Fall and the Inevitable Pause

Fall has come and all of my trees are tucked away under their benches. Much to my DH's chagrin, I have moved the most recently collected trees into my art studio/shed. It's too cold to paint out there right now anyway. I am so eager to work on my newly acquired stuff, but I have to be patient and wait. In the meantime, I am updating my inventory lists, identifying how many training pots and pond baskets I'm going to need, and I'm appreciating the finer things that I won't have time to notice in the spring. We are worried about our ARM raising again, making our house payment impossible. Lacking knowledge about what to do next and being called an irresponsible borrower on conservative talk shows is getting intolerable.

It makes little things like studying bark an even nicer escape.

I'm still not over my favorite nursery closing. It's been open forty or fifty years, and they have had some of their plants so long that they have grown through the bottom of their pots and into the ground and reached heights of thirty feet in some cases. My bonsai buddy and I could go on an excursion and drag stuff out of there for pennies on the dollar. Most of my 60 or so projects have come from there. None of my trees are anything like a finished bonsai (if there is such a thing). They are all projects in the works. All but a very few of them are still in tubs and training pots, or in the ground for fattening up. Most of them are still awaiting heavy pruning or trunk chops.

I plan to use this space for chronicling their progress and to record the damage I do to them! Hopefully, the damage is minor and the artistry will be high. More than likely the BS will be of more note.

Alas, it is winter time and all I can do is plan and think and look. Today I am admiring the bark on my old man pinion pine tree I collected in February 2005.