The art of bonsai has fascinated me for over 20 years and has become a bit of an addiction, I got into growing bonsai when I was in my early 20's and still get that same buzz out of it now as I did then when I see a beautiful tree that someone has lovingly styled, trained and cared for over many years.

How I Learnt

When I first got into growing bonsai, I couldn't afford to buy the already trained trees from my local garden centre, nor did I want to take the risk of killing something I had paid a lot of money for, so I concentrated on growing trees from cuttings, seed, plants from my parents and even neighbours yards, and anywhere else I could legally collect trees that I could experiment with.

This was certainly a challenge to create anything of quality in the early stages, but it taught me a lot about the plants themselves and how they reacted under different growing conditions, how to get the most from a tree that has very little potential to begin with, and that with time if you can keep it alive in most cases it can become something (even if it only resembles a bonsai and you can be proud of it!)

My first demonstration

In the late 90's I ran a personal training business and one of my clients at the time was one of the owners of a local garden centre. She new one of my hobbies was bonsai and asked if I would be able to do a demonstration for their upcoming business birthday celebration sales weekend, I reluctantly agreed and then spent the next week scouring the countryside for material to use that I could transform in a reasonable amount of time, would have an instant impact, and keep onlookers interested long enough to see an end result.

I found a couple of likely subjects and over the weekend worked on these trees to produce (even if I do say so myself) a couple of respectable looking bonsai.

Teaching Bonsai

About 10 years ago I was asked by another of the local nurseries that I had started supplying trees to for sale, to start teaching classes on how to bonsai as they had a lot of customers enquiring about learning the art.

This made me realize how many other people locally and then all over the world that had the same passion as I did for this wonderful art form.

I had no experience with teaching anything but I decided I would be able to put together enough information and with some practical work on starters we could have a course.

I put together a a general work-book that the participants could follow along with and even today after some refinement I still use that work-book when teaching classes.

I love everything about bonsai

Growing bonsai starters from cuttings and seeds, to training nursery stock into a work of art, teaching and demonstrating this beautiful art-form to other passionate bonsai lovers, everything about bonsai still gets me excited.

No matter how long I have been growing trees, how many I produce, how many bonsai books I have on the subject, I still continue to learn more about trees, nature and the art of bonsai every day.

This is why I love everything about bonsai!