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1. The Pacific Bonsai Expo will be held this coming weekend, November 12-13, at the Bridge Yard in Oakland, California. The address is 210 Burma Rd.

If you haven’t heard the news, the Pacific Bonsai Expo is sold out – thanks so much for the support!

I can’t believe it – the Pacific Bonsai Expo opens in four weeks! Here are the latest updates.

Bonsai stands are small tables used to display bonsai. They’re commonly found in exhibits or in formal indoor displays. We rarely see them in the garden as few stands are built to last outdoors.

This year’s suiseki exhibit was held in the Greenhouse Gallery at the International Bonsai Arboretum on September 10-11, 2022, in Rochester, New York. An active membership of 13, from a much larger group of the Suiseki Study Group of the Bonsai Society of Upstate New York shared their prized suiseki with visitors and answered many questions. A few weeks ago we had our annual stone collecting trip and a few of the newly collected stones were displayed as suiseki. A stone or rock does or become a suiseki until it is collected and appreciated for its artistic suggestions of natural scenic formations or of objects.

This fall’s Pacific Bonsai Expo is coming together quickly. As a result, all of us working behind the scenes wanted to share some updates so here we go!

Today we finished setting up my displays to welcome visitors to my garden for this weekend’s Open House & Sale. Each of the individual displays was very carefully designed, and the entire four displays as well. Each display is unique, all trees, containers, display tables, accessory plantings have not been duplicated. Even all of the flat stands under the accessory plantings differ.

The lowest area of bonsai is one of the most important features which creates beauty and the character of the bonsai. We work the surface root area quite a bit when transplanting. Please note that nearly all of these bonsai have spent their entire lives in a container, carefully shaping and allowing the trees to mature slowly during the past 60 plus years under my care. The Ginkgo, Chrysanthemums, Larch, Satsuki, Korean Hornbeam and only one Trident maple were trained from field grown of collected material. All others have been completely container grown.

For those of you curious to learn which trees scored best in the recent Kokufu scoring exercise (see part 1 and part 2 for details), here they are!

This week’s topic is scoring multi-point displays – displays that feature more than one bonsai within a six-foot space.