At the start of our first Bonsai Chat of the year here at Willowbog Bonsai last Saturday one of the regulars said that his New Year Resolution was not to purchase any more trees, he went home with two, thank goodness.

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Sadly the two bonsai featured in the tokonoma were not the trees !

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This impressive Trident maple is one of only two Japanese origin bonsai left in The Willowbog Collection. Last year I took the decision to sell all the Japanese trees in our personal collection with a view to spending more time on those bonsai with which we have more of an intimate connection, many are trees that we dug up ourselves as ‘wild’ raw stock in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. So this Acer buergeranum in it’s old Japanese pot is being made available.

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This nice chuhin size Chinese juniper we took as a part exchange recently.

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‘ Chat ‘ itself was pretty typical of all these regular first of the month get togethers. Mostly it was regulars. Mike looks happy !

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About half the participants brought their own trees along to work on like Graham in this shot.

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The rest, like Len in the background here, just enjoy mixing and chatting with others who share the interest.

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Len has been helping John H with his bonsai for most of the time that John has been keeping trees.

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Diane, although looking a little surprised at getting her photo taken, also brought trees along to work on.

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Getting some wire on her nice Larch.

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Another Larch getting attention.

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The G-man was also busy wiring his Willowbog origin Japanese larch.

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Peter has done a lot of very good work on this Larix in a fairly short time from when it was complete raw material and it is really starting to pay dividends.

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Flat cap Martyn concentrated on whatever was behind his pine.

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Antony assesses his recently purchased Scots pine that was recently style by Caz, just before Antony decided to buy it in fact.

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This is what ‘Chat ‘ is all about , an in depth discussion on bonsai ??  no, actually Len made the mistake of asking me about the Highland cows !

It was a good day with lots of friends meeting up here to kick off our twelve months of activities.