After the long Christmas break the club got off to a good start with a panel of experts giving advice on where members should be going with problem trees. A total of 12 trees were discussed and options given.
March started with a very successful trip to Auckland to visit three collections and a garden centre. For a full report see the newsletter.
The March meeting was a bit quiet due to some very bad weather. After the usual notices and reports the members gathered around the display table and had an in-depth discussion on the trees on display.
The highlight of the April meeting was Graeme Hancock from Kaimai Garden Centre who came and did a talk (and show) on what is new in the plant world for gardens and bonsai. He brought along a variety of species to show us and to sell (if we were interested – many of us purchased something), and he left with quite a bit less mass than he arrived with.
Kaimai Garden centre has a special place in the history of Bonsai as the first meeting of all the NZ Bonsai Clubs was held at Kaimai Garden Centre in 1989, and was the catalyst for coming together and unification of the NZ clubs into NZBA.
May saw two of our 'Long Distance' members at the club. Peter Clendon came down to support Bob Langholm as he refined the group planting he donated to the club several years ago. This impressive Juniper and Pohutukawa group has been left to grow and it was felt that the time was right for Bob to bring it back into shape.
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The group will now be fed to bring a little colour back to the Juniper and given some protection over winter to allow the Pohutukawa to bud back.
A fantastic weekend workshop with Lee Wilson from Australia. Lee was extremely impressed with the quality of the material bought along and some fantastic trees emerged over the two days.
Jeff gave an exciting talk on the mounting and displaying of Suiseki. During his talk he explained some of the methods used and some of the 'rules' on how to display Suiseki. He also talked about his experiments with less conventional materials. A great talk.
Les and Melody did a double act for the meeting. Les gave an interesting talk on pruning techniques explaining when, why and how we should prune. This was followed by a challenge from Melody. She gave a brief talk on flowering bonsai and then set a quiz. On the table were 28 different flowering species, we had to guess what they were. To complement Melody's talk there table were a number of flowering trees on the display table.
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Ann and Peter provided the fun for this meeting. This time the "Camels" were to be created from Junipers. Three of the four groups set to straight away on their tree whilst the fourth spent some time discussing the options for their tree - almost too long as they had only made one cut when time was up and the trees moved on to the next group.
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The four 'Camels' and their creators. |
October was a very busy month with our Annual Show at Hamilton Gardens and the Timaru Convention. Attendance at our show was down this year due to other vents happening in and around Hamilton. Nevertheless the display was outstanding with 130 trees on display despite the non-attendance of a couple of the stalwarts due to other commitments. Adriaan and Poppie Engelbrecht came over from Tauranga to do the judging as well as put on their own sales table. Their comments on the trees they chose for the Merit Awards were insightful and informative. Our thanks to them for coming over.
Following on from the AGM we had reports on the recent NZBA committee meetings where it was confirmed that Hamilton will be hosting the National Convention in 2010 and the Timaru Conference where Les won the Photo competition and Peter won Dianne's Vision to Reality award. After tea Peter gave an illustrated talk on feeds and feeding regimes.
The first weekend of December saw a fantastic workshop with Nobu Kajiwara. As well as working on the trees, Nobu gave a very informative and thought provoking talk on the horticultural reasons behind his pruning techniques. This went down so well that many of the attendees from Saturday returned on Sunday for more.
 Fine pruning on Sandra's Juniper |
 Examining the soil in Melody's Azalea |
 Detailed pruning on a Beech |
 Marshall's Celtis gets a short back and sides |
