Portrait of Nigel Saunders in a Canadian magazine

Cosmos

Shohin
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How I learned to Love Bonsai, in The Walrus.

An enjoyable read. I am a sucker for good, subtle disses, and I appreciated this one:

There are other bonsai YouTubers, including Tennessee native Bjorn Bjorholm, who was once called “the Brad Pitt of Bonsai” by Architectural Digest, probably thanks to his wavy blond hair and angular jaw. But Bjorholm, who trained for six years under a bonsai master in Osaka, Japan, has a teaching style that felt far above me. “When designing a coniferous bonsai,” Bjorholm says in one clip, “there is a general process utilized to determine the tree’s front, angle, branch placement, line, flow, and directionality. This process is largely influenced by value judgments regarding composite design, and those value judgments are themselves influenced by the larger cultural context in which contemporary bonsai art exists in Japan.” I turned off the video. Saunders’s passionate one-man-with-a-handy-cam performance, in comparison, feels like watching a high-school science teacher who can’t hide his elation with electron transfer. His videos are even studded with unintentional Tao-esque proverbs, including “I can always grow a branch thicker, but you can’t make them thinner.”
 

MHBonsai

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"To be a bonsai artist, you must look ahead. You can’t think about what your tree looks like today or what it will look like next month; you have to think about what your bonsai will be a decade from now. I sacrificed years off my tree for the hope of a better future—one of mature and proportional growth."

A good read. Cheers for sharing!
 

WNC Bonsai

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Yes, I too sometimes skip the occasional post but generally enjoy his low key and more naturalistic approach—let a larch be a larch not a pine tree! I really got hooked on his larch forest and enjoy his side excursions into printing his own pots, etc. I wonder if he is a teacher or a nuclear physicist? I also love how his neighbor has erectd a tall stockade fence alongside the chain link fence on Nigel’s side—must not appreciate the clutter of the abandoned car and makeshift bonsai tables. Not sure I’d want to love next door either!
 

tree3

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Thanks for the link! I also like his YouTube channel a lot. Although I find that he's very traditional and serious in the Lingnan Penjing bonsai style, he's still not a purist, and that is precisely what I like the most about him!
 
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BonsaiNaga13

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His vids are good and informative for anyone new to bonsai. Learning about a tree before trying to write it and hes started so many from seed.
 

It's Kev

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He’s a legend, he doesn’t do cut outs or a whole lot of post editing. If he says he’s gonna trim his tree, you see him doing just that, and you know how long it will take if you did it yourself. And as previously mentioned by others, his videos motivates beginners, where stuff from people like bonsai empire come across as snobbish
 
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