In order to share the beauty of Satsuki azaleas with friends and introduce a bit of rarely seen areas of Japan, Kora Dalager and I introduced a new tour to Japan this week– The Satsuki Festival Tour. Our group includes 14 people from across the United States as well as Australia who want to see colorful Satsuki azalea bonsai as well as some of the finest bonsai Japan has to offer.

We arrived on Sunday evening to visit the private bonsai garden of Shinji Suzuki who lives north of Nagano on Monday. After a two hour bullet train ride we took a local train for 30 minutes. Upon arrival in Obuse, the town where the Suzuki garden is, we walked around and had a wood fired lunch in an old sake factory. Obuse is a quaint town where many wanted to simply walk around to absorb the sights and culture…

The spring defoliation marathon is officially over here at Aichi-en. Most of the tree’s we did here were japanese maples and trident maple’s. I’d thought I’d share a few trident’s that I did. All these tree’s were grown by Oyakata’s grandfather from scratch but, all quite different. All three were partly defoliated, leaving inner weak shoots and weak area’s.

The second tree.

Although they are both root over rock style tree’s, they have their difference’s.

The first tree.

We have many tree’s styled like this at Aichi-en because Oyakata’s grandfather was one of the first people to style root over rocks with a long casting branch in Japan. I think it works well when you have a tall rock and helps to balance the image, giving a natural feeling even though it is a more stylised form.
It would be quite easy to imagine a tree in nature clinging to…