A Bonsai Story (Sometimes You Just Can’t Tell) 3/1/14

You can get some idea that this might be a pretty big bonsai from this photo (the little leaf at the bottom helps). But how big, you could only guess. This and the other photos in this post are from Peter Tea Bonsai.

I started this post with the title Sometimes You Just Can’t Tell. That’s because I wanted to talk about how difficult it is to tell just how big some bonsai are without something to indicate scale. In photos that is. Now you might not think this is a big deal, but it is. Photos, even when there is something to indicate scale, never really capture the power and grandeur of bonsai, especially large bonsai. Without something to contrast with, the problem is compounded. That’s what this post was going to be about (and still is, in part at least).

The tree in question is a Trident maple that belongs to Peter Tea (a bark favorite). You can find Peter’s story of this tree on his blog ‘Peter Tea Bonsai.’ I encourage you to pay a visit.

Somewhere in the process of preparing this post, it dawned on me that I was reading and viewing a compelling and entertaining bonsai story that expresses a lot that’s important about bonsai in a personal sense and in a technical sense as well. A story that most of us can learn from. Especially if you grow deciduous bonsai.

Back to the scale part. It’s impossible to get the feel of just how huge this Trident is without something to compare it to. In this case that something is Peter’s hand in the photo just below. If it weren’t for that photo, I never would have guessed just massive this tree’s trunk is. I can only imagine how grand and imposing it will be when Peter is finished.

 

This is the photo that caught my attention. The trunk is massive. But you still can’t tell just how massive it is, because the entire girth of the trunk isn’t shown. Still, it’s best we have and it’s a pretty good indication.

 

The whole tree. You know it’s big, but just how big isn’t at all obvious. BTW: that soil looks something like our New Masters Bonsai Soil.

 

Now that you have some idea of just how big the trunk is, you can tell that that’s a pretty big hole.

 

An added bonus. Peter decides to fill the hole and takes us through some of the steps involved.