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Last weekend I had the opportunity to judge the Minnesota Bonsai Society’s annual show held at the state fair. An amazing crowd of 225,000 people attended the fair that day, and many of them lined up to see the bonsai on display, a club tradition dating back to 1975.

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After the famed heat dome in the Pacific Northwest in late June, 2021, we saw some odd things.

When I first moved to Oregon I went to a famous WPA lodge on the top of Mt. Hood—our nearest active volcano—for some low-stress sightseeing. What I found on the walk around this high-elevation lodge spoke beautifully about how to design multiple-tree bonsai.

In the last few years I’ve started working more with olive bonsai. Although they do best where the weather gets hot, they can grow well in mild climates too.

We all love bonsai, to many of us it is a way of life, as we care for the trees and shape them into bonsai. Many require decades of timeless hard work which we find pleasurable as we create living art.

5 years after the first styling I return to this Itoigawa Juniper to bring it closer to the “final” image. progression and development is an ongoing process leading to smaller and bigger changes as the tree develops.

The 46th Mid-America Bonsai Exhibition was sponsored by the Midwest Bonsai Society. It was held at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois, on August 16-18, 2024 and is one of the largest regional bonsai shows in the nation. I have exhibited and sold bonsai in every one of the 46 shows, and in my opinion the tree quality has significantly improved throughout the decades, but took a giant leap forward this year with many refined developed bonsai displays. 

I had a rare surprise invitation to visit the private collections of Thang Dinh before the Mid-America Bonsai Exhibition, held in Chicago, Illinois last weekend.

Limber Pine grows in the Rocky Mountains, and when you can find a good one, it’s like hooking a halibut rather than a cod. It’s got better than average needles, buds back well, and trunks with deadwood abound.