Mandarin
As the institutions of the empire crumbled, I spent a glorious fall morning in the northern provinces tending my bonsai. The smaller of the two pommegranits has survived a bout with fungus & is doing well. I have trimmed the rosmarys’ summer growth to reveal the sinuous structure of their branches. The ficus & the [...]
Fall
The days have been fairly warm, but the nights cooling. The leaves on some of the maples have just begun to shift toward yellow. Cassiopeia rises in the northeast at the end of our road in the gap where the tall trees open on the riverbank. There are still coneflowers & black-eyed-susans in the flowerbeds, [...]
Chill in the Air
Carole & Amy are up in the mountains tonight doing an art thing with SLU students. They took Angel the lab with them, who is no doubt in 7th heaven soaking up the love of hippie girls with no terriers around. I’m home with the terriers. Almost built a fire tonight. Rainy & damp all [...]
Remarkable Bonsai / Richard Rorty
I just ran across these amazing photos of bonsai by Walter Pall, who has developed what bonsai purists call a “naturalistic” style, though the viewer unfamiliar with the formal styles of traditional bonsai might not choose the adjective “natural” to describe these tress. All that apparently lifeless wood, by the way, called jin, is part [...]
Two More Trees
Repotting
Two bonsai pots I’d ordered from Bonsai by the Monastery came yesterday. Two of my favorite trees needed repotting — a juniper created out of nursery stock a couple of years ago & a rosemary I bought as a little herb planting about five years ago. The rosemary is the bonsai I’ve had the longest [...]
Swabbing off a Ficus
The title of this post sounds sort of dirty if you don’t know the exact meanings of the words, or take them just as sound. Go swab a ficus, mate! In fact, the post title refers to the fact that I spent an hour this evening with cotton swabs & insecticidal soap swabbing the leaves [...]
Bonsai Notes
Warm enough today to take the pine & the juniper off the front porch & put them outside. It will be great if we get the rain that’s predicted. Bonsai love rainwater. This is the time of the year when we humans have to slosh through rain sitting on top of snow; the hardy bonsai [...]
Stumble it!