Our annual weekend workshop saw NZBA President Lindsay Muirhead in the spotlight.
Over the weekend some great trees emerged and Lindsay was certainly challenged by some of the material.
Marshall got the year off to a fantastic start with her superb talk on the tools used in Bonsai, the types, proper uses, care and maintenance. Her talk has been written up in the club newsletter.
Sandra gave a talk on her passion - Shohin. Her talk included a pinning down of the definition of shohin (as used by NZBA for the National Show) and how to display shohin correctly.
April saw our annual trip north of the Bombays to visit three very different and fascinating collections and a stop off at Bonsai NZ to lighten the wallets a bit. A great trip.
At the normal meeting Peter passed on the techniques shown to us by Nobu in December last year on how to prune Junipers correctly. No more pinching out the growing tips for us. There was also a very impressive display table with 16 trees for discussion.
At the May meeting Jeff gave a presentation on the history and interpretation of the Literati style. This interesting talk debunked some of the myths and common misconceptions around the style. After Jeff's talk Peter and Jeff gave an impromtu demonstration using 4 Black Pines - two of these were rejected as not being suitable, the others were given a rough shaping into Literati with more wiring to be done before the next meeting.
Our guest speaker for the afternoon was Rob Morley-Smith who came over from Tauranga to give a great in-depth talk on plant nutrition. During his talk Rob explained how plants get their nutrition and how we can make sure that our trees can get the best out of the feeding regiemes we use as well as how to add that little bit extra to make our trees stand out.
Our annual weekend workshop saw NZBA President Lindsay Muirhead in the spotlight. Over the weekend some great trees emerged and Lindsay was certainly challenged by some of the material. |
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Dianne could not be here due to work commitments so Peter gave a short talk on preparing pots and trees for the Convention before we got down to a workshop.
With the Convention coming upon us very quickly, Peter gave a timely talk on Display Stands, the types, how to choose the correct one and where to get them from.
The normal meeting was taken up by sorting out last minute convention details. We also had photographers from Chasing Time Productions come in to take pictures of bonsai for their next film.
The convention and exhibition were a great success. Over 150 trees on display and the demonstrationsby Robert Steven were fantastic. Our own demonstrators, Dianne, Les, Louis, Peter and Sandra also put on a good show.
The weekend was rounded off by a workshop with Robert on the Monday. More details and pictures can be found here.
The November meeting was mostly taken up with the AGM. This was followed by Sandra giving a brief talk on the 10 Merit trees from the Convention and Robert's comments on why they won awards.
December saw the usual weekend workshop with Nobu. A wide variety of trees were worked on giving Nobu a chance to demonstrate the different pruning techniques for each sepecies.
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The Wednesday meeting saw our 'Christmas Camel', three teams styling a bonsai from scratch, after 10 minutes the trees are swapped giving each team a chance to work on all the trees - and some very funny trees emerged.
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