Wauchope Bonsai montly meeting

[SteveW]

The Wauchope bonsai group's next meeting is on Saturday 13 June commencing at 10 am and going until around 2 pm. The group meets in the Rotary Hall, Oxley Lane, Wauchope.

This month's meeting will feature a display of saikei settings. Saikei are a landscape scene created with rocks and trees. It is a living landscape created with rocks and trees. Either the rocks or the trees should dominate. Styling guidelines are not as important as for bonsai, however, artistic principles of design and perspective are employed to create balance and harmony, very similar to those applied to groups, except that we are working with the additional element of rocks.

Saikei was invented by Toshio Kowamoto after World War II as a means to give his students something pleasing to look at whilst waiting for the trees to mature for creating bonsai
Saikei has any number of trees greater than 2, combined with rocks that depicts a scene in nature, using sand and mosses; represents different scenes – creek bank, mountain ravine, coastal scene; and styles can be formal upright, informal upright, slanting, broom, windswept, parent tree with a group of seedlings.

The meeting will commence with a discussion of the display trees, followed by a demonstration on working with real and faux rocks by an Armidale artist. The remainder of the meeting is workshop time for members to work on their own trees and a separate a 1 hour session for beginners to learn the basics of bonsai care and creation.

Visitors are welcome to our meetings. The group is an excellent way to learn how to create your own bonsai, or to care for the one(s) you already have.