A Timely Watering Tip from Michael Hagedorn

This illustration by Kyosuke Gun is from our Masters’ Series Juniper book. It is a perfect fit for this post that is borrowed from Michael Hagedorn’s Crataegus Bonsai. Before the real summer heat hits, consider how you are watering your trees. Have you ever seen your trees grow through spring just fine, only to get fried leaves at the first onset of early summer? Ever wonder why that happens? Those trees just don’t have enough roots. Those are the trees that got overwatered, or simply never dried out, in the cool spring months. Their roots were never encouraged to hunt … Continue reading A Timely Watering Tip from Michael Hagedorn

Post-Dated Wins Gold!

This cropped cover shot of Michael Hagedorn’s Post Dated provides a powerful hint why the Publishers Association of the West choose it for a Gold Award in design. If you been following this blog for a while, you know that we featured a review of Michael Hagedorn’s ground breaking book and a two part interview with Michael in February. Since then, my enthusiasm for Michael’s fascinating bonsai and life adventures in Japan, hasn’t wavered a bit. It’s still a great book and I still recommend it with the full confidence that you will enjoy it as much as I have.

How to fertilize for a better nebari

This very useful tip comes courtesy of from Michael Hagedorn of Crataegus Bonsai, author of Post Dated: The Schooling of an Irreverent Bonsai Monk. For those of you who like growing maples and other deciduous trees that might develop a marvelous fused nebari, when that tree is young, fertilize right next to the trunk of the tree. Fine fusable roots will grow right under your fertilizer cakes, the kind that develop into the solid nebari pancakes that we see on really old bonsai and trees in the wild. If we fertilize only at the outside of the root system, the … Continue reading How to fertilize for a better nebari

Two Junipers for the Price of One?

In the expert hands of Michael Hagedorn, this collected Rocky Mountain Juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) in transformed into two noteworthy bonsai. A remarkable transformation of a Rocky Mountain Juniper …actually, two Rocky Mountain Junipers. When I first posted this (just a couple minutes ago) I was convinced that Michael made two bonsai from the collected tree in the box above. It turns out that there were two distinct trunks and root systems, but Michael says that one of them is unused. Still, it looks to me like he ends up with two different trees. Take a look (you have click on … Continue reading Two Junipers for the Price of One?

Michael Hagedorn Interview: Part 2

This is the second and final installment of our Michael Hagedorn interview. Do you collect wild trees? Any advice if you do? I do collect. And I would definitely advise studying the techniques of taking wild trees with a very experienced collector who has a high success rate. Studying this seriously is better than learning by mistake and experiment—enough have done that already! The tree pictured above is Sonoran scrub live oak (Quercus turbinella). Michael says of this tree: I collected this oak from a mountain range in eastern Arizona in 1999, at around 5,000 ft. It was growing much … Continue reading Michael Hagedorn Interview: Part 2

Michael Hagedorn Interview: Part 1

In my last post I wrote a review of Michael Hagedorn’s Post-Dated; The Schooling of an Irreverant Bonsai Monk, a book I consider to be an important and unique contribution to English language bonsai literature. You could say that Post-Dated is in fact literature, as distinguished from the how-to genre that most bonsai books fall into. In addition to being a very accomplished writer, Michael Hagedorn is a first rate bonsai artist. His work appeared in the Kokufu show in Tokyo (Kokufu is the pre-eminent bonsai show in Japan) in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and Mr. Suzuki (Michael’s teacher) honored … Continue reading Michael Hagedorn Interview: Part 1

Post-Dated by Michael Hagedorn

I first read Post-Dated at 30,000 feet; Boston to SFO. By coincidence, the man sitting next to me was reading Thoreau’s Walden, a book usually confined to students and scholars (and everyone else’s bookshelves). He was well past his student years and turned out to be an engineer who simply loved Thoreau. I bring this up because Post-Dated has a chapter titled: Restless Spirits: The Usefulness of Henry and Ernest. Henry is, of course, Henry Thoreau. Ernest is Ernest Hemmingway. Michael included them in his book because they both studied bonsai in Japan as young men. Henry was gifted, but … Continue reading Post-Dated by Michael Hagedorn