During the weekend of June 5th, Ed Clark from Lindsay, California came down to visit. If you like to read more about Ed Clark please click on this link to an earlier blog post. Ed came down to visit several individuals and just enjoy Southern California. Ed did a small meet and greet at Ted Matson's house with a small "shohin" sale of some of his specialty bonsai pre-material.
A beautifully twisted shohin Japanese Black Pine. That base is what you will be looking for. This is just one he brought down. Can you imagine trying to choose one or several from hundreds to choose from?
Above is an Blue Altas Cedar shohin. I'm not a evergreen person, but many that are available are grafted too high. These bad boys and girls are cut grown and do not have that ugly graft line.
Here are some shohin shimpaku juniper material ready to be transformed into future show pieces.
Above is a mandatory photo of Ed and Linda Clark talking about plant growth with another happy customer.
And where are we? We were hosted by Ted Matson after his class in the afternoon. This was the first time I visited his castle and asked for a grand tour of the place.
Ted graciously accepted my request and several other joined the tour. Ted's garden is layout in two unique zones. The current zone you see is a display garden, where all the trees are in display pots and in excellent shape.
Several bonsai pedestal are surrounded by beautiful natural drought tolerant scene. There was several extremely large bonsai in this photo and the scale of some of the trees are deceiving.
On the South side of the garden is a basic bench lined with 8 refined bonsai trees.
On the West side of the garden is another basic bench lined with some of the larger bonsai trees of his collection. This zone is a well composed garden lined with 3 sides of bonsai trees and a entertaining patio under a large pine tree. While this is not a unique layout, but is one of the best composed of a natural drought tolerant bonsai garden I have seen in a long while.
Behind the wooden fence is zone #2, what Ted calls his growing field. In this zone Ted works on his up and coming bonsai material. Materials that needs some time to grow and develop.
He has several rows of benches in this area. Quite and impressive selection of material that Ted has amassed and collected.
Ted shows off one of his collected trees. This juniper he gives us some background is called a "one seed" juniper from Arizona. It took him 3 separate digging trips before he finally took it home. He explains that it almost took a 4th trip because time and lack of tools for the final pull. But, it came out with some scissor jacks. "One Seed" Juniper comes from the single seed from the juniper berry of this species.
And finally, a picture of this little fellow. If you have read the other post about Ted. This little pomegranate was the star. If you like to read more about it please click on this link. Well, that does from my visit of both Ed and Ted's. Until next time.