Author Archives: tony bonsaiko

I’m sitting at a Starbucks in Portland on my 3rd day of Michael Hagedorn’s seasonal.  I have about an hour to spare before our session starts.   At another table 5 seniors (2 ladies and 3 gentlemen) were discussing the hottest topic in America, the presidential election.  I was minding my own business when one of the gentleman got upContinue reading “Take a Bonsai Pill”

  I was going to respond to Michael Hagedorn’s shore pine design challenge by replying to his blog and describing what I would do with this shore pine in words but I ended up doing a sketch instead.  I will be joining Michael next week for his fall seasonal so I have to be careful I say the rightContinue reading “Michael Hagedorn’s Shore Pine Design Challenge”

5 lessons learned from bonsai on raising children

This Prostrate Juniper was in my yard and didn’t even realized it was a good bonsai material until about 3 years ago.  When I decided I will make a bonsai out of it,  I root pruned it early Fall 2016 and kept it in the ground. I then moved it into a plastic pot late Winter (orContinue reading “Making Sense out of this Juniper”

Six months ago I posted about a landscape juniper that I collected from someone’s yard in 2011 Landscape Juniper.  I did more work this weekend to continue to refine it.  I’ve fertilized the tree all of spring and summer and it is very heathy. This time, I made some dramatic changes from the last workContinue reading “Continued Refinement of Landscape Juniper”

February 2015, I collected several common (Tam) junipers from a landscape project.  Some didn’t make it and some made it.   Some of the junipers had beautiful trunk movement and “bones” while some was just practically a stick with green on top.   This post is what I did with a tree with a nice trunk butContinue reading “Bone Sai not Tanuki”

Got my copy of The Artisan Cup retrospective book this weekend.  It’s awesome to be part of it.  Thank you to Ryan and Chelsea Neil!