It’s Time To Relax a Little Bonsai takes time and lots of it. A great deal of water has passed under the bridge of life since I purchased my first bonsai, a serissa, to stand on the side of my little koi pond. On occasions I ruminate over all that time passed, about thirty five years I guess. The trees that came and went, the stupid ideas I grew out of, the bonsai I made, the trees I killed, the people I have met, journeys undertaken, the friends I made and some I have sadly lost. I have reached an age where I have more to look back upon than I have going forward. I have aged parents, grand-ba ..read more

Great British Bonsai Over the last few years I have been buying up a lot of bonsai collections. As a result I have obtained some previously unknown or unseen Great British Bonsai. Typically when that happens I buy everything, we buy live trees, a few dead ones, the benches, old pots, tools, books lock stock the f***** lot. This makes folk very happy to know that what is often decades of their hard work is assured a good future. I don’t sell these trees to just anyone, in fact I mostly don’t sell them at all. It’s sad when we have to part with our trees but that’s life, in the end we leave it a ..read more

Open Your Eyes! My job has, over the years, developed into something more of a lifestyle than just being what I do to pay the bills. Part of that job these days entails putting myself into the public domain. For a socially retarded carrot cruncher from deepest Norfolk with a bit of an attitude and an old school opinion on everything that’s definitely not a comfortable place to be. I get a lot of emails and telephone calls asking for advice on the cultivation of bonsai and many of those leave me dazed, confused, baffled and even angry. The level of ignorance often leaves me shouting at my scree ..read more

Two Half Heads are Better Than One! Creating bonsai takes a really long time. It also takes a long time to figure out exactly how to do it so if you are starting out TODAY assume it will take twenty years to figure out the basics, and that assumes you are busy and not applying yourself in a ‘working from home‘, civil service, tired hands kind of a way. Having been hammering away at bonsai now for the better part of forty years I might be so bold as to say I figured this all out a while back. I often say it takes ten years to figure out which end goes into the soil. Now that’s not strictly true ..read more

Hope everyone is enjoying the EASTER break ……while I keep working. Sympathy on a postcard please ?   The post On A Roll – Yet Another New Video. appeared first on Graham Potter | Kaizen Bonsai Blog ..read more

Bonsai Repotting Adventures This time of year we are always insanely busy. It gets to the stage where we judge our output each day by weight rather than order numbers. A bad day is currently about 500kg of goods but we have shipped over 1200kg on our better days this year. For an old man and his son-in-law that’s a lot of graft. Currently work has ground to a crawl as we have been let down by a supplier and so I thought I would take the opportunity to share some of my most recent Bonsai Repotting Adventures. Regular visitors to this blog might have noticed that for 14 years i’ve spent this tim ..read more

What a Bunch of Tools So here we are already in the middle of January. I’m finally getting over my Christmas lurgy, my horrible knee sprain is on the mend along with my buggered up pinky and orders are flying out the door to the point we are measuring our output in weight (average 800Kg of goods daily). An almost imperceptible layer of snow is sparkling in the pristine sunlight, there’s a crackling fire in the grate and the dogs are toasting themselves right there. Life is good! To cap it all Kevin Willson just made me the proud owner of a very special scots pine I have been developing for clo ..read more

It’s been a very productive few weeks around here (A NEW VIDEO!). There’s a great deal going on in preparation for the spring. Organising and sorting out the dozens of tons of products we sell through the spring period typically starts in June thanks to manufacturing lead times, slow boats and UK port delays etc’. At this moment in time there are about 30 tons of goods inbound from Europe, Japan and China. We already received tools, wire and over 15 pallets of soil products in the last few weeks. Thankfully supply chains are recovering from the insane enforced shut down of the world thanks to ..read more

It’s amazing to me these days how everybody knows everything about everyone. Seems anyone with a working mouth is an expert on most everything and the affairs of everyone. However in the case of what I get up to that’s evidently not the case. I get fucked right off by being told, by folk I don’t know, all about what exactly I am doing. So let me put the record straight before some dumb shits get the better of us. It seems every year or so I have to deal with this bullshit and it’s pissing me off. Just so you heard it from me …….  Kaizen Bonsai is not closing it’s doors and we are definite ..read more

As a young lad I was lucky enough to have some wonderful grandparents that were influential throughout my formative years. Waste not, want not was a phrase I heard regularly. On my fathers side my grandad served in the merchant navy  and ended up in the water at least once. On my mothers side my grandad worked in munitions manufacture in the midlands. I have wonderful memories of summers spent with the latter. Whilst my parents were always busy putting food on the table and paying the bills they did their best for us kids. Grandparents however had a lot more time to give us. Summers spent ..read more