This is going to be a much shorter response than I had intended, since the site timed me out while I was composing it and I lost it.
Will, you did nothing more than set up straw men to knock down. No one suggested that people buy stock beyond their means or talent. No one suggested that preworked bonsai stock was the only way to go.
I do not believe that prebonsai nursery stock is the only or even best way to practice bonsai, I just think it's better than regular nursery stock because it obviates the need to spend so much time fixing bad roots or overcoming a lack of movement or whatever. Remember that yamadori came first. My guess is that Americans first started using nursery material for only one reason: there was really nothing else available. Especially here in the midwest where we have no mountains for juniper or pine, or swamps for buttonwood or bald cypress, collecting is reduced to some bare probables and urban collecting, which I have done and enjoyed.
There are a great many ways to go about doing bonsai. We have a retired doctor in the local club who buys workshop trees, or has in the past, and basically refines them through the years. We have another doctor who used to collect some of the finest trees in the U.S. and not display them. Some of them have gone on to the Huntington collection and Golden State and perhaps other great collections. Some of us have gone to the mountains to collect, a 12 hour drive and a written permission slip from the National Forest Service which was pretty much ended when the wildfires in Colorado rained on our parade.
I read this thread at Art of Bonsai about six or seven times in response to your comment, Behr. Vance, this is perhaps the most thoughtful post I have ever read on any forum. You really made me think. I'm not much for wabi and sabi because no one has ever satisfactorily explained them to me, most just parrot what Herb Gustafson or someone wrote about them. But your explanation of "kami" made me think.
Then I read and reread the paragraph Behr paraphrased. You have opened my eyes just a little wider. Right now in my collection are prebonsai stock I am working on (with the last two years being a painful exception to the work part) and a few collected trees, as well as seedlings I have been growing myself. But to look at nursery stock as if it were yamadori...well I might just have to go nursery diving this spring. Don't know that I will pick anything up, but it could happen.
Vance, I know we have had our difficulties, fed by both of us. For my part, I am sorry I ever let myself get out of control in those disputations. But they have never been about what you have accomplished so far in your bonsai adventure. I disagree with certain old school attitudes you promulgate, and this is one of them. But no one has looked down on you because you haven't studied with a master. That is entirely your own construct. I won't try to psychoanalyze it. My difficulty with your position is not the use of nursery material, I have only made one simple point: that it's wrong to suggest that using cheap nursery stock is the best way to learn and practice bonsai. Doing so limits you in so many ways. Personally, I'd love to see what you could do with a really fine piece of yamadori. I think you would quickly eclipse anything you have produced so far. Just my opinion.
(A grower at heart)
