Don’t forget to mark your calendar: JUNE 16 - 19, 2011. We will need help setting up on June 15 and breaking down on June 19. No matter what your physical condition, there will be areas where you can help.

REGISTRATION:

Registrations are coming in from people outside the Louisville area. If you plan on taking classes, submit your registration soon. Workshops have limits set on them by the instructors, since they will be supplying the trees. Generally, this limit is 8 to 10. So if you are interested in a particular workshop, get those forms in to ensure your spot.

While on registrations, I have been asked if a volunteer had to register for the symposium to visit the exhibit and vendors. The answer is NO; if you volunteer, once your ‘shift’ is done, you can visit both areas. If you are going to attend the seminar sessions, there are still many things that you can do. Don’t wait for the committee chairmen to call you!

SEPTEMBER 18, 2010 - Cave Hill Maintenance Shop - 10 AM-Noon

On September 18, we will be holding a BYOT workshop at Cave Hill. Trees can be trimmed, wired, and styled at this time of year but there will not be any transplanting done. There will be a number of our more experienced members there to give you some advice and help. Bring your own tools, wire, and turntable if you want to use one.

by Ogden Tanner

This article appeared in the "Smithsonian Magazine" in 1990.  A number of our members have visited the National Arboretum and hopefully this summer I will be able to visit it also - ED

Behind the walls of the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Stillwater, Tom Chappell and 17 other members of the prison's bonsai club spend a couple of hours each night working on their collection of tiny, picturesquely twisted trees.

"It gets your mind off other things," says Chappell, who is serving 15 years to life for second-degree murder. His prize juniper, which he trained for two years, won a blue ribbon at the Minnesota State Fair last year; with the help of other ribbons earned by fellow inmates, the club swept the competition in the novice class. "Most of these guys are lifers with a history of big trouble," observes Sgt. Mike Hermerding of the prison staff. "But we've had surprisingly few problems since they got involved in bonsai."

When he isn't performing surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, orthopedist David Andrews can usually be found operating on his own collection of bonsai in Alpine, New Jersey. "I spend all day making crooked limbs straight, and all night making straight ones crooked," he quips. "Practicing bonsai has given me a certain amount of balance."

by Lee Squires

I hope everyone is surviving the old cliché, “Hot enough for ya?” It has been a scorcher, and our bonsai know it best when 95 degrees heats up the pots around 3:00 P.M., makes our beloved trees wince in horticultural pain. What can we do? Try to provide some shade one way or another and move your more sensitive trees into afternoon shade. There are excellent shade cloths on the market, but you will need to construct a frame to hold the fabric. That’s the hard part and it’s difficult to make it look professional without some skilled help or advice. Water twice a day if possible. I prefer to water in the evening when the sun is down. The cooler temperature and lack of sun reduces evaporation and water stays in the pots longer. If you water in the morning, the water is sucked out and evaporated by the sun by 1:00 and your trees don’t get full use out of your watering. If possible, water again around 1:00 to cool down the pots. However, us workers out there can’t be home from work to take care of the afternoon watering chore. Put in an irrigation system with a timer. Several of our members have them and they work well. Downside? Generally, your trees have to be placed in close proximity for efficient system design and you may lose the artistic individual stand display of your trees and resort to “bench life” for your bonsai. Check out the various options out there and consider providing some solutions to the summer heat issues.

by George Buehler

Hopefully, you noticed there was no July issue of the newsletter. Seldom have I missed an issue, but I have been out of the country for a month and …. Well I guess that wasn’t much of an excuse, but it’s the best I can come up with.

For this month’s featured article, we have a very informative discussion on Koi and bonsai and how the two are related (and different). I want to thank Mike Pfeffer for ‘volunteering’ to write it. Mike has been involved in Koi for a number of years and has become somewhat of an expert. He quite successfully breeds and raises Koi and is willing to answer questions on them. I hope I can persuade Mike to routinely submit more articles so we can all learn more about starting a pond, populating it and keeping them alive.

When you look around, you will see that there are many subjects closely related to bonsai – koi, suiseki, kusamono, ichiban, Japanese gardens – to name a few. Hopefully, I can find a few experts on these subjects to put together articles for this journal. I know that there will be a nice pamphlet on kusamono coming out fairly soon. It is being written by Pauline Muth, and it will be part of the “Basic” series of bonsai art. I hope to be able to get permission to publish parts of it here. Although not an expert by any means, I have been researching information for an article about Japanese gardens for several years and perhaps soon I will find time to put it all together for an article.

by Mike Pfeffer 

In addition to being a member of the Greater Louisville Bonsai Society, I’m also a member of the Greater Louisville Koi & Goldfish Society.  I think there are a lot of similarities in the two hobbies, and I know our bonsai club has a few members that raise koi and goldfish.  I have a lot more history and knowledge of koi than I do bonsai, and I was asked to write a little bit about that hobby.

I began with my first pond in 1990.  I started out with a very shallow pond and added goldfish and plants.  I really enjoyed my first pond and, since I built it on the back of my property, I sensed that I was entering a different dimension when I walked back to the pond to sit on my bench and enjoy the waterfall, fish, frogs and plants.  I knew little to nothing back in those days and, as time progressed, I made lots of mistakes.  I quickly developed an interest in koi and got rid of the goldfish in the first two years.  Just like bonsai, as my hobby progressed, my tastes progressed.  In the 90s, I was a sponge, reading everything I could get my hands on and traveling to see koi in other parts of the country and other parts of the world.  My second pond was deeper and larger; even more so with my third pond, all for the sake of giving my koi the best possible environment.  In the last six years I have constructed a temporary greenhouse over the pond, which uses solar heat to keep the pond water well above freezing all winter long.  While koi can survive the winter at near freezing water temperatures, many times, long cold winters can cause health issues in the spring.