Stalking The Wild Bonsai

A few weeks ago our bonsai club had a field trip...a true 'field' trip.  We headed out to a farm owned by a friend of one of the club members to collect trees to train into bonsai.

Quite frankly, I had no idea how this was done.  I am still learning about what trees make good bonsai and what ones aren't worth the effort of trying.  Combine that with the fact that none of these trees have their leaves on yet...

So we wandered around for a bit and enjoyed a nice walk in the woods.

I finally found a little (like pencil thick) tree that has a nice trunk.  Himself dug it out for me.

Then we took a break for a nice little gourmet picnic.

Marinated olive selection, marinated mozzarella balls, artichoke hearts, dolmas (stuffed grape leaves), roast beef and smoked Gouda with rosemary olive oil bread.

Oh yeah...

Then we decided to go watch what everyone else was doing.  And they were doing a lot of cutting and digging!

This is one of the smaller(!) trees that was collected by the experienced club members.

After a lot of fast learning and observing, I decided to give it a go on trying a larger tree.

I found an American Beech sapling with a trunk I liked.  Himself did all the work to get it out of the ground (and it was a lot of work).

Here's just a few of the trees collected by other club members.

Next morning we potted our 2 new trees.

This is the first tree we found.

Cool trunk!

Here is my new beech tree in it's large training pot.  It will get at least one year to recover and then we'll see what I have to work with.

Hmmmmm... I wonder what sort of possibilities are in our own woods??