Japanese maples, doing their thing around Halloween. It still seems such a miracle to me, that you can have a tree in a pot, and it will color up and drop its leaves just like the ones in the yard, and at the same time, too.
It seems the fall will go on and on; day after day in the upper 60's, day after day calling me outside to play. Alas, I cannot, for guests arrive tomorrow night, and I must remove the evidence that we have been using this place like a hotel for the last three weeks.
Winter chores always sneak up on me. They have less immediacy than spring chores, after all. A tomato seedling that's ready to be planted in May starts to go yellow and holler for help. You see your investment dying, and you get on it. But a spent gladiolus bulb can sit in the ground through a few light frosts. No big deal. You can always pull them another day. Likewise, bonsai trees can take light frosts; it's that 20-degree night that's going to give them problems. So I put off putting them to bed.
They're so beautiful. How can I put them in the ground before they've lost their last leaves?
King of them all, the split one. This is the one that was knocked off the porch by a coon in 1993 and split down the middle, breaking its pretty blue pot. I taped it back together with electrician's tape and it healed just fine and now is the most beautiful of them all.
With apologies to my other trees, who are also lovely:
When you have a tree in a pot, you can really see the subtle changes fall brings. This tree is in full color. But just before the leaves drop, they lose red:
and they get paler and paler as they begin to fall:
At last you can see their bones; you can see how they might need to be trimmed to give spaces "for the birds to fly through." This is my oldest tree, and the one I love best, because we've been through so much together. It has a really grand, thick trunk and the best leaf-to-tree size proportions of them all. In other words, it has itty-bitty leaves, which is what you want in bonsai, and which you can only get over a long, long time. *Unless you are willing to cut its new leaves, leaving only half of each one, every spring, which I am emphatically not. This saps the tree's energy and causes it to put out smaller leaves the next time. Blaa. I'll wait.*
26 years is a long time to care for a tree. It's got quite a twist developing to its trunk, which is exciting.
My little Korean moon maple, in training since 2006, has fabulous fall color. I'm excited about this tree. It's already got some great asymmetry going on. I think it's going to be a stunner in about 25 years. At that point Phoebe and Liam had better be ready to take them, or I'll have to find an arboretum that would like some killer trees for their bonsai collection, because I'll be too old to put them to bed in the fall and wake them in the spring. I don't like thinking that way, but I need to be realistic. Like most things I love, they take a lot of work. I never really realized that until the work started to hurt.
In another session, you've already dug out the bonsai pit, pulling out armloads of spearmint that you've used all summer for mojitos and fruit salads. Spearmint comes back.
Chet Baker has kept you company this whole time, running the bunneh route and periodically checking to make sure your back isn't too sore, which it is.
He checks for chiptymunks.
and you stop to inhale its fruity apple scent, and remember that that's what gardening and bonsais are all about: stopping to appreciate these wonderful things that we have made. If you just do the chores without sitting down to marvel, you won't have replenished your spirit with what you need to keep doing the chores.
