A bonsai weekend (3/2/2020)

I have had a busy weekend working on my bonsai trees this weekend. This includes re-potting, root pruning and just basic cleanup work of the shoots in some. My Siberian elms are starting to leaf out. This is not a surprise; they are usually the first anyway, but it has been a very warm winter. My flowering quince cutting was flowering in late January, which is really early for a year-old cutting that is only 4 inches tall. However, it was nice to see something like this on my bench. The quince in my yard, from which I took the cutting, was blooming as well in January. 

Not much to show for, but this is my flowering quince.  Yes, it was flowering a few weeks ago.  It is a cutting I took from a larger bush I have in my yard.  I am trying to develop it.  Nothing to show for yet! The two others here are my New Mexico privet and my crape myrtle.

This picture of me was taken two weeks ago.  I was working on my Siberian elm (not yet pruned) and now it has leafed out and it showing it first leaves.  In other words I did not do this too early.  Global warming is even affecting us; in fact if was in the low 70s that day.

Having more than 25 plants that I am working on, it was quite a task and this past Sunday I worked from around 10:30 until 3 pm on some of my trees. I started on one of my Japanese maples. I am playing with two that are the same age. They were seedlings I got from my neighbor Bob; he had dug them out from underneath his older tree. I am growing one of them in a small pot like a shohin (smaller plants that are less than 10 inches). My daughter bought the pot as a present for me in China. The other is growing in a regular flowerpot and twice the size already. Its trunk is thicker as well. I am experimenting with the two as a comparison the see the difference in growth when you restrict the roots. 

Maybe not the best picture, but this is the little maple in the Chinese pot just after repotting.  Hopefully it will do great this year.

I also worked on three pyracanthas that I have growing. All three came out of my father-in-laws yard. He has a hedge and somehow they had seeded out. We had pulled them out of the ground. Two of them barely had any roots and I just stuck them in a pot with some potting soil two years ago. They survived and it was time to do something with them. They will most likely become shohin bonsais. I do not think I will grow them like mames, which are less than 4 inches. 

One of my Pyracanthas, it has a great root system, but now it needs a canopy.  In the background you can see an azalea that I got from a friend (butchered to the max) and a nursery shrub) that I potted down in the hope to eventually bonsai. 

I also worked on two air layers of an azalea from my yard. Two branches were buried in the mulch and when I freed them, they had rooted. What to do but cut them off and stick them in a flowerpot with my regular bonsai mix. Two years later, it was time to split them and pot them up. They had a decent root system and branch structure. I will see what develops. 

I did many other plants, but my pride and joy was a crepe myrtle that I have been training for the past three to four years. This was the first repot, and I was amazed by the wonderful radial root system that this plant was developing. I am feeling much better letting it grow. I was keeping it at 6” but after yesterday, I think that I will let it grow a bit larger to a foot and a half to two feet. It has a root system that will be able to support it. This should also give it a much bigger diameter trunk and nebari (or exposed spreading surface roots). 

Concluding, I am not done yet, but it was fun being busy with my plant. I had little time to think about anything else. Things like the Corona virus, the upcoming primaries or other political crap. Coming back to work, it all came flooding back. Honestly, I cannot wait for the weekend to be back playing with my plants again.

Hotels 1: Fairfax (2/28/2020)

My travel season, or should I say travel year, has started. We usually have a slow January. Mine followed by six local workshops in late January and early February, and this week my travel started with a big bang: a three-day class in Fairfax. This meant three hotel nights and an almost five hour drive back home, last night. Now it is nose to the grindstone and teach my heart out.

Around president’s day my wife and I visited the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. They had a Hopper exhibit. The exhibit dealt with Hopper’s vision of the American hotels, motels and guest houses. 

A photo of me in front of a vignette at the museum depicting a Hopper scene.  This is really the scene that gave me the idea of this series.

One of my favorite pieces in the exhibit   Blue girl on black bed.  Not by Hopper, and sorry I did not write down the artist.

This gave me the idea of doing something similar to Hopper; take pictures in and of my motel room and maybe even describing the stay there. No, I do not want to make it a review. I have already done this at times when I wrote about the sounds next door while trying to go to sleep, and my fantasies about what happened in my room before I occupied it. If you search for the word travel in my blog, you find some other references, but these two are the clearest ones about motel room stays.

So this past visit to Fairfax was the first, and the Hilton Garden Inn where I stayed must have suspected something, because they rolled out the welcome mat for me. Something I do not deserve; I am only a minor member of their loyalty program. But the fridge was stocked with free goodies (darn, no beer) and there were plenty of fruit and candy bars for me to enjoy. Since I try to watch that elusive girlish figure of mine I did not touch it, although I did have an energy bar for breakfast one morning.

On my way up I had stopped by IKEA and in a weak moment I had bought one of their cheap bonsai trees ($14.94): a ginseng ficus. I brought the tree up to my room as my “emotional support plant.” I still wonder what the cleaning ladies thought of a customer who brought his own plant to his room, but I assume that they have seen stranger items in a room. I’ll refrain from speculating here.

Well, here I’ll post my first Hopper like picture. I already posted it on Instagram, but still for those of you who do not follow me there. Enjoy.

My version of a Hopper like view of my Hilton Garden Inn Hotel room in Fairfax.

A belated entry into 2020, but here I go (2/5/2020)

The guilt feelings are creeping up, I have not posted in almost two months. Why is that? Well, a minor case of depression has set in. In addition to it being a brand spanking new year, and relatively little daylight, we have currently been looking at a year started with record high temperatures. I put a positive spin on the temperatures, by telling folks on my Facebook page that it was wonderful that “Summer fell on the weekend this month.” But in fact, it is darn scary to have temperatures in the mid-70s or around 25 degrees Celsius in the middle of January and again this week, while Facebook was reminding us of the 10 inches of snow, we had two years ago. That is global warming for you. Or should we call it climate change? Still, a whole section of society does not seem to give a damn about what is happening to the earth.

At least the weather allowed me to work on the back deck a bit and on repotting a bonsai of mine. In addition, a friend of ours redid her yard and removed several azaleas and donated two to my bonsai selection. I really had to hack at the roots of these 25-year-old plants and now it is hoping they survive. 

This all somehow kept my mind away from the major issue at hand. Two days after the new year we got the message that my trusty old dog Jake was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of either the liver of pancreas. I have written a lot about my walks with my dogs, in particular Jake, in the woods behind my home. That news really hurt. We are now in doggy hospice, waiting for the inevitable. Yes, we adopted a new dog, Jasper, on November 17, and I am sure he will eventually fill the gap that Jake will leave, but this guy is special.

A photo of Jake take on February 1 this year.  He still looks in decent shape, although a month ago the vet said he had days of weeks to live.  I'll miss the old guy.

Jasper our new dog has made himself at home.  Being a hound he has to sleep in a pack and always need to be close to Jake.  I want to bet that he'll miss Jake as well.

Jake was adopted 11 years ago. We had gone to the Newport News SPCA to look at the border collie, but that dog was too crazy, jumped on kitchen counters and seemed like a piece of work. Then we saw Jake, cowering in his cage in a corner and somehow, we fell in love. In the beginning he was a runner, and we had to keep him under control, on the leash and we fenced in a small section of our yard. He has gotten much mellower and if he can help it and is not being pushed out of the way by Jasper, every morning he will site next to me for a back and head rub. 

Oh well, folks that is the issue with being an animal lover. Most animals have a shorter lifespan than us and it is something we are confronted with a number of times during our life. At least three times in my life did the dog we owned disappear and never returned. Our first one was old, and I suspect she walked off to die alone somewhere in the bush of Curacao, the island I grew up on. The second was a runner, and we never knew what happened to her. So was the third, Moses, and my parents found him dead, obviously hit by a car somewhere in the Netherlands where we lived at the time. All other dog we had to deal with mortality one way or another. 

The relationship between humans and their pets is a beautiful thing. I guess it is because the pets show something like unconditional love; a thing that does not happen much in human relationships. Pets become completely integrated into the household and act like they own the place. I was amazed last night when my wife told me about a colleague of hers whose son sent their young family pet to a trainer for two weeks to get obedience training. The trainer seems to do this with electroshocking and now the, in our eyes, poor young dog just shakes when being called or told to sit, in anticipation of getting a shock if he is not obeying. I cannot imagine taking all the spontaneity, love, and trust out of an animal like that.

In his book “The Empathic Civilization,” Jeremy Rifkin discusses how babies are born with unconditional love and empathy but somehow somewhere we lose it. A new form of empathic humans needs to evolve he argues for the human race and civilization to survive. I did not get a chance to finish the book completely, and I will, once I retire. One thing is for sure, we desperately need more empathy and compassion in this world. We seemed to have lost it judging from the callousness of our current politicians willing to stick children in cages and look the other way just to save their political skin. 

Having said all this, judging from the first month of the new year, 2020 is not going to be much more empathetic. To the contrary, it is showing to be worse, politically, humanity wise and even the climate is showing signs that it will have no mercy.

Our Environmental Language (12/3/2019)

I was reading an article by Dipesh Chakrabarty about earth ethics and spirituality in relation to the thinking about our world and the environmental crisis. Mr. Chakrabarty discusses among others the philosopher Martin Heidegger. In the essay he describes how Heidegger, as I understand it, differentiates between the words planet and earth. I am probably getting it completely wrong, but to me it seems like Chakrabarty and Heidegger see word planet or global more as hands off while the word earth is anthropomorphizing this world we are living on; making it more our own. Whether true or not, I like this notion and it got me thinking. 

Maybe we need to step away from the terms global warming and climate change since they do not seem to impact us directly. There are still too many people who do not seem to give a crap about the environmental collapse that is predicted in our future; the sixth extinction. Maybe our approach has been the incorrect approach all along calling it global or world or even climate. Are they to esoteric; maybe we need to incorporate the word earth in the term and weather or extremes? 

While difficult to digest at times, Mr. Chakrabarty’s essay had another (to me) noteworthy passage in it where he discussed Ludwig Wittgenstein. It seems that Wittgenstein mentioned in his book “On Certainty” that we question about buildings how old they are, but we never ask that about the mountains behind those buildings on the earth they have been constructed on. In other words, here again we have lost that relationship with (or focus on) the earth. But in essence, what is more valuable, the buildings themselves or the mountains or the earth those buildings are constructed on? It reminds me of the Buddhist statues in Bamiyan Afghanistan that were destroyed by the Taliban. While they were old and valuable, many of the Buddhist scholars reacted to destruction with “nothing is permanent.” At least nothing man-made. Boy, you should have seen that lady’s reaction when her son hit our mailbox a few months ago and destroyed it completely and instead of getting mad, I burst out laughing. When she wondered why I wasn’t mad I told her just that: “well, nothing is permanent” and this is a good teaching moment to her son and actually her whole family. 

Nothing is permanent.  A few months ago, our maibox was taken out by a boy driving his truck.  He was supposedly adjusting his seat and lost control.  He swore to his mother he was not texting.  I died laughing when I saw this and his mother and he could not understand why I was not pissed (actually neither could I).  However, it defused the situation and it all came out fine!

What I am writing here is in no way original thinking; however, Mr. Chakrabarty’s essay was published in the Divinity magazine published by Harvard University. He did not really go into this idea of relabeling what we call global warming or climate change; however, he wants to approach it from a spiritual angle. That is fine with me as well. However, having lived through a political climate where politicians are masters of relabeling their opponent or calling them names, I feel this may be our only choice in saving our earth. 

I am not yet sure what I am proposing. All I know is that what we construct, build, or make is not permanent. Even the pyramids in Egypt are slowly deteriorating. However, the earth will keep rotating around the sun, just like our neighbors Mars and Venus with or without us. Wouldn’t it be nice if it did it with our children or our children’s children actually living on it?  Unlike that Mars and Venus which still appear lifeless, although scientists still think they may have harbored life in the past?

By the way, talking with my brother-in-law, who actually is a Heidegger expert (he wrote a couple of books about Heidegger) over our Thanksgiving meal.  It seems that Heidegger predicted some form of environmental catastrophe or collapse. Regretfully, my brother-in-law did not go into any detail, except to say that Heidegger did not envisage a rosy outcome. Finally, Heidegger wrote a book on language; well, maybe it is time to look at our use of language as I mention in this post and re-brand our environmental language!

Climate change alarm bells are going off (11/27/2019)

It was again in the newspaper today, we are experiencing a climate change crises, or better a global warming crises.  The United Nations issued their report on Tuesday November 26, it seems, which tells us that during the past decade the global average temperature has already risen 1 degree Celsius or for us non metric stone-age folks 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.  Moreover in the age of Trump the CO2 emissions in the USA last year have increased 2.7%.  This seems to be a reversal from what we were trying to do under the Obama administration of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  This alone should be reason for impeachment, if not by us, at least by our children or by the unborn children he is trying to protect to gain brownie points with the religious crowd.  But is seems, they be damned once they are born.

My wife and I were discussing whether it would behoove us to eat more vegetarian.  But then I was thinking, living here in Virginia would it be better for the environment to eat tofu produced in California or chicken and pork slaughtered here in Virginia?  Yes, those animals eat plant based food and produce a lot of waste.  However, the transportation cost from farm to my dinner plate surely must be less and thus the energy to transport them.  This is an interesting debate to have with yourself and to question with everything you do.  I really think we have to live more purposefully; make decisions in our every day life, with the environmental end in mind; and be concerned about leaving a livable planet for future generations.

A colleague of mine bought a large property with a home on it that might not be the mansion that many of us would want to live in.  It is a simple home; however, like her handle on Instagram which includes the word "homesteader", she and her husband decided to make is a homestead and try to become independent to some extent.  The first year they were there, they raised chickens for the slaughter, planted a garden, which did not do very well (the soil was to heavy), planted an orchard, all the fish in their pond died, but they had fun trying to find solutions and at least make a start.  I really think this may be a way of fighting the global climate change crisis, grow things locally and if you grow enough, maybe you can sell some of it at a farmer's market or barter.  She chronicled it all on Instagram.  Granted she is not there yet.  A lady down the street seems to want to do the same on her half acre lot.

I myself, what am I doing?  Our yard is wooded, and our vegetable garden is somewhat of a failure since it is mostly in the shade and we are still working stiffs.  I promised myself that I would revive it when I retire.  We try to heat with wood whenever we can, don't use fertilizer or pesticides.  For the rest we do eat vegetarian one or two days a week (no tofu form California though).  I bake my own honest bread.  Can we do better in battling global warming?  I am sure we can.  I would love to put solar cells on our roof; however that would mean cutting trees, which would raise the internal temperature in the house in summer (more air conditioning?).  On top of that, mature trees take out more CO2 out of the air than lawns or smaller trees or young trees.  It is all a question of alternatives.

I just love the profile of this tree on Yorktown Beach.  Again, trees are very productive in removing CO2 and other pollutants from the air. 

But again folks, we need to be aware of what is going on.  We are so close to that point of no return.  The UN says global emissions need to fall by 7.6% starting in 2020 to meet the Paris climate accord.  And then to see we increased it by more than 2.5% last year.  Let's resolve to live purposefully and as I mentioned in one of my posts, "Plant a tree" and consider climate change in our every day decisions, from eating to sleeping.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!