Deep Cut Bonsai Society

Most meetings are held at:

King of Kings Lutheran Church, Fellowship Hall
250 Harmony Road and Cherry Tree Farm Road
Middletown, NJ 07748


This month we’ll be working on our own trees again and helping anyone that needs it.

We'll be raffling off a Wabi-Sabi Yasubusa pine, from MABS, that we will raffle for $2 a ticket or three tickets for $5.

Now we have the book, Bonsai Master Class by Peter Chan. This will be a $1 raffle for one ticket and 3 tickets for $2.

We'll also have three wisteria that bloom little 2" flowers (they were in bloom this june), have 1" trunks, will make good projects in a growing pot to ticken them up or just good as they are for shohin or medium size Bonsai. The wisteria to sell at live auction, with a starting minimum bid of $20. These trees were originally $30.

See you Thursday, August 18th.

Steve, Dick

I’ll bring my darft wisteria to show what can be done with this material.

Bill M.


Tree raffle schedule

April - Trident Maple
May - Texas Ebony
June - Trident Maple
July - Scotts Pine
August - Wabi-Sabi, Yatsubusa* Pine
September - Japanese Maple
October - Korean Maple
November - Dwarf Elm
December - TBA



*What is Wabi-Sabi?

A philosophy which prizes the elements of life virtually left behind by Western standards of commercial beauty, wabi-sabi is based on the beauty of the simple, of the imperfect, and of the incomplete. Being nature-based, its hallmark is finding ways of creating beauty without succumbing to materialism and artificiality. He explains that "wabi-sabi" translates roughly to the marriage of spirituality and inconspicuous beauty, a romanticism of the rustic.

*Wabi-Sabi Philosophy v. Modernism

Historically, wabi-sabi was never taught theoretically, but passed on by practice and example. For this reason, Koren expresses hesitancy in formally instructing others on how to live the wabi-sabi lifestyle. Yet his guide was written to revive appreciation for what might otherwise become an endangered aesthetic. Apparently wabi-sabi's lack of concrete definition in the past has caused its understanding to fade nearly to extinction with the onset of modern culture. The author acknowledges that wabi-sabi is “a teleological benchmark that can never be fully realized” (Koren, 17). Even so, he outlines its provisional tenets for the sake of salvaging such a valuable counter to Western ideals.

*Pinus thunbergii 'Yatsubusa'

A congested Japanese black pine with very short internodes and stark white fat buds. The foliage and bark are typical of the species, but it is the ability of this cultivar to break buds everywhere that make it so intriguing. Four or five year old grafts are so dense that you cannot see into them. It is a fast growing cultivar despite its short stature and will form a stout trunk as fast as the species. This is a superb choice for smaller pine bonsai.