Good bye to old friends
I did something difficult yesterday - I said goodbye to some old friends. I really have not dealt with the bonsai destruction from the storm, but last weekend the living started coming out of their shells. That was nice to see and got my interest perked about bonsai once again. A couple of trees I was most worried about are looking fine, so I thought it would be a good time to clean out the dead ones. I suppose there was always hope for a couple of trees that I really cared about, but confronting the reality that they were really dead was not at all fun. I emptied about 20 bonsai pots and they sit, sadly, on an otherwise vacant bench. Some of the ones that died were damaged a year ago when the watering system failed. Others were perfectly health, or so I thought. Truth is they were in marginal health and could not stand the stress of the drought after the storm. It was harder than I thought and not quite the "oh well, that just the way it is" thing that I have been saying for the past six months. The saddest part was the tree I had to hack out of its pot with a small pick ax. That's not a repotting tool, by the way. It was difficult to hack through roots with a maul that I had tenderly manicured for the past decade. I remember when I bought that tree in Lafayette in the back of an old, run down bonsai nursery. I remember what it looked like at the time and what the nursery owner said about it. "looks like it wants to be a broom style," he said. But, I didn't want that, so I changed the design. I remember getting advice from a friend on whether to reduce the crown from three to two main branches. He was right - it was much better with just two. I remember taking the tree to one of the kid's 6th grade class and talking about Bonsai and asking the kids whether I should cut a small branch I had been debating - "yes, was the chorus," and off went the branch. It never gave me any trouble and grew slowly and consistently year to year. It was a beautiful tree. It was a native hornbeam, collected from the wild.
I thought of just breaking the pot and throwing the whole thing away, but that's dumb. Trees die all the time and we don't just throw the pot away. Now, the trees lay in the trash pile like an old bone yard. They were, indeed, old friends and I will miss them. Funny how easy it is to ignore painful issues for long periods of time. Perhaps I'm free now. I don't know. Truth is that the shock waves of the storm keep reverberating - ever smaller, but seemingly never ending.
I thought of just breaking the pot and throwing the whole thing away, but that's dumb. Trees die all the time and we don't just throw the pot away. Now, the trees lay in the trash pile like an old bone yard. They were, indeed, old friends and I will miss them. Funny how easy it is to ignore painful issues for long periods of time. Perhaps I'm free now. I don't know. Truth is that the shock waves of the storm keep reverberating - ever smaller, but seemingly never ending.