There are many bonsai trees bought/sold for prices in excess of one million dollars. In other countries, patrons purchase the trees as investments and entrust them to the care of their favorite (bonsai) master. It's very common for the trees winning their category at bonsai shows in Europe & Asia, especially Asia, to never have been touched (worked on) by the owner - only the master or perhaps one of his favored apprentices, depending on the value of the tree.

Hi all, it's nice to be back, and comforting to see that even our resident Smart A$$ is in fine form (Hi KT!). :-) The thing about gardening, is that when the season finally gets here I have so little time for GardenWeb! I have not just my own garden, but my clients' to occupy my waking hours. Oops- my mistake... I was paging Wendy2, not you, WendyB. I didn't make that distinction, and apologize for the confusion. Wendy2 is in Zone 6 as I am, so her report about surviving 'Helleri' hollies was comforting. George, thanks for that information about your 'Helleri.' It corroborates some of the things I've read on the Internet. I just planted a row of 'Helleri' in amended soil (lots of organic compost and Holly-Tone), but it is in full sun on the top of a slope with a due-Western exposure. In the nursery where I bought them, they had sat in full sun in #3 plastic pots on a 22-acre site, so I figured they could handle the exposure as long as they have adequate water. They are clipped into low, flat-topped "buns" so maybe they will be low-slung enough to protect in the winter, but I was most concerned about soil moisture. There are boxwoods growing across from them in the same conditions, and those have weathered at least two winters. I read everything I could find about 'Helleri,' and got too much mixed information. Most sources said "full sun," while some said "tolerates part shade." The more detailed sites pointed out that they don't tolerate hot, dry soils, but many sites said "needs well drained soil and full sun." Then there was the ubiquitous "does best in moist, well-drained soil..." I'll water these heavily, put more organic matter in, and hope for the best. Deb, Mike and I have had a very long engagement! lol. When you get to our (middle age) stage of life, the pressure to seal the deal doesn't seem as urgent, but now we're talking "his-and-her rings"... :-) He'll definitely be teaching classes. He did a free workshop on making kokedama (a type of moss bonsai) at the Smith & Hawken store in Marietta, Georgia in May, and I'm guessing the one up here in Hingham, Mass. would be another potential workshop venue. He'll post when we have a better idea.

The spring fling is in the morning, I'm excited. I know I'm new to the forum and to starting my own gardens but I'm still excited about the gathering and getting to meet so many new people. I haven't really introduced myself, so I'll give a small bio. My name is Rachel,I'm 23 years old and I live NE OK, near Tulsa. I'm originally from CA but my father was in the army when I was younger, and well...this is where we ended up. I've been with the same wonderful man for the last five years and we plan to get married. We bought a house, a fixer upper, this past fall and the front and back yards are in desperate need of plants, lol. I grew up with a wonderful mother, who loves plants and gardening, so Im really excited about fixing up my yards. Also, I work at a Lowes, in the outside lawn and garden, so I spend just about everyday taking care of plants and helping people select the right plants. I was going to bring a painting and a stuffed owl for door prizes, but my friend really wanted the painting so I'll try to find something else. Also, I found the seeds that I collected from my mothers garden, from this past fall. I'll bring them incase someone wants some. That way I'll have something to trade, and won't feel like such a mooch if someone gives me something. : ) I hope everyone sleeps good tonight and I can't wait to meet all of you. -Rachel

Thanks, Amy and Nancy. What a year it has been, though in all the wrong ways. I'm looking forward more than ever to 2020, or even to October, which at least is coming soon. Amy, Do you know what stripped the kale? Have you seen any cabbage loopers or anything? Maybe fall armyworms? Sadly, at our house, when the kale is being stripped, it usually is our own chickens feasting on our kale. I love Beck's Big Buck, but its size does stun a person when they are new to it. I like to slice them and oven roast them. You can sprinkle the sliced with a little olive oil and seasoning and create okra chips that are (to me) much tastier and obviously healthier than potato chips. With the cucumber plants and as moist as it has been, I'd suspect disease more so than pests. I hope y'all have a good weekend too. Nancy, There's three kittens and they all look just like their mother except they are going to be bigger than her. They are growing fast now that they are eating regularly. I think they are about five to six weeks old and beginning to get a little bit more used to my presence every day, but it is going to be hard to tame them. Still, I am making progress. One of them no longer runs and hides immediately when it sees me---it sits and waits to see if I am bringing food. lol. With cats, you can develop a friendship over food, so I'm off to a good start there. I need to spend a lot of time trying to tame them over the next several weeks and it likely will involve putting a large cage in the garage and moving their cat food dishes into it. Once they are used to eating in the cage, hopefully I can catch them in the cage and bring them indoors to start working to tame them. It needs to happen while they are pretty young, or they'll be impossible to tame. As soon as we get them caged, their mom will go to the vet to be spayed so that she won't have another litter of kittens. If I can't tame them, they can become barn cats/garage cats, but I'd rather tame them so they can enjoy being around humans. If we let them remain feral, it will be hard to catch them in order to take them to a vet for shots and medical attention as we'd have to trap them and then they'd be upset, hysterical wrecks. I'd like to avoid trapping if at all possible. I guess I can spend the non-gardening season taming feral kittens. I'm amazed they've survived living outdoors this long because we have raccoons in the yard every night and coons will kill and eat kittens (or even adult cats). This kittens basically have survived by climbing up into the engine of our Dodge pickup truck to sleep at night. You have to lift the hood, check for them and make sure they aren't in there before you can start up the engine....every single time. They also like to hide on top of the tornado shelter, which is covered by a large trumpet creeper vine that gives them lots of cover, so if we can peer into that mess and see them, at least we know they aren't under or in the truck. Have fun with the church group tomorrow. I'm sure the house and yard look simply splendid. I love our house when it is perfectly clean and tidy, which generally doesn't happen nearly as often as I'd like! You know, there's a level of everyday clean or family clean but then there is holiday/visitor clean. I love it when I take the time to get it all holiday/visitor clean BUT I don't love it enough to keep it that spic and span every day of the year either. I hope you get a good night's sleep so you do not feel exhausted tomorrow! Today there were new monarchs in the garden. I don't know if they hatched here, but they were enjoying nectaring at various plants. It is too soon for us to be seeing migrants here, so these are local more or less, one way or another, though they could be regional or local butterflies beginning to mass prior to migrating. All the butterflies and bees are why I don't rip out any plants too early....any more, it is all about them in the garden, not us. I looked at the plants at Home Depot today (inside the garden center, I forgot to look at the ones outside on the sidewalk) and they are starting to compress them down into a smaller area, probably in order to make way for holiday merchandise. They still had some shrubs and perennials, and some fall annual warm-season color, but nothing new for cool weather yet, and I forgot to check to see what Wal-Mart had. They had a lot of tropical plants that would look lovely indoors if only we didn't have cats and dogs that would destroy them. We were buying paint at HD to paint the house, a job which has been on our To Do list ever since we got the new roof put on the house, which I think was in July. We totally changed the shingles from light colored to dark colored and wanted a new paint color that would look better with the new color of the roof. We've just been waiting endlessly for cooler weather to arrive because who wants to paint when the heat index is 108 or 110 or 112? We cannot wait too long now that it is almost October or the nights will start to get too cool for the paint to dry properly, so we are going to start painting Saturday. I would have started tomorrow but Fred's funeral is tomorrow afternoon, and I don't want to go to the funeral with paint in my hair or anything. I'm seeing a definite pattern change in the behavior of the hummingbirds over the last week or two. Several weeks ago, hummingbirds were flocking to the feeders all day---flying back and forth from blooming plants to feeders in a dizzying whirl of activity that went all all day long. I knew they were our locals eating extra food to put on the fat they need to help sustain them on their journey south to Mexico. It was amazing to watch and then it ended, and I knew at that point that the males were headed south, though we still had females and juveniles feeding all day long but not in such a crazy frenzy---they seem a bit calmer. Over the weekend and at the start of this week, it appears the females and juveniles too had headed south, and we had a day or two with practically no hummingbirds. Now we have migrants. One way you can tell is that they appear suddenly at the feeders early in the day, feed like mad, and then pretty much disappear. I assume these are migrants eating as they travel south. Then, in the evening you'll see more of them. I don't think it is the same ones that I saw in the morning. They seem tired, and content to sit on the feeder perches and feed a long time before drifting away before dark. Then, in the morning, they probably feed again and leave on the next leg of their journey, and then new travelers come in, sometimes in the morning hours, and sometimes in the early evening hours and repeat the process all over again. They're definitely spending more time at the feeders, and somewhat less time at the plants in the garden or around the house. There's nothing feeding in between the morning crowd and the evening crowd. It is fascinating to watch it all happen. Oh, and also at Home Depot today, there was one lone hummingbird who was visiting all the flowers and was so thrilled. It was just happy and chirpy and the whole nine yards and not at all bothered by being in very close proximity to people. I forgot to ask if it is a regular visitor there or just passing through. The garden is full of sulphur butterflies, and some of the candletree leaves are being devoured, so we may have sulphur cats. I just haven't had time to check. The partridge pea plants in the pastures still are in bloom but there's much fewer flowers on them now, so I think they are about done. I'm glad we have the candletrees to fill that niche of time in October after the partridge peas finish up because their blooms won't last much longer. Helenium, goldenrod and and a few other fall bloomers fill all the fencerows and any pastures that aren't regularly hayed or grazed down low, so butterflies and bees have all the flowering plants they possibly could want right now, and that's such a good thing. Our weather was slightly cooler today, but still hot, though our heat index did not break 100 today---yay! The HX was 99 but that is am improvement and we'll take any improvement we can get. Have a great weekend, y'all. Maybe cooler weather is coming next week. Dawn