Park Avenue Art Festival

Each summer I participate in two arts festivals in Rochester to introduce the “public” to bonsai, get new students for my Introductory Bonsai Course and sell a few indoor starter trees. Each year photos must be sent for judging to see if your art is good enough for the public. All work must be original, not imported from China or India. On Sunday we finished the Park Avenue Arts Fest, which I’ve shown in for the past 20 years. My good buddies and super salesmen Ron Maggio and Rick Marriott helped Diane and me sell some indoor bonsai starters. Well, they did the selling because Diane “tried” to make me sit down and work on a few bonsai because of my broken foot. They did a smashing job selling 74 bonsai! The bonsai which were sold were priced from $18 to $350. I hope they all live too… My display area is in front of one of my student’s jewelry store, Gudmund Olson, who is a goldsmith. He does great repair jobs for valuable containers. On his porch where he has many of his bonsai I noticed an unusual Siberial elm. It has been container grown from a young collected seedling 21 years ago. He wanted to improve the taper and develop a couple of new branches so he allowed two to grow wild. The normal leaf size on the escape branches is unbelievable next to the branches he has been trimming for over 20 years. I took a quick photo of the bonsai to use in my programs and Diane took the tree to our sales tent to show people the power of trimming to dwarf plants. Each summer I drastically prune the long shoots of my Nippon Daisy Chrysanthemum bonsai to encourage fresh, compact growth and hope for the autumn blossoms. A week ago I drastically pruned a few and they are popping with buds all over the place, and need to be thinned out already. At the festival Ron Maggio helped prune my Nippon Daisy Chrysanthemum bonsai which originally came from Yuji Yoshimura’s father, so it must be nearly as old as my mom, 94. Of course the public wanted to know why we had a “dead” bonsai on display. Thanks Ron for a great trimming job!