Visit to Jim Gremel's

misfit11

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I am having Jim do some grafting on a couple of my trees so my son and I drive out to his place in Occidental yesterday. I've been living in Sonoma County for 13 years now and have always wanted to check out his place but never made it out there before. He has a truly phenomenal inventory of trees, many of which are absolute show stoppers. In fact, Jim has way more nice dead trees than many of us have living.
Jim is a character with a terrific sense of humor. He's got endless stories (including one about how Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead came out recently and "spent more on trees than you did on your car.") about bonsai and is constantly dropping names of bonsai heroes like Boon, Ryan Neil, Mas Imazumi, Randy Knight etc as he rambles from one story to the next.
I enjoyed the visit and intend to return. I might even bring enough coin with me to take one of his trees off his hands. At the very least I will need to retrieve my trees after the grafting is finished. He said that my Blue Atlas could be a $10K tree. That would be nice. That would give me one tree that rivals his many.
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Adair M

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I like your comment about Jim’s dead trees! Lol! He has quite the pile, doesn’t he?

Did you find the Clementine tree?
 

misfit11

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I like your comment about Jim’s dead trees! Lol! He has quite the pile, doesn’t he?

Did you find the Clementine tree?
He does have quite a few dead trees. Not really sure what that means. He's obviously a skilled practicioner...
What's the Clementine? Orange/Citrus bonsai?
 

Adair M

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Some nice trees. Happen to ask why dead trees:confused:?
Over the years he has collected, or attempted to collect, hundreds of trees. Not all of them survive collection.

Ask Randy Knight about it.
 

Adair M

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His “growing field” is all over his property. It’s now quite a jungle that he’s unable to keep up. Over in one corner, I was looking at some Ume (actually, a machete would come in handy to blaze a path), I stumbled upon a Clementine tree. Full of fruit. Both on the tree, and on the ground. Jim came over, and exclaimed, “Oh! Don’t eat those! They’re poisonous!” Then, he proceeded to pick one, peel it, and eat it. They’re delicious!
 

misfit11

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His “growing field” is all over his property. It’s now quite a jungle that he’s unable to keep up. Over in one corner, I was looking at some Ume (actually, a machete would come in handy to blaze a path), I stumbled upon a Clementine tree. Full of fruit. Both on the tree, and on the ground. Jim came over, and exclaimed, “Oh! Don’t eat those! They’re poisonous!” Then, he proceeded to pick one, peel it, and eat it. They’re delicious!
He took us out to his growing field. I saw some of the Ume. They were just beginning to produce flower buds. He definitely could use some pruning on this material. I think it's getting away from him. He lost his apprentice, Bali (sad story), so I think it's a bit more than he can handle himself.
 

Pitoon

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He took us out to his growing field. I saw some of the Ume. They were just beginning to produce flower buds. He definitely could use some pruning on this material. I think it's getting away from him. He lost his apprentice, Bali (sad story), so I think it's a bit more than he can handle himself.
What happened to Bali? I saw some videos of his work, he did a really good job.
 
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