Maybe I am reading the wrong magazines. I have two pet peeves.
One is that they have this photo essay of the Big Expert who
takes a $3000, 300
year old juniper with lots of deadwood & turns it into a
masterpiece. I need an
article which tells me how to turn a $25 juniper in a 4 inch
pot into a
masterpiece.

I tend to agree, Iris. I had a brief discussion with someone on
this not long ago about Bonsai Today, after I complained about
issue #84 (which I did NOT buy):

It seems to me that the how-to-do it stuff on trees are
increasingly getting to cover repair and maintenance of trees
that 99% of BT readers will never own, and will seldom see, much
less have cause to do. The massive surgery on some of the trees
in the 4-parter in #84 is an extreme case in point. First, I
really doubt that any of those trees will survive that kind of
torture for more than a few years, and second, the folks who buy
magazines and read them avidly aren't capable for the most (read
MOST) part of undertaking that kind of operation. The folks who
ARE capable have no need for a how-to magazine.

Most of BT's readers aren't taking a good bonsai and making it
better. They're struggling to create a bonsai from untrained
nursery stock. They wouldn't DARE cut off as much root as most
of the BT articles would have them do (for example). And if they
tried to do it, they'd lose the tree because they don't know yet
how trees (or radishes) grow.

There also seems to be a growing amount of hero worship in the
text; I thought the writer of the piece on Kimura's tree in #84
was going to be shown kissing his feet! Now, you know that I am
NOT a Kimura fan, so take that with that amount of salt, but
still it is blatant kiss ass to keep calling him "the master."
I've begun to wonder if he owns part of the Japanese parent of
the magazine.

When I buy BT today, I do it primarily for the gallery, but even
those seem (except for Ernie's trees in this issue) to be
lacking. I think it was #83 that had galleries of European
trees??? I, at least, thought those were decidedly inferior.
(Mota's olives in #82, on the other had, were excellent.)

You're right, I'm only one person, but the feeling is shared by a
couple of folks in my local club. The BTs stocked by the local
Borders have gone largely unsold the last few issues. I think 82
sold out (they only get 3!), but 83 did not, and 84 is
languishing. The club bought one copy of it to raffle off at our
show last weekend -- ONE ticket (!). (We made $75 on raffle
tickets.)

In sum: Traditionally, BT is great at how-to articles, but the
more recent issues _seem_ to be presenting how-to info on stuff
most folks won't (or can't) use. Maybe they think all the basics
have been covered, but as you can see from the IBC, folks need to
know the basics. Of the other magazines easily available in the
USA, International Bonsai is the only one that presents as much
informative material as BT (ABS and BCI are too filled with
organizational stuff). At least recently, IB's material has been
more useful.

That's the end of my earlier diatribe. I noted recently that the
current BT #85 seems to be more back on track. It even has a
useful beginner article on pinching and trimming. The early
issues (which no one can find anymore) had a lot of beginner-type
stuff in them; maybe today they can at least have an article or
two that doesn't feature some mega-star working on a mega-tree.
It's kind a like Ma Housewife reading about Lucy Liu's beauty
secrets: YOU WISH!


The other problem is that the books & magazines have step by
step articles on
how to take a tree from day one over a period of six years &
turn it into a
bonsai. But either I didn't have this tree six years ago, or I
didn't have the
magazine six years ago, and the tree is six years old. I need
an article that
tells me what to do with it today, not what I should have done
six years ago.
Sometimes you can extrapolate, but it is usually difficult to
tell what is
going on when you walk into the middle of Act Three, Scene Two.

I'm sure you're familiar with Bill V's International Bonsai.

Jim Lewis - - Tallahassee, FL - The phrase
'sustainable growth' is an oxymoron. - Stephen Viederman

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