How To Make A Wonderful Flat-Top Bald Cypress
In my collecting endeavors I often run across trees that I just want to work on myself, and I mean beyond the initial styling I often do on my stock. This is one such tree. And yes, in this first photo it's obviously another one of those sticks I wrote about the...
How To Make A Deadwood Bald Cypress – The Initial Design
This isn't the first time I've made a deadwood Bald cypress bonsai, Taxodium distichum. They've been part of the ongoing How to Make Bonsai Lemonade series. Today I pulled out the last of the BC's I've been ignoring, that failed to bud all the way when I collected...
BC Hunting Season Ends – It Was Just About My Best Ever
With an early spring in the offing, today was probably just a bit beyond the end of the collecting season. All of the specimens I brought home today were already leafing out. Now, I've had good luck collecting cypresses after they start budding, so I don't have a...
More New Collected Trees – Aren’t These Just Great?
Today was another opportunity to collect some great new material. Here are a few of the trees I brought home today. First up is yet another terrific Bald cypress, Taxodium distichum. This one has a 5" trunk 5" above the soil surface, and is chopped at 27". The...
More BC Excitement, And The Tree With The Knees
So the best thing to do after posting a blog about not acquiring any more really big bonsai is to go out and collect some. There are two extenuating circumstances, however: one, I did say I would continue to collect big trees for artists out there who love the big...
No More Really Big Trees For Me – Just This Last One
I have always loved really big bonsai. No matter where you see them, either in a show or in someone's collection, your eye is invariably drawn to them. They're so ... big! And yet they're a small representation of something that's super big, which is a little odd...
It Was A Good BC Hunting Day, First One For 2017
Today I finally got out to where the Bald cypresses are, more specifically the smaller ones that have grown slowly giving rise to great taper and trunk movement. I brought a bunch home, and I wanted to post some photos for those of you who love the species as much as...
The Bald Cypress Forest In The Trees – Diving In
On Sunday past I did some work on a new Bald cypress forest bonsai I started last fall. My work was limited to wiring and straightening the trunks of four of the seven trees. As I noted last fall, when building a forest bonsai the main consideration is the placement...
It’s Really Warm This Winter – This BC Agrees
It's not at all uncommon for us to have mild winters down here. What's really uncommon for us is to have balmy winters down here. What does balmy mean? It means temperatures in the 80s with humidity in the 90s. And not just an odd day here or there, but days on...
The Rare Deep-South Winter Wonderland
Yesterday we got a rare bout of freezing rain and sleet, enough to put a light coating on everything. Well worth documenting. Temps fell to the low 20's this morning. This shouldn't be cold enough to kill anything on my benches, especially since it'll warm up a bit...