posts because they are not only interesting but very educational. Thanks. I plan to start posting more once spring arrives in that I plan on assembling my first forest. Should be fun and I'll be sure to document the process. Right now I'm just sifting soil and collecting rocks. Boring stuff.

I like how you refer to the "front" as the primary view. I'm going to start doing that as well.

Thanks again.
Steve

only me again... "beer city snake"
maybe i should start calling you by your screen name and we'll see how you like it !

oh...

wait...

never mind

just wanted to say that graveyard fields is aptly named...
a truly wonderful and evocative composition.

Arthur:
Just wanted to express my admiration for "Graveyard Fields". So very fine.

Hey Arthur I'm still here as well. Particularly enjoyed your last post. But doing 3D is hard. Your hints and guidance would be appreciate by many. Stay warm my friend.

Thank you to those who read and responded to my last post!

Stuck at home today due to the snow storm that is currently covering a wide swath of the eastern US, I will take the opportunity to post some follow-up information about the Dwarf Procumbens Juniper (Juniperus procumbens 'Nana') featured in the last entry.

This juniper was part of the original donation that started the NC Arboretum bonsai effort back in late 1992. Here is what it looked like at the very beginning of 1993, before any real work had taken place:



Here is how it looked later that same year after an initial restyling:



This was the first time I had attempted a bonsai in the literati form. True, the tree as it was given to us was already in a somewhat literati shape, but it was badly overgrown and lacked much definition. I think of literati as being an exercise in minimalism, and as such the greatest hazard in creating one is in overdoing it. Leave too much and it will not look right, but you can always go back and remove more. Take too much and the result looks hideous. If what you are working with is a juniper, falsecypress, hemlock, pine or any other species disinclined to produce new growth off of old wood, taking too much can ruin the specimen. Looking back now at what I did then, I think I did alright cleaning out the excessive growth and opening up the canopy, without leaving it looking abused. Another first for me with this juniper was creating deadwood. A branch that was deemed unnecessary was stripped of foliage and bark but left to remain, and then a strip of bark was removed from the point where that branch attached to the trunk on down to the base, joining up along the way with several existing scars left from branch removal that occurred before the tree came to us. Again, all this basic technique was the result of reading in how-to bonsai books and applying what was proscribed. But I remember feeling leery of tearing that strip of bark the length of the trunk and I was suitably impressed that it all worked out the way it was supposed to.

There was yet another personal "first" for me with this particular specimen, and it first shows up in this photograph, made in 1995:



Planting a bonsai on a rock was another one of those things that grabbed my attention when I was starting out, and this juniper was the first attempt I made at doing it. The rock was a piece I found one day on a hike in the nearby forest. I had seen pictures in books of naturally concave stones and then one day I was walking along and saw one and collected it. I was not looking for such a thing, it just presented itself and I assumed at the time they must be fairly common that I should just happen across one close by a path. I am glad I picked it up, because I have never come across another near as good! Not knowing anything about planting on a stone I figured it might be advisable to give it a drainage hole, so I drilled one in it with a .5in (1.27cm) masonry bit. This was unnecessary and I am just lucky I did not ruin the stone.

One technical problem I have continually faced with this specimen is a result of its being quite top-heavy. There is little danger of it pulling the rock over, but what it will do is gradually fall over while remaining perfectly in place on the rock. The first time this occurred it had happened so slowly I did not notice it until comparing photographs taken a year apart. In response I epoxied a wire onto the stone and then put a screw into the base of the tree on the opposite side of the lean and attached the wire to that. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of this. I did it in a way that would not be visible under normal circumstances, so I will have to make a photograph of it next time the tree is re-potted.

Here for convenience sake is a side-by-side comparison of the bonsai as it was in the beginning and how it presently appears:

 

I do not think there is anything remarkable about this bonsai, but now that it is beginning to acquire some age it is looking respectable and the public enjoys it. Mostly I appreciate it for what I learned while working with it.

The original owner should be proud and pleased at what you have done with this tree. It is a nice piece of work that could have easily gone the wrong way in a heart beat.

question AJ - why do you say that a drainage hole wouldnt have been necessary ?

is there an aspect of the stone that is not pictured that would allow for drainage ?

or... ?

thanks
kevin