With talent yes and this is a good example.
Walter I applaud you courage and candour in displaying one of your "dogs" so to speak.... Do you honestly believe that if it were not for this tree as part of your pilgrimage you would have achieved the wisdom you have aspired to? Do you honestly believe you had the talent back then to work on greater material? Through your own admittance not? Would greater material at the time provide better results? I don't believe so, as discussed great material in the hands of untalented individuals results in sub standard bonsai, whilst sub standard material in the hands of a talented individual results in a credible bonsai....
I believe the point here is that not everyone needs to reinvent the wheel. Of course we all need experience to grow, but there are also many shortcuts to knowledge. This forum is one of them. As one gains experience, one can also gain knowledge that will shorten and enlighten the path. For example, I have spent twenty years studying how pines grow in relation to bonsai from seedlings to trunk finished plants. I have actually performed the feat, all twenty years of it. This experience was immensely enriching. But does everyone have to do it? Of course not. One can read what I have written about it and spend five years applying it and then pretty much know what they are doing.
Can they get good trunk finished material in that five years? No. Can they find fifteen to twenty year old material to finish a tree in five years? Yes. By reading, studying, and observing, one can gain the knowledge of how to choose and handle material in a condensed and time saving fashion. Will they know the intricacies of what I know? No. Does it matter? Probably not, unless they want to grow material commercially.
I think this is what Walter is talking about. Obviously he had to learn the skills of bonsai just like the rest of us. Fortunately for Walter (and us) he did this quickly and with a contagious passion for the art. What he found out along the way is that it could have been a shorter path, just as I have. You can LEARN from our experiences without going down the same path. He is telling you to make recognizing and finding GOOD material a priority, because doing so will shorten and enrich your path. You can also grow from seed and cuttings at the same time for another type of fulfillment, but don't let this distract you from the art. Progressing quickly using good material, and all the other tools that you can muster will give you more time to enjoy really fine trees that you have created, and do it before you are too old to do the work anymore.
One of the things that us old farts learn (Walter and I are the same age, but I don't think he thinks of himself as old fart yet), is that life is really short. I was in my thirties when I started this, and I was pretty sure I was going to live forever. I made decisions in complete disregard for a limited life span or the limitations of my body as I aged. Boy, is that different now. These will just be words for the thirty-somethings reading this, but they don't have to be just words, you can plan a path based on their probable veracity even if though can't really imagine what it will be like to be in your sixties. How could you?
There is always something to be said for learning or doing something from 'scratch'. You gain a richness that others cannot possibly know. But you also waste a lot of time and energy. Our civilization has advanced because we don't reinvent the wheel for every individual, we teach our children that round things roll, and that a torus and an axle roll a burden with less friction. What took our ancestors ten thousands years to learn, we teach in ten minutes. The trick is to teach it so the head gets it and to learn it so that the hands can do it. Amazingly, this culture (and perhaps all cultures) still do a really lousy job of this.
To bring this back around to the discussion, can 'common' nursery material (without any intentional pretraining) become world class bonsai? Absolutely. The only thing that stands between any material and masterpiece status is time and talent. I'll leave talent to another day, but time is of the essence. Any gain you get from common material is going to be from sheer accident. The path from such material to masterpiece won't come from talent alone, but also from a deep and profound knowledge of the marriage of horticulture and the art. Most people don't get this. They think that just putting it in the ground for ten years and giving it a couple of chops will do the job. No. You have to spend just as much time learning how to grow material as you do in learning the art. There are all sorts of tricks, shortcuts, and pitfalls. Good growers know a whole lot of these, but people who devote their lives to growing probably won't have time to learn all the tricks, shortcuts, and pitfalls of applying techniques of the art itself.
I'm not passionate about the argument of yamadori versus nursery material despite the fact that I have spent most of my life learning how to grow nursery material. To me it doesn't matter from where the material comes, only what you do with it. Yamadori is just another one of those shortcuts, professionally prepared nursery material is another one. Common nursery material is not a shortcut, and in most cases isn't even less expensive in the long run. It's just an inefficient, longer way of getting there (hopefully) that can give you the real satisfaction of saying you did it yourself. Not a bad goal, but pretty much unrelated to really good art.
Brent
EvergreenGardenworks.com
see our blog at
http://BonsaiNurseryman.typepad.com
