a winter trip to florida and wigerts bonsai nursery in fort myers

visited wigerts about a month ago while in florida seeing my mum and figured this would be a good time to share warm images with all of us north of the mason-dixon line  

heres a few pictures at wigerts (cloudy day = flat light)

































if you have never been to wigerts and you find yourself in southwest florida, i would highly recommend a visit.

and a few other trees that i enjoyed looking at that were within walking distance of mum's condo...
all species commonly used as bonsai material

japanese black pine, i believe







a couple bald cypress (again, i believe)
both "stand alone" with no competition for sun light, so no flat-top look to them as commonly designed in bonsai







and one last image i made that i particularly like in its starkness

Nice bro, I was waiting for some pictures from your trip. Thanks for sharing. I would imagine myself as Tucco from "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" in the final scene. Racing around in circles, desperate to find what he's searched for. Until, finally, the quest is complete. C'mon, didn't you run around, just a little? Big ol' grin from ear to ear.

LanceMac10 wrote: C'mon, didn't you run around, just a little? Big ol' grin from ear to ear.

hell yeah... and i still didnt see it all... but i was there to shop too, so spent most of my time perusing the ones i ended up buying (a podocarpus, a campeche and a parrots beak... all just raw pre-bonsai stock)

and my mum was being as patient with me as she could but she had no idea how long i could have stayed there... i wanted to just take her car, but she insisted on going with me to the "banzai store"... pretty funny...

moms - gotta love 'em !

Great pics! I find that the only way to go to nurseries and historical societies is completely solo. And of course to make sure they announce when they are closing, but that's another story.

Precarious wrote:Great pics!  I find that the only way to go to nurseries and historical societies is completely solo.

thanks !
and yeah man... my preference as well... but she insisted...

Precarious wrote:And of course to make sure they announce when they are closing, but that's another story.

ok... interest sufficiently piqued !!!
i hope its one of those stories where someone gets locked up in a botanical garden and has to pry open venus fly trap jaws to steal and eat the flies in order to survive overnight !

those are the best !

Are those Cranes real or statuary ?
Great pictures thanks for sharing and nice photography BTW...
I specially like the tree on the rock with the Bamboo in the background and stone in the foreground.
Chas

hey chas... the sand hill (?) cranes were very real... funny because at one point i was in the shop picking out a couplafew pots and andrea wigert came in to say that my mum had pulled the car up and she was in it waiting for me and i thought "oh well, so much for this visit" so i hurried up a bit...

got out to the car and she said she wasnt in a hurry, but she was hiding from the cranes that she said were "terrorizing" her

(i guess you had to be there )

and yeah the nice thing about being somewhere like florida, you can actually incorporate bonsai into the year-round landscape.

The Birds are Great Blue Herons. Your black pine looks to be longleaf pine or slash pine. All three native to Florida. Never been to Wigarts. Had no idea it was so large. Impressive.

JimLewis wrote:The Birds are Great Blue Herons.    

Sorry Jim...you are wrong on this one...Sand Hill Cranes...notice the red on the face.

thanks john gee

thats what i thunk
also because i dont believe that great blues are known for terrorizing elderly wimmen folk.

jim - me not being a pine guy, you are probably correct... when talkng to the wigerts i recall them saying that black is one of the very few they can do down there, so thats where i got that from... man-o-man, but i gotta get schooled on pines...

Thanks for posting the photos! Looks like a great place to spend a few hours...

jgeanangel wrote:

JimLewis wrote:The Birds are Great Blue Herons.    

Sorry Jim...you are wrong on this one...Sand Hill Cranes...notice the red on the face.

oops! Didn't look that hard, and never have seen sandhills that close to people.

Sandhill cranes are wonderful. Up north here where Kevin and I live (a few ~ 25 miles apart) is part of their breeding territory. When up north, they are very shy birds that avoid letting people get within a few hundred feet. My aunt in Sarasota is always complaining about the sandhills screwing up her golf game. Its funny how their behavior changes with the seasons. Their populations have exploded over that last couple decades, in the 1970s they were down to less than 25,000 world wide. Now their population is back into the 100,000 range. It is still not up to their historic levels, but they are no longer a very rare bird to sight. A good sight to be able to catch.

I believe the golden bamboo is Bambusa vulgaris, or one of the other golden culm Bambusa, I wish they were winter hardy, but alas they are not.

Love all the tree pictures, especially the bald cypress. Totally cool.