Philipp improves Chinese juniper

This is a very old garden juniper from the Chinensis family. Anyway, it sat in my garden for more than ten years now. Today Philipp worked on it to bring it one step further. Philipp practiced his carving skills with serious machines. Now the juniper will be for sale or trade. it should be possible for most enthusiasts to form a decent crown with the existing green.

Lens comparison

Some folks show an immense interest in my new Tamron lens vs. the Nikon lenses that I used before.

Here the results of taking shots of two trees at the same light with different lenses. Since I had the Nikon D40 body I used my 18-200 Nikon lenses and the Tamron 60/2.0.

So what do we learn from this? I think we can see that ALL trees look artificial with both lenses. This is because BMW puts spotlight with BLUE light onto these trees. And then we learn that the Tamron lens makes much sharper images, which is no surprise

Here the shots.

1) Nikon 18-200, 36 mm, 5.0 aperture

2) Tamron 60/2.0 aperture 5.0


3) Tamron 60/2.0 aperture2.5

4) Nikon 18-200,55mm, aperture 5.0

5) Tamron 60/2.0, aperture 5,0

Bavarian Garden and Flower Exhibit Rosenheim 2010 #2

Today I visited the show with my wife. As you can tell the flowers interested me more than the trees. The light is very poor an it is nearly impossible to make decent bonsai photographs there. Anyway, on Sunday, May 30 starting 2 pm I will have a four hour tree critique there and 'ask the master' session.

Cutting back deciduous trees

Your bonsai book tells you to carefully pinch new growth on deciduous tree soon after it appears. This will result in short internodes and some time after this the tree will respond with a second weaker flush and thus it will improve ramification.This is very time consuming. One can spend a whole afternoon with a large maple. And it weakens the tree.
As so often i do exactly the opposite of what the books says. I let the trees grow freely for a few weeks. then I take a medium size hedge shear and cut off the new growth rather ruthlessly within a few minutes. I can handle about 20 to 30 trees in one day. The tree responds strongly with a second flush of lots of buds also back into old wood. Thus my trees are much healthier and the ramification will be very good - much better than with the book method. The trees fatten about five times more than with the book method. Anyway, I do this with ALL my deciduous trees since many years, also with the shohin trees. The quality of my trees must have something to do with my methods. There are folks who write 'Walter may be a great artist, but I doubt his horticultural wisdom'. well, maybe, but just look at my gallery. Do you think this has nothing to do with horticulture?

1 anw 2 Acer palmatum
2 and 3 Lonicera xylostemum
4 Fagus sylvatica