Learning patience from bonsai
BONSAI, according to Lito Alansolon,
current president of the Cebu Bonsai Society, is the Japanese art of
growing trees on a tray. And the beautiful bonsai specimen one sees in
an exhibit or in a bonsai grower’s garden is a result of hard work.
Alansolon said he became fascinated with bonsai when he visited exhibits
in Metro Manila where he was then assigned as a regional manager of a
pharmaceutical company. Inspired by the exhibits—“looking at a big tree
in miniature form—he took up bonsai cultivation when he retired in 1999.
He says it’s not easy to come up with a beautiful bonsai plant. It can
take several years to finally realize one’s concept of the bonsai one
has started to grow and it takes a lot of work.
To make a bonsai, he explained, one can start several ways. One is
through cuttings, or marcotting or layering. Or one can start from a
seed. But the easiest, though perhaps not as self-satisfying, is to go
to bonsai nurseries which, he says, “have a variety of ready material
according to size; and then you replant it. It’s easier to create a
bonsai from a nursery than from the cuttings or seeds.” The hard part
comes when one already has the bonsai material.
One chooses the tray or container where one plants the bonsai material.
Then one has to nurture the plant. For cutting and marcotting, it may
take three years to finally form it as a bonsai. From seed, it can take
up to 12 years. The plant has to be carefully watered and the potting
medium changed every three to five years. To shape the bonsai to one’s
concept of its mature tree, one needs to bend the branches using
aluminum or copper wire, or one might clip away an unwanted twig in
order to shape the tree to one’s idea of it in mature form, be it in the
form like the broom or umbrella type, the informal or formal upright,
or the cascade, or whatever else one may fancy.
These days, now that he is much older than when he retired, Alansolon
says he is into an even smaller form of bonsai, a miniature bonsai:
“Shohin size bonsai.” It is bonsai that can be carried in the palm of
one’s hand, and it must not be more than 10 inches tall. The biggest of
his old bonsai needs to be carried by four people if it is to be
transported but his shohin bonsai is easily portable. He says, though,
the care is the same. He uses “the same technique, the same way of
caring for them except when you change potting medium. For shohin, one
changes the potting medium once every year while for the big bonsai, the
potting medium is changed every three to five years. Making a bonsai
teaches me patience.”
It also gives Alansolon great pleasure to contemplate the things of
beauty he, in effect, has created. This is why he, and many more
hobbyists and enthusiasts in Cebu, stays “hooked” on bonsai.
Read more: http://www.sunstar.com.ph/cebu/lifestyle/2017/11/11/learning-patience-bonsai-574112
Read more: http://www.sunstar.com.ph/cebu/lifestyle/2017/11/11/learning-patience-bonsai-574112