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29 October 2005
Gardening Calendar
Gardening events for the week
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Seawater Seminar -- 2 to 5 p.m. today. Don Jansen speaks on remineralizing the soil with diluted seawater. Free. Sunset Valley City Hall, 3205 Jones Road. (Park at Burger Center). Register at 894-3387 or Patrick@patricktimpone.com.
New growers seminar, show and sale -- 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. today. Heart O' Texas Orchid Society event. Free. Zilker Garden Center, 2220 Barton Springs Road. 502-1145.
Dromgoole on Organics -- Noon today. John Dromgoole, owner of The Natural Gardener, talks about fall gardening. Free. The Natural Gardener, 8648 Old Bee Cave Road. 288-6113, www. naturalgardeneraustin.com.
Bonsai benefit -- 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. today. Garage sale benefits Texas State Bonsai Exhibit, Inc. 2005 Edgemont Drive. 266-2655.
Halloween Fun -- 4 to 7 p.m. Sunday. Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center has a bat scavenger hunt and pumpkin patch. $6 adults, $2.50 kids 5-12; free to members and children younger than 5. 4801 La Crosse Ave. 292-4200 or www.wildflower.org.
Health with Herbs -- 9:30 a.m. Tuesday. Austin Herb Society presents member Vee Fowler; also, a Day of the Dead altar will be created. $3 for nonmembers. Zilker Garden Center, 2220 Barton Springs Road. 936-1190 or www.austinherbsociety.org.
Plant history lecture -- 7 p.m. Tuesday. Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the Botanical Research Institute of Texas present a lecture on potato lore by historian and author Larry Zuckerman. Free. 4801 La Crosse Ave., 292-4200. www.wildflower.org.
Garden Club of Austin sale -- Noon to 5 p.m. Nov. 5 and 6. Show and sale from experienced Austin growers. Zilker Garden Center, 2220 Barton Springs Road. 345-0906.
Rain barrel sale - 9 a.m. - noon Nov. 5. City of Austin offers 60-gallon rain barrels for sale. $60 each. 6014 Techni Center Drive, 974-2199. www.ci.austin.tx.us/watercon/rainwater.htm
Permaculture classes -- 7 to 8:30 p.m. Nov. 9, Nov. 16, Dec. 7 and Dec. 14. Introduction to the specifics of living more sustainably. Free. Habitat Suites Hotel, 500 E. Highland Mall Blvd. 695-3425 or austinprogressivecalendar.com.
Send calendar information to garden@statesman.com at least two weeks before the event.
Hundreds of blooming orchids exhibited in a naturalistic style will be shown Saturday and Sunday at Klehm Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Rockford. The flowers also will be for sale.
Anyone may enter a blooming orchid for judging, and entries will be accepted until 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28. Bonsai also will be displayed and available for sale. The show is presented by the Blackhawk Orchid Society and the Rock River Bonsai Society.
If you go
# What: Orchid and bonsai show and sale # When: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29, and Sunday, Oct. 30 # Where: Klehm Arboretum & Botanic Garden, 2701 Clifton Ave., Rockford # Cost: Free # Information: 815-297-4723
Sequoyah County Home Community Education (HCE) is sponsoring a Fall Fun and Food Tasting from 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m. Thursday at the OSU Extension Building at the Sallisaw Rodeo Grounds.
Sue Tatham, HCE membership chairman, said the event will feature American Indian (Cherokee) fry bread, Chinese samples from the new Super China Buffet in Sallisaw, homemade Italian bread and savory spread, Mexican beans and tortillas from Caporales restaurant in Sallisaw, All-American apple pie, and mini sandwiches.
Also expected to be at the event are a Bonsai display from Myung's Garden (Korean) and an authentic Cherokee cultural dance performance. The food blessing will be the Lord's Prayer in Cherokee.
For more information contact Tatham at 775-4093 or Oma Bounds, HCE cultural enrichment chairman, at 775-7241.
BENT CREEK, N.C. — Ask Arthur Joura about bonsai, and you won't hear much about Japan, where the art of training trees to grow in small pots first took root.
Arthur Joura tends to a pond cypress bonsai as he prepares for the opening of the new Bonsai Exhibition Garden.
John Fletcher, Asheville Citizen-Times
"I don't speak Japanese. I don't own a kimono. I don't do tea ceremonies," Joura said. "All these plants were not touched by Japanese hands."
While the mystique of miniature trees may have originated a millennium ago in Asia, bonsai has gone native at the N.C. Arboretum with the opening of the new Bonsai Exhibition Garden earlier this month.
"It's an Appalachian art form now," said Joura, the arboretum's bonsai curator. Arboretum and tourism officials see the new $1.8 million garden as another key to attracting more tourists, and their dollars, to the area.
"This is going to be one of the finest bonsai gardens in North America, if not the world. Bonsai is so relevant to what we are, and our mission of connecting people with plants. It's a very traditional art form, but it's a very energetic art form, and we are at the forefront in design and the use of natural plants," said George Briggs, arboretum executive director.
The Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority saw the potential for more visitors, contributing $750,000 toward the project in 2003. Money for the new garden was raised from private sources, Briggs said.
A horticultural art form that originated in Asia about 1,000 years ago, bonsai has taken root in America in the past 50 years. Unlike dwarf plants, which grow only so tall according to their genes, bonsai are plants and trees carefully trained to remain small as they grow.
The tops are pruned regularly while rootballs are typically trimmed and replanted each year in shallow pots. Branches are trained with copper wire to give certain shape to the tree. Bonsai are not necessarily old trees, although they may look ancient.
Many of the plants in the North Carolina Arboretum have been grown from seed in the last 10 years.
Briggs said the arboretum averages about 250,000 visitors a year but could add a half million more with the opening of the bonsai garden, along with an improved outdoor amphitheater and education center under construction.
The arboretum has played host to the Southeast's largest collection of bonsai since 1992, when the Staples family of Butner donated the first trees and other bonsai enthusiasts began sending their plants to Asheville.
For the past decade, the plants have been stored in the arboretum greenhouses, which are closed on weekends.
With their root balls carefully trimmed and branches coaxed into shape by wire, trees that would grow 100 feet tall in the wild thrive at only a few inches tall in shallow pots. Joura groups individual trees into small groves and stands reminiscent of views along the Blue Ridge Parkway or at Graveyard Fields.
Using juniper and azalea, he re-creates the rhododendron and hemlocks atop scenic Roan Mountain.
"You can go inside these landscapes. It's like you make yourself that size and walk right in," he said.
It's hard for Joura to pick out his personal favorite among the 100 or so plants in the collection. That's like picking out a favorite child in a family.
But he does have fond memories of a particular piece called "Yoshimura's Island," a grove of American hornbeam already starting to show the gold of autumn foliage.
Joura watched his teacher, Yuji Yoshimura, "the father of American bonsai," create the grouping with plants raised from seed in Asheville. It was Yoshimura's last bonsai project before his death in 1997.
The garden itself has been specifically designed to highlight the artistry of the plants.
Mike Oshita, a classically trained Japanese garden designer, worked hard to blend Asian tradition with a more contemporary Appalachian feel.
"I didn't want to make just a Japanese garden," Oshita said.
He designed a stone garden, handpicking rock from nearby mountains, and placing them just so in a flowing pattern, much like trout heading upstream.
"They all point to the mountains," he said.
Bonsai builds a bridge between the Appalachians and Asia, which share certain plant species found nowhere else in the world, Joura explained.
There are fringe trees and tulip trees, for example, that only grow here in the Southeast Appalachians and in China and Japan.
Building one of the nation's best bonsai garden here bodes well for the Arboretum and Asheville, Joura said.
"Asheville is a little quirky, a little different for most people. We have our own unique character. To add something like bonsai is a perfect fit, it will be one more feather of a different color in Asheville's favor."
A bonsai exhibit at an arboretum in Western North Carolina, where there’s no sizable Japanese community or other apparent connection to Asian culture, appears a bit out of place at first. But some things seem destined to be. There’s something a bit uncanny about the serendipity that brought together all the elements needed to create a unique garden at the North Carolina Arboretum that melds an ancient Japanese art form into the Appalachian mountain culture and landscape. And it is a melding. There are no graceful teahouses or bamboo fences in this garden. The pavilion has the solid ruggedness of a mountain cabin. And a number of the bonsai (which literally means “a plant in a tray or a tree in a pot”) were made with plants native to Western North Carolina and designed to evoke the landscapes of the region. The circumstances that culminated in $1.8 million Bonsai Exhibition Garden began in the early 1990s with the arrival of a young artist who wanted to learn about horticulture. His name was Arthur Joura. Not long after Joura’s arrival, a member of the staff made a phone call to make sure the arboretum’s program for kids was aligned with the state school curriculum and by chance ended up talking to a woman who said her parents were looking for a place to donate their bonsai collection. The woman was the daughter of George and Cora Staples of Butner. Mrs. Staples was a sophisticated collector of bonsai and the collection was valuable, but arboretum Executive Director George Briggs says he wasn’t quite sure how a bonsai collection would fit into an arboretum devoted to Southern Appalachian flora. He took the matter up with his board of directors, which at the time happened to include Dr. John L. Creech, a former director of the National Arboretum and by chance, the man responsible for its internationally acclaimed collection of bonsai and penjing. Penjing is the Chinese art of creating miniature landscapes in a container that was the precursor of the Japanese art of bonsai. Dr. Creech conceived the idea for the National Arboretum collection after hearing a lecture by Yuri Yoshimura in 1972. Yoshimura probably did more than any other individual to introduce the non-oriental world to the art of bonsai. Creech and Yoshimura later served as advisors to the National Bonsai Foundation, Inc., a non-profit corporation in Washington, D.C., founded in 1982 on behalf of the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum of the National Arboretum. With Creech’s background and support, the decision was made to accept the Staples’ gift. Other considerations played a role as well, Briggs says. There seemed to be a natural connection in that there are several plant species that are unique to Japan and parts of Asia and the Southern Appalachians. And bonsai seemed to fit well with the arboretum’s mission of “cultivating connections between people and plants” because they can be grown by gardeners without much space and are intriguing to children. Briggs chose Joura to take responsibility for the collection and began sending him to bonsai conventions and to study with bonsai masters. One of those masters was Yoshimura. In 1957, “The Japanese Art of Miniature Trees and Landscapes” by Yuri Yoshimura and Giovanna M. Halford was published in the U.S. and Japan. It was the first really comprehensive and practical work on the subject, according to an article about Yoshimura on the Web site of the Phoenix Bonsai Society. In 2004, the 37th printing was made of the book, which some have referred to as the “Bonsai Bible in English.” In 1997, when Joura went to study with Yoshimura at his home in upstate New York, Joura took native plants he had grown from seed with him. Yoshimura used the plants to make a bonsai for Joura, who was his last student. That bonsai, now on display at the arboretum, became Yoshimura’s last major piece of work. Joura says Yoshimura encouraged him to find new ways to connect people with the art of bonsai. One of his own creations is titled “Appalachian Cove.” It is composed of native plants, a red maple, an American hornbeam, a Carolina rhododendron, a St. John’s wort, a rare native spirea with flowers that are not as showy as the Japanese spirea found in many yards, and native mosses and stones. The design evokes the sense of being in a mountain cove, just as a painting or a photograph would. But, as Joura points out, this piece of art is alive. “If you paint a landscape,” Joura says, “the painting never changes. These are constantly changing. That’s what makes them so engaging and rewarding and challenging. Because what you’re working with is alive… you develop a relationship with it…. It has an individuality of its own. It grows and you grow by working with it.” The arboretum’s goal is to honor and respect bonsai’s Japanese roots while also exploring the ways it can be used as an expression of Southern Appalachian sensibilities. “Art isn’t supposed to stand still,” Joura says. Just as bonsai had its roots in the Chinese art of penjing, it may be that our Appalachian mountain culture will take the ancient art that the National Arboretum Web site calls “the pinnacle of gardening skill,” in yet another direction.
Dennis Quenneville thought he'd never see his three bonsai trees again after they disappeared from his side yard last weekend. But on Friday morning, someone left the oldest and largest of the miniature trees on the front porch of his home on South University. Quenneville, an engineer at Visteon, said his children first noticed the tree on their way to school. "I'm totally happy I've gotten my big tree back,'' Quenneville said of the 18-inch Chinese juniper. Still missing are the other two bonsai, but Quenneville said he was willing to give those up to get back the Chinese juniper, which he bought in Japan in 1991. Quenneville, a member of the Ann Arbor Bonsai Club, has about 20 potted bonsai, which spend the warm months outside and winter in the garage. Taking care of the miniature plants is time-consuming. Enthusiasts prune and wire the bonsai to look like a scene in nature. The Chinese juniper that was returned was only partially wired into shape when it was taken, said Quenneville. Quenneville and his wife, Gail, returned from an out-of-town trip Sunday to discover the bonsai were missing from the yard. Quenneville admits he forgot to lock the gate on the fence that encircles the yard before they left. "That's never going to happen again,'' he said.
Bay Area bonsai expert Tim Kong demonstrates how easy it is to create and maintain bonsai from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday. The free demonstration takes place at Oakland's Lakeside Park, 666 Bellevue Ave. Call (510) 763-8409 or visit ww.gsbf-bonsai.org.
Send home and garden items at least three weeks in advance to Pad & Patio, Bay Area Living, 4770 Willow Road, Pleasanton, CA 94588, or e-mail Christina Troup at ctroup@angnewspapers.com. Fax submissions can be directed to (925) 416-4874. Include the name of the event, time, date, place, description, cost and a telephone number.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. Dennis Quenneville thought he would never see his prized bonsai tree again. Now he's happy that someone returned it yesterday, mostly unharmed. For 14 years, Quenneville carefully pruned, watered and shaped the Chinese juniper that he bought in Japan. It was swiped along with three other trees while he was out of town last week. Quenneville is a mechanical engineer for Visteon. The master gardener says he was willing to give the other trees up to have his largest tree back.
Mr. Gopalkrishnan sees a typical manager as a Bonsai whose growth has been restricted by undertaking stereotype tasks without much challenge. He feels management is all about instincts. There is no definite protocol which can be followed in management. A typical manager becomes a ?Bonsai Manager? by the age of thirty unless he/she chooses to look out for grass root experience and be ready to sweat out on the shop floor. There is a need to increase one?s span of mind, go for healthy mental food and accelerate one?s growth by following his/her instincts. He cites his example and attributes his success to his days in Hindustan Lever wherein after graduating from IIT Kharagpur in Computer Science he joined HLL and was asked to go out and sell soaps in markets of Nashik (he fancied of sitting in an air-conditioned cabin punching keys). According to him there is a need to understand the product and the consumer, failing which one can never be a good manager. He feels management education does not guide us to take instinctive decisions. It just provides us with knowledge required to follow our ?Gut Feeling? to take such decisions. In the world of management there are no proven managers because management is all about instincts. When one rises in management one should rely on his instinctive decisions since there are no prescriptive solutions. ?Managers should be implementers rather than mere planners.? Management is an art which cannot be taught unlike subjects like marketing, finance, etc. Subjects like HR and OB only help in providing an insight to management and those who learn what is not taught grow to become Top Class Managers. According to him, the human brain structure consists of three layers*: 1. Pea ? This part controls the basic life functions and co-ordinates the physical activities. 2. Lemon ? This part is capable of basic emotions. 3. Cabbage ? This part makes us diplomatic, and this is what differentiates the humans from animals. Most of the mistakes made by the top managers are elementary in nature. At such crucial moments one should rely on their instinctive Brain (pea and lemon) rather than on their top quality brain (cabbage). He also talked about BRIM (Brain Remote Instinctive Memory). It consist of two parts Short term & Long term memory (Explicit memory) Remote Memory (Implicit memory, emotional events) He stresses the need to rely on the ?remote memory? as that regulates one?s instincts and things stored here are indestructible. Every individual in an organization has a different perspective and level of thinking and a manager would be successful only if he is able to connect with each individual at the right time. He should be able to motivate people and get the best out of them by engaging their emotions. This needs to be done at times when they are least motivated. The first ten years are crucial in shaping the future of a successful manager, since it is in these ten years that one would be exposed to grass-root experiences and gain by the challenges he comes across. * Cabbage, the largest part of the brain is supposedly in the head. Lemon is in the centre and the pea is at the bottom near the neck.
Starting tomorrow, people who sit down to dinner at the Imperial Inn on North 10th Street will get more than a meal.
Is it wry prank or biting satire, a joke or a complaint?
At first glance, the 20-piece installation looks like a typical grouping of bonsai plants, for sale in the window of a 10th Street store. A closer look reveals that the miniature 'trees' are actually oversize stalks of broccoli, nests for tiny resin chickens - a Mad Hatter version of traditional bonsai.
