[00:00:00] Speaker A: Today's episode is brought to you by Peter T. Bonsai. Peter is my teacher, mentor and friend. And on his website, ptbonsai.com you can find copper wire, bonsai pots and bonsai trees. I highly recommend it. I feel like not enough people know about this awesome resource.
[email protected] first off, he has buttery, soft, annealed copper wire. I've been using it for several years. Peter has also used it for several years.
Absolutely phenomenal wire.
He's got bonsai containers and ceramics, both glazed unglazed pots for you to to purchase. And then lastly, probably the biggest secret is that he actually has bonsai trees available.
So I feel like there's not enough high quality bonsai trees in the United States. A great spot to find really good trees is on his website. He's got deciduous, broadleaf, evergreen and conifers available.
Some of them you do have to purchase.
They're only available for pickup. But he does ship a wide variety of trees. He's got lots of trees for sale where you can buy them and he'll actually ship them to you in the United States.
The good ones go quick. So I recommend checking back on the regular super great resource for trees, copper wire and containers. Check it
[email protected] once again, that's ptbonsai. Com.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: The black pondo podcast.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: The Black Pondo Podcast.
Hey, thank you so much. I really appreciate you talking with me. I have a tremendous amount of respect for you and I guess I feel like you are the goat when it comes to collecting, which is greatest of all time.
And so it's an absolute honor to get to sit down with you and pick your brain a bit. And I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: You're welcome.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, so I guess I was wondering if we could maybe kind of start towards the beginning. I was not sure how you actually got into collecting and how long ago that was. I guess I think the first time that I found out about you was on Evergreen Garden Works, Brent's old blog, several years ago.
I think that was the first time. And I remember seeing some Rocky Mountain junipers that he posted and I was just absolutely mesmerized and blown away by them. That was very early when I got into bonsai. But I was curious how you got into collecting and bonsai. Do you think you could give us a background on that?
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Sure.
Brent Walston was probably up here at about, I'm going to wing it and say 2007.
I think that was a visit that Came about through a collaboration with Walter Paul. At the time there was some connection. I don't recall it, but I probably got collecting for in the Rocky mountains in about 2000 or 2001. The first time I had started a bonsai nursery field growing in about 1996.
And I was still working for a corporation, wearing a suit and a tie, working downtown in Portland.
But that was never going to be a career path.
I just wanted to do something. I had a green thumb.
It was something that you could actually do without having a pile of cash. You could start in slow and work towards it.
Field growing turned out to be a labor of love. So I never really made any particular money at it. There were lots of years I lost money.
But at some point the Internet wasn't really a thing back then. And so what was online would have been super basic horrible stuff. But I read a lot and I'd read every bonsai book there was. And there were a lot of the English book writers that. Well, mostly they were book writers, but they wrote about bonsai too.
And there was a couple guys in there who talked about collecting out of hedges or urban yamaduari, you know, the mugo pines, it's been trampled at the bus stop and you know, you can imagine. And old boxwoods, you name it. Things that were overgrown in parking lots and yards.
I got started doing that in probably 98 or 99.
Made a few trips to the mountains locally with not good success. And more importantly, they were horrible trees.
Yeah, but we start somewhere, right?
[00:05:07] Speaker A: Yep, gotta start somewhere.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: My.
I had a little bit of collecting under my belt in about 2000, I think. And coming back from Canada, my wife, I and father had just come back from a boating trip.
And we stopped at Dan Robinson's Landon Gardens. And I had some spruce trees that were sticking. You could see them sticking out of the back of my father's. It was a like a 22 foot trailer bowl, a big boat, but still on a trailer. And we went and did the tour and walking around. And we came back out of the parking lot and there's this dude in the back of his boat and he's like looking through all my trees. He's pulling them up and it can be gesticulating and excited.
Turned out it was Dan and he had seen them and the boat was high, it was like seven feet. But he'd seen some of the tips of the trees and he climbed right in and he was looking at them and all excited.
So that began a conversation and I told him where I found these. In exchange, he told me where he collected pines in Wyoming.
And that was the beginning of a friendship with Dan. And that's what led me to the Rocky Mountains. So maybe that very fall, I met him in maybe July or probably August after a deer hunt. In early November, I was in western Wyoming and I drove to the eastern side of the state and it was cold and snowing, and it must have been right after Thanksgiving because there were still elk camps with pumpkins carved sitting on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.
And there's about 8 inches of snow and ice. But I still managed to get about 18 trees. And two or three of them were good. In fact, one was a limber pine that was just outstanding.
And that was it. I mean, so jump ahead a little bit. I brought those back and I was selling trees from my field.
People would come out to look at those and would get distracted by the collected trees. I just bought home and wanted to buy them. Where'd these come from? How much would that be? Can I have it?
So anyway, that as I continued to collect once a year in the fall, it was always combined with a hunting trip because it's time I was raising kids and running my own business, which was a landscape contracting business. I built koi ponds and water gardens primarily.
So just taking off there was. There wasn't a lot of money and there wasn't much free time.
But I could combine it if I was sneaky with the deer hunting trip and add some days at the end.
[00:07:44] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: The family knew what was going on, but they let me slide on it. It was very clear within four or five years at the future to make money, there was way more interest and way more sales possible.
You can only sell so many trident maples and hornbeams. Doesn't matter the quality or the size the caliper of the trunk. And it may have changed a little bit today because at that time you could still import from Japan pretty readily.
You know, there's half a dozen places on the west coast that brought in hundreds and hundreds of white pines and azaleas and trident maples and everything that was in a pot and ready to go. So on a side note to that, John Eads is currently field growing and he only lives 30 miles from here at Left Coast Bonsai. And it's a labor of love mostly, but I think he's doing okay. I hope so.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: I hope so too.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: You can't say that field growing is fun, but it's not nearly as fun as Climbing through the mountains. And you're tree hunting, right? You're hunting for trees. And I basically, I'm a hunter. And so it just happened to be that this combination of events fell into my lap at the perfect age where I was still physically fit and had the time and to make this happen. So now, for the most part, I've been semi retired for a couple of years. I'm 65.
I plan to do this for 10 more years. And I work four months a year. May, June, September, October.
When I'm in the mountains, I work pretty hard. I would say that mostly I'm just efficient at it.
I do love it and it is hard work, but I don't notice that so much. It's like, wow, look at that. Look at this. Wait, so I won't retire anytime soon? Well, physical, not being physically fit or, you know, getting hurt somehow, that would be what ends my career. And it's not impossible. I'm doing this into my early 80s. The heavy trees won't be coming out and I won't be going nearly as vertical, and I certainly won't be going as fast as I do now. I'm already slowing down.
As you can guess, this isn't my first podcast or my first bonsai talk, but rein me in if you need to because I can ramble up on tangents. I may get lost.
So don't, don't be shy to reign me back in.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: I appreciate it and I'm so excited to talk with you. I just, like I said before, I've been following you for so long.
I remember those initial blog posts by Brent are what introduced me to you. But then I also was on some of the old school bonsai forums, and I think your cousin Jason Gamby, he's.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Just a friend that lives nearby.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Okay. So I remember him posting a few Rocky Mountain junipers that he acquired from you. And those also just absolutely blew me away. And so just been following you for a long, long time. I think you also helped me with some aftercare tips back in the day. I don't know if you remember that or not, but probably around 2010 or so, I think I sent you an email with some Sierra junipers that I collected and was trying to pick your brain back then, and you were very generous with information in terms of aftercare. And since then I've, I've gone on and watched the Mirai aftercare videos that you created, which were absolutely phenomenal, and I basically just follow anything that you have put out there, and that's that's what I do for my aftercare when I collect trees. I think you've got a very solid process down and so I really appreciate everything that you've put out there and it's totally an honor to speak with you today.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Oh, kind words. Thank you.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: I wanted to circle back where. What did your initial customer basis look like for collected trees and how maybe how has that changed over time? I imagine it's changed quite a bit over the last several years or many years.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: So in the beginning I had the field grown bones Eye Nursery and at one time I had over 22,000 trees in the ground, four bones that had gone in as seedlings.
Each one of those is planted on a ceramic tile.
God, I had a lot of ambition back then.
It's funny to even recall that those trees primarily were sold to local people. And Diane Lund at WE Tree Nursery, which was down in Corvallis, Oregon and she would basically, she would then later let me back up. I believe that she would buy those from me and we would, she would heal them in sawdust for a year. These are deciduous primarily. Get a good root base on them and then get them into a container, sell them online and she would ship them. I don't ship anymore. I haven't shipped in a long time. It's just a nightmare. Anybody who does it is wow, hats off to them.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: I completely agree. It's the worst part. It would be horrible.
Especially Yamadori would not want to ship Yamadori.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: It's horrible. So it just, it's a time consuming process and often it ends poorly and it's, it's very expensive. So she was my initial customer base, but it was primarily for the deciduous trees because even in the beginning the amadori prices were.
But by today's standards they would be unbelievably, ridiculously cheap. If you saw what some of that stuff sold for as recently as 2012 or 14, he would look at those trees and say, wow, I Wish I'd been 10 years earlier. That's not so much me being able to raise my prices, which is a factor in that, but it's also about the understanding in America of what a high quality tree is and a bigger, broader base of people that are willing to risk a large sum of money for high end trees.
So in between, right now almost all I sell is collected yamaduwari and in the last two or three years, mostly high end stuff. The numbers that I collect now are, are very, very small compared to what I did do 10 years ago. And up until about COVID How many.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: Trees are you collecting these days compared to previously.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Maybe 120 to 150 trees this year.
There were times when I could get permits in country for what I would call high alpine species that were, they were old, as in compared to nursery stock. You know, stuff with half inch calipers that would be 25 to 45 years old and knee height or less.
And there was a big market for that in the Northeast and there were literally tens of thousands. There still are. It's just a lot of work and a lot of effort for minimal value.
But I had a business where every year I would ship a 53 foot container full of collected trees out to Chicago and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
And I did that in conjunction with Walter Ball, who is an unofficial business partner, if you will. And we, we did that for about 13 or 14 years.
And so there were lots of years there'd be 350 or more trees on that truck.
It was crazy because we'd hand load them all in and you have big trees and big containers and then they'd be full of little containers and then 1 gallons would be inside of this. But it was a lot of fun.
It's a lot of trees to water over the summer.
It's a lot of.
It took a lot more time for very little financial gain. It was more a passion at the time.
And it's evolved and now it's, it's streamlined because as I get older, I don't. I like to make enough money to afford vacations and go on hunting trips and do what I do.
And tree collecting allows me to do that. It also gets me out in the west in lots of different states every year. And I just realized that I digress. Again, I ran away from the question you asked, which was what are my customers? So they started as local deciduous field grown tree customers. And over the course of about 20 years, 25 years, it has evolved into mostly people that are after high end stuff. And most of my stuff is out of the Rocky Mountains. I've been in pretty much every western state.
I just hunted caribou in Alaska for the last 10 days of August and I found some unbelievable spruce trees up there. And there was permits available. It's just a matter of trying to get them out. Could you do it commercially and is it worth the time and the effort? And the answer is no.
But I may do it once just to get up there because it would be like an adventure.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: Wow.
Yeah.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: And I got off topic, but in a roundabout way. I love what I do, and I don't advertise online or do the blogs or run the websites anymore. It's turned out to be way too much.
It was a lot of wasted time, and.
And people didn't do it on purpose. It was just what happened. And I talked to people who run websites and stuff now, and the same game happens. I'll just paint a quick picture. Somebody would reach out to me, and they'd say, I've got 300, and I'd like to get a nice conifer. You picked a brand. Ponderousa pines, by the way, are my favorite tree, and I collect more of them than anything else.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: Very nice.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: So I'd send them some pictures of trees. You know, I'm trying to say, well, how much do you really have to spend? What characteristics are you looking for?
And you don't typically get a.
If somebody really has $500, they don't want to tell you that. They want to tell you 350 so that they're afraid of getting taken advantage of.
These are all ballpark statements, and you have blanket statements.
And so I'll send them some pictures, and they'll see better trees in the background. And they say, well, what about that tree or this tree? And five or six email communications pictures later, we're looking at $1,200 trees.
And they will end up buying a $75 tree because they feel guilty about wasting my time and stuff.
Now, that scenario happens so many times, I'm sure.
I. I just. I didn't have time because I was also running the landscaping business at the same time. And in the winter, I would cut firewood commercially because in Oregon, the rain starts in September and it lasts until June.
When the rain starts here, nobody thinks about their yards. So you work really hard from June through October. And if you could schedule a couple of big jobs in January, February, maybe, that's. That's how my customer base has evolved. Now, since I don't advertise, people reach out to me online, much like you did. And it's funny because people are always struggling to find me, but I think I'm accessible. I've got it. And you're welcome to put my email address out there at the end. Probably. That's probably the best way to get started. And then if they're serious, we'll move. I give them a phone number and we'll move to texts.
But people are aware of me, and they reach out. A lot of people think that I am unapproachable or that I Only sell to Mariah or Marae students or. But before that it was Walter Paul and before that it was Boone.
There's always this weird scenario of now you can't bite it, you can't buy it from him. You can, but the reality is if you're serious about a tree, you're going to have to come up and visit me. And it's a pain in the butt for most of the country, but it's also not that expensive. If you're truly serious and you communicate with me ahead of time, we can schedule a time when you can come up. And my container yard is basically full with trees that are ready to go or available. You may have to put some money down to hold them, but we'll wait until they're actively growing and then we'll find a way. And most of the time there's two or three times a year that I can find a truck or a van or somebody going back east to get stuff to the east and California is much easier.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Very nice.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: I'm down in the Bay Area every spring at least once to drop trees.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: Great, great.
That's fantastic. I guess I. I would highly recommend that anyone that's interested go out and visit you in person and see trees in person. I think I still feel bad about this because I purchased a tree from you a long time ago. Oh, it's been a few years now and I didn't realize the scale of the tree and I should have gone out like you recommended and actually saw it in person. I think it's very hard to judge the scale of trees even for people that have experience from pictures and videos and in person you can tell right away. Whereas in, in images it can be challenging to determine the scale. And so I think that's the best way to do it is by a tree in person, if at all possible.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: I remember the scenario you're talking about, that Ponderosa was a monster.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: It definitely was.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: That's what we're talking about.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: And you, in my opinion, you made the right decision by the way. The circumstances of that worked out and change. But the other thing I would say is just like if you look at trees, you miss a bonsai exposition or a show and you see the trees, even if you're experienced and aware, seen three dimensionally onto something that has a lot of character. And I'll say on a side note that if you're buying Yamadori from me, what you're after is you're looking for trunks and age or the appearance of age, that the hand of man just really can't do a very good. We can't compete with nature. And you get some acute angles and that spiraling, the spiraling live veins and the old ancient deadwood that gets, starts to get the dragon scale and stuff on it. And when you start to peek into. And the good trees, let's be honest, are. But even the very best small trees for me are going to be about knee high with tremendous trunks. But from there they go up in size and they get little trees too, but you can judge those pretty accurately. But once you start to get limbs in a canopy and dead wood and hidden Shari and you're spending significant money, it's worth a 500 plane ticket ride, round trip, most definitely.
This sounds like sales pitch, not meant to be. But I am only 45 minutes or an hour from Portland.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: That's great.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: So it's not uncommon anymore for people to, especially people from California to just jump up, fly up in the morning, visit me in the afternoon and go home that evening. This has been going on for years and it comes and it goes. Covid slowed that down, but this year it resumed again. Half a dozen people came up that way and it's effective. And if you're gonna. And often the, the same people will pick more than one tree. It's not uncommon for people to grab five or six.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Most definitely.
That's fantastic. Yeah, I was actually, I was just at Peter T's house for the last few days and there was a gentleman there, his name is Max and he was telling me that he has bought a couple from you and is, is, he's like, yeah, you know, I'm texting Randy once a month and I am always trying to keep tabs on when he gets new trees. And he was talking some strategy on how to get the, the best trees from you. It was, it was pretty funny.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: What was the guy's name again?
[00:24:04] Speaker A: His name is Max.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: M A X. M A X.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Yes. I just chatted with him today.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: Very nice.
Doesn't surprise me.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: He did an incredibly good job of being, communicating with me. I can tell that he's. He and many others sometime are afraid of being the squeaky wheel by reaching out too often.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: But once we've, once we've developed a rapport and I understand what you're after and you're serious at that point you're going to get my text information so that we can communicate far easier than we can via email.
He is, I think, I think I got a message from you as well, and you can change this if you need to about looking for high end stuff.
And the biggest problem with that is that even in a good year there are only 10 or 15 super high end trees and there's always going to be people that want the top five.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: In general, if you've been a customer of mine for a long time and we have a rapport and this goes, let me digress and go back to because I listened to some podcasts, some of your podcasts a couple of months ago, coming and going from some hunting trips where I had long drives and to answer some of the questions, if you've got a long history with me and you're successful at keeping trees alive and you're not a serial murderer light heartedly, but you know what I mean. There are some folks that tend to lose more trees than I think they probably should.
But if you're successful with my trees, that is the best way to move to the top of the heap, if you will, for the truly significant trees. And I would be the first person to tell you that I get a lot of people that come out of the Seattle and Upper Washington area and I rarely sell them Rocky Mountain junipers and I warn them off them constantly because they just don't live in the right environment. It's just simply not hot enough up there.
And I would tell probably you the same thing, that you shouldn't look at a mountain hemlock or a larch tree.
So I try and do what I can to tailor tree sales to people so they're going to be successful. There's an old adage it's easier to maintain a customer than to create a new one.
And it's been my experience that if I sell a tree or even if people put money down or hold a tree at my place and it stagnates, possibly dies or let's say it loses an important limb in the composition, offer them their money back or a credit.
But if you let a tree go out too soon and it dies, people think you've sold them a defective tree and it's very oftentimes you never hear from those people again.
I don't know what happens, where they go. And on a related note to that, if anybody's out there who is listening, who's purchased a tree from me in the past and it's suffering or it's stagnating or there's problems, I tell everybody this when they buy a tree, if there's a problem, reach out to me before it's dead, before we're doing a root autopsy to see what we can learn.
I want the trees to live and be successful and I want people to think they made a good purchase and that they're. I, I want to do everything I can to help them be successful.
[00:27:39] Speaker A: Definitely.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: And now that I do less commercial sales in bulk to the east coast, it's.
That has worked out a lot better in my opinion because there's a lot more one on one, personal. I know pretty much everybody who is a customer of mine now.
Bite face. I've met them, they've been out here. And as you probably know, Mariah Ryan Neal's outfit is only about four miles from me.
So it's not uncommon that people come to see him or visit his garden or participate in his classes. And then I meet them through that. I try and go up and say hi to every class. Well, when it's fun and I do like bonsai peoples.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: That's great. That's great. Awesome.
Well, I, I absolutely respect everything you just said and that makes total sense to me. I mean, I think it's, it's fantastic that you care about the trees and you want to see them do well and be successful and survive and thrive in the future. So I really like the strategy that you have there. And I think it only makes sense that you have repeat, repeat customers and ones that move up to the top of the line. I completely get that.
I think it's all about building a relationship with someone, with someone like yourself and making sure that you show them that you're, you do what you say you're gonna do and you're a stand up person who has good, at least horticultural skills when it comes to bonsai and can keep these trees thriving.
Because we really need to respect them as these things are often very old and ancient and we need to show a whole lot of respect to these trees. So I love everything that you just said.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: Well, thank you.
One thing that I say this all the time in general, the trees. Some of them can be quite old, but they're almost never as old as everybody thinks. I would say that the two and I've collected, I don't want to say the number, but when we add up all the little dink trees that, you know, the number's high. And I think only twice in my career have I collected a tree that was legitimately a thousand years old and there were junipers. But I see some extreme ages out there that it's just not the case.
And anybody aspiring collectors or anybody that finds themselves out in the mountains you'll find dead trees at times. Or if you have a tree and sadly it dies, it's interesting to cut through the trunk and count the rings. And you'll be a little bit shocked at how quickly some trees can put on the appearance of age.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: I have been in California a few times and I also know that the Sierra junipers and the California junipers are relatively young trees. I'm routinely surprised that they can grow very fast. Not always. I mean but you'll, anytime you look at a ring count, you'll see how trees will have a period of good years and bad years. Sometimes they can put on 2 inches, 10 years and then you might towards, at some other point you might see 20 years with a quarter of an inch. I see that in pines more than the junipers. But the reason the Rocky Mountain are kind of sought after and what makes them so spectacular is they are a little bit older than the other junipers and they don't grow all year. They grow a little bit in the spring and a little bit in the fall.
And all of this is my opinion based on observation. I could be wrong and, and I'm happy to change my opinion when I am because I like, I like to learn too. But they basically go dormant in the summer with a lack of rain and they, they basically when it gets so cold, they shut down in the fall and lay idle until spring.
So I'm going to make these numbers up. But I would say they grow April to the 4th of July and then they grow again in September and October as soon as they get some rains.
And November it can go into November. And this year they did and they get the crazy shapes because of leader substitution for any number of reasons. Typically it's not snow load, there is snow there, but it has more to do with wind and desiccating events, you know, tops that get basically freezer burn or I, I think that it's more that losing the tips from freezing in the winter than getting burned in summer.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Anyway, that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean changing the leader, I, I, I guess I, one thing I would love to pick your brain on is just the differences between what you see when you go collect in the Sierra compared to the Rocky Mountains in terms of many different things like terrain and trees. But I tend to see not as much twist on Sierra juniper as opposed to Rocky Mountain juniper like Rocky Mountain juniper seems to have some of the best twists that I see as well as with Ponderosa pine like the Ponderosa in The Sierra. I don't seem to see as much twist as the Rocky Mountain versions and I wonder if you have any thoughts on why or what causes that twist. I guess my thought was maybe it has a lot to do with wind in the Rocky Mountains as it seems a whole lot windier over there.
But I'm wondering if it's more of a genetic type thing or if you've given it much thought.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: I have thought about this and I don't know for sure but I have some observations I'd be happy to share.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: Please.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: I was just recently in the Sierras and after I was mostly chasing lodgepole pines, but I got a few Sierras too and I actually looked this up online afterwards and I've done it before, I just couldn't remember. The Rocky Mountains are a much older mountain range. They're a little bit more decomposed than Sierras. The conditions in the Rocky Mountains are not nearly as hot and desiccating in the summer as they are in the Sierras.
So when you collect in the Rocky Mountains you find rock pockets that have more decomposed granite DG and you get pockets of roosts with fine capsules, capillaries that are there can be more volume to that root pad that you collect. The trees also don't often in the Rocky Mountains don't have as much anchor holding them in place as they do in the Sierras. And the Sierras I see regardless of the species, things mostly growing in cracks.
You find one, you get a permit and you find the right area and you find that within those pockets it always seems to be more soil to me than dg, which I don't know that that makes a lot of difference. But the capillary root systems because of that or I don't know because of that. I do know that comparably in the Rocky Mountains if you get a good tree with good roots, you can get a way finer capillary root mat. And the mass is just, I'm going to say it's 10x more than in Sierras whether wow, pines were junipers.
You get a lot more cord like roots and anchor roots in the Sierras.
And it's my belief that you guys get so hot in the summer without thunder showers and any appreciable rainfall that the trees simply don't survive unless they have an anchor root that goes down deep and taps into some sort of a water supply.
And of course that's going to be. You're never going to collect that root. So the other thing that I Notice is that the trees in the Rockies come. They pop out of the rock, if you will.
It's a term more than a real thing.
But they come out more easily in the Rocky Mountains than they do in the Sierras. And the Sierras, really, you walk by significantly more trees that are like, there's no way.
Okay, it might wiggle a little bit, but that's a deep wiggle that it's wiggling from a foot down. And there's no capillaries between here and there. Why would we collect it? It'll die.
[00:35:57] Speaker A: So you think there are significantly more collectible Rocky Mountain junipers compared to Sierra junipers, would you say?
[00:36:06] Speaker B: I wouldn't say Rocky Mountain junipers, no. I would just say trees in general in the Rocky Mountains.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:36:13] Speaker B: The Rocky Mountain junipers are relatively small number compared to the pine trees in the Rockies. But you would see the same thing in the Sierras. You get into zones of Sierra junipers, but primarily you're going to be in pines. Whether it's Jeffreys, ponderosas, sugar pines, lodgepoles, western whites, they have the same, many of the same species in the Rockies. The Rockies are also a lot wider and a lot longer.
You know, if you come up out of Sacramento, let's say you just drive over I80, there's not a whole lot of collecting type rock and ground. As you come up the west side and you kind of peek on the eastern side and drop over, you're going to find the rock and you see that from north to south, you're probably aware of that.
So the other thing that I think might affect us a little bit, it's my opinion that the Sierras burn more frequently than the Rocky Mountains do or did.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: I'm sure that's true.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: And fire.
And I've gone back and forth with this with people often, not often, but it's a recurring theme. Yeah, collectors are going to get trees and especially they're going to get them where the road comes close to accessible rock. Not too steep, fractured up or down. But once you get a half a mile away, there's relatively little collecting activity. If you get out one mile and two mile away, especially if you go downhill. Nobody, nobody thinks to go downhill, people.
If you're gonna ask somebody at this road on the side of the hill which way they're going, they're going up. Nobody thinks to go down. This is a tip.
Nobody wants to pack the load back uphill. I understand.
It's not, it's not always a super awesome thing, but you know, suck it up.
Do you want to get. Definitely go where the other guy hasn't been.
[00:38:01] Speaker A: Most definitely.
[00:38:03] Speaker B: So there was one other thing I wanted to add.
Think that one of the things that Dan Robinson told me 25 years ago was in the Rocky Mountains they have summer rains. It's called the Front Range. And I don't remember the story but they do get thunder showers and they do get periodic rains that I believe help with that capillary formation. In the rock pockets in the Rocky Mountains. Elevation doesn't seem to matter whether you're at 6 or 7,000ft or you're up at 10 5. It's just trying to find the right micro environment.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:42] Speaker B: And there's. They're scattered.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: Definitely.
What do you look for to determine that a certain spot is a really good area and would likely yield high quality trees for you. That would yield high quality yamadori. What are some signs that you're looking for?
Is it the rock? Are you looking for other ancient big trees?
[00:39:10] Speaker B: There's like I'm just going to ballpark it and say there's a half a dozen things. There's a couple I'm not going to share because. Well, I'm just not.
[00:39:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:20] Speaker B: But what I would say is how accessible is it and what is the return trip look like?
So how far am I willing to go? What kind of elevation drop? You've been. You've spent time in the mountains, I believe.
And there's lots of times you get good ground that's fairly horizontal and then you get to a deep canyon or a crevice that it's manageable. You can go down and go up the other side. But do you really want to bring 100, 150 pound pack back through that chasm? So that would be a case where I know there's likely to be good trees over there or the possibility is there. But the return route is something I'm just not.
I'm either worn out or it's not worth the effort or lazy. Basically. If I don't do it it's because I'm feeling lazy. But looking for small trees.
You would never expect to collect a Christmas tree if you're hiking through the coast range here in a mature forest. Right.
So looking for some size compatibility. In a lot of places it's trying to find rock that's not too steep. You can find yourself out in places where you really should have a rope. And I work alone and I try not to do that because you don't have. If you fall 10ft even and land on rock. It's not good. Like a lot.
And nobody's going to see you cry. You're just going to be there weeping in the dust all alone.
Then you're going to limp back to the car and. Yeah, it's just sad. Don't do it.
[00:40:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I've taken a few falls, I.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: Guess would be that.
And I like to do what people would call pattern recognition. If I'm on like eastern slope and I can look north or south and I can see that there's other buttes or prominent ridges that look like the one I'm on and I just had success, those would. You should go look there. I can also tell you that sometimes you'll find benches or little knob tops, if you will, that are super productive. And there's another one 200 yards away, another 200 yards beyond that, and you just really clean house on the first one. You get to the next two and there's no trees or they're there, but they're locked in tight.
And the microenvironment looks identical. The same face, elevation, same window.
But that, that is probably the best way to start is if you find success in environment, take a little time and observe what's going on, what, what makes this unique. And when you see that again, do your best to remember and look there.
And elevation up and down doesn't matter as much at I. I think that it's sun and wind would be the overwhelming. If I was going to pick two that matter the most, it would be that. But I'm probably wrong as often as I'm right.
[00:42:11] Speaker A: So I asked you earlier, I think briefly, but I don't know if we settled on a firm answer. Do you think that a twist within Ponderosa specifically, do you think that it's the result mostly of just genetics within that pine? Do you think it's. It's from wind, it's from leader transitions, or kind of a combination of everything, or any other thoughts on twist in particular?
[00:42:42] Speaker B: I can't answer that specifically, but I can tell you what I see. And I'm really good at observation. I mean, this is what I love, so I pay attention to it.
You were helping me set up the computer earlier. I don't care about technology.
I won't remember what you helped me with three days from now because it's not important to me. But when I'm in the Sierras, I simply don't see twisty, convoluted corkscrew trees of any species. I'm going to relate that to age A little bit would be the best guess. And when I find what I would call a corkscrew, a barber shop type pine, pines are. It's way more common to find it in a pine than it is a juniper. Not always, but most of the time, it's my opinion that that tree grew and it had an anchor root that's. That goes down into the rock and holds it in place. Right. And at some point the tree's bigger, it gets to a certain size and that root strangles and dies. And very often the corkscrew pines will have a bulb base. A pineapple base looks like a tulip bulb. Not always, but it's not uncommon. When that happens, you've got too much. The nutrients from the top of the tree are getting, you know, they're trying to get to the roots, but there's nowhere to go. The roots are probably growing, you know, they might be down there, they might be a quarter inch thick and a foot wide, you know, growing in that seam of the rock. There's an imbalance, I think when that taproot dies, I think that the older trees, and this is just a guess, that for whatever reason, over time they have had a.
The cambium layer that and the nutrient feed is working in a clockwise motion going up. So when all of a sudden you take a lifeline and remove it, 70 years later, you've got dead shari spiraling up the trunk. Because the pine, we talk about it in junipers all the time, you cut a root and it could fill. It could be affiliated with a branch or a crown, that they have different specific areas. Pines can do that too.
There's no question when you see a corkscrew tree, typically it's a little bit older than some of the surrounding trees. But I also believe that it's genetic because there are times you'll get into a bench or a pocket and you haven't seen a corkscrew tree in three days and you've walked by 40,000 and all of a sudden you're looking at three or four within 100 yard radius. And I've seen the same thing with cork bark pines.
Yes, but that can be a genetic thing where it's like, oh, look, there's three here and I haven't seen one in a year and a half.
That's not random.
[00:45:22] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense to me. If you think about pomegranate, we have pomegranate that grow straight up and down, right. And then there's a twisted pomegranate variety, which you can reproduce consistently through cuttings.
And it, it seems to start twisting at a certain age. So it, it would seem that there, there has to be something genetic. And also the fact that we don't see the twisted ponderosas in the Sierra make me feel like it is genetic. It, it's probably mostly genetic. I wonder if what you were talking about totally makes sense earlier as well, but there has to be a, A, a big genetic factor there. I would think.
[00:46:06] Speaker B: I would, I would agree. And as you were saying that, a couple other things dawned on me that I literally just came home from Sierra's a week ago because you guys are having, up until just a couple of days ago, you're having a no snow winter.
And I was up high at 7,000, 8,000ft of 65 degrees. I worked in a T shirt for three days with my dog. And there was the occasional snow patch, but it was gorgeous.
And I digress.
But I took a lot of pictures of really old Sierra junipers. Really.
They're vertical trees, they're upright, they've got chari and twists and deadwood on them.
And in some of those old Sierras you will see spiraling live veins. I don't see it on the smaller trees, but I don't ever see that on old mature pines.
Whether I'm in the Sierras or in the Rocky Mountains. You don't see a 100 foot tall tree that's 2ft in diameter with Shari.
I don't know why that is, but if it's genetics, at some point windstorms or something is causing them to blow down because they don't get to that age and maintain because you don't see them.
And I don't know enough about the California junipers, but you don't see much Shari in the way of Utah junipers either. And I've been around tens of thousands of them.
Their shari lines are literally straight up one side of the tree.
If you find a twisted one, I've got an analogy to that story. There's a lot of places I've been that have both primarily Utah junipers, but there's a few Rocky Mountains thrown in. Typically it's sandstone country, which is horrible collecting success. Or if you get the fine capillary roots are 14ft from the trunk running down a sea at the side of a hill full of potential trees. And in the distance you'll see some elegant, beautiful, curving, twisted juniper. And every single time you walk up to it, it'll be a lone rocky mountain. Juniper in a sea of Utahs.
That's a recurring theme in three different states.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:48:21] Speaker B: So that's probably genetic. There's a relationship there as well.
[00:48:25] Speaker A: Got it.
Randy, in your mind I would love to know how do you rank all the junipers for bonsai characteristics? For example, I would assume you're going to say Rocky Mountain number one is Sierra number two and then California, Utah. We also got one seed in there. How do they stack up against each other? And I know that's very broad and it mostly depends on the specific species or specimen, but do you have a kind of a general outline of rank in your mind?
[00:48:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So you nailed it.
Rocky Mountain junipers are probably the best in the world for trunk and deadwood movement.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: I would agree.
[00:49:09] Speaker B: My opinion, and I'm biased, the Japanese might think differently, but you don't.
At the end of the day have you been to Kokofu or you've been to Japan before, right?
[00:49:21] Speaker A: I've been to Japan. I stayed. I was there for like two and a half weeks. I was at a bonsai nursery the entire time. At ign. Yes. I didn't see Kokufu. That's still on my list.
[00:49:32] Speaker B: So we, if you're just talking about frames, trunks and branches and deadwood and shari and crazy, the Shampaku can't compete with our best Rocky Mountain junipers. And I think even the Japanese would, even if they wouldn't say it out loud. They have eyes. Right. They're good at observation as well. We know this.
So. And then Sierra's would be number two probably. I don't. I've only been down after California junipers a couple times and that was 10 or 12 years ago and I was more up in that Tehachapi area. I went down into the Palm Desert. I can't speak effectively about California's but I think Sierras, you get more unique stuff going on with them than you do the Utahs. However, I can say that if you just like deadwood and some crazy forms, there are a tremendous number of good Utahs out there that don't fit what would be the conventional Japanese standard of curving spiraling limbs in the right places. But if you're okay with crazy and massive and just impactful, there are some impressive Utahs and are Utah's harder collected. And there's like, I'll just say it, there's. There's millions of Utah junipers between southern Wyoming and northeastern California.
[00:50:55] Speaker A: I've. I've collected Utah. That's how I started my collecting journey. However, I Always thought that they were a lot harder to actually extract compared to Sierra junipers.
I didn't find nice pocket Utahs. I was probably in the wrong areas, but they weren't growing in pocket like, you know, where their roots were confined by stone and granite. And so I always had a challenge removing them, getting a lot of nice fine roots. And so I, I stopped collecting Utahs. Was that your experience as well?
[00:51:31] Speaker B: Yes.
And I'll add that there are quite a few Utahs that are collectible in the sandstone.
But one of the bigger problems for me, because I'm a tree collector and I consider it my job to really find high end trees and have a high success rate with getting them out of the soil and transition into a bonsai pot so that somebody that. And then, you know, actually start to style them.
And the length of time that it takes to get a Utah juniper to that is double or triple what a Rocky Mountain is or a Sierra. The Sierras, I have phenomenal success with them growing quickly, rapidly, with what I would call youthful juvenile vigor. And I think it partly is because they take up water better and quickly. Faster grower.
Yes, but the Rockies and the Utahs are probably similar in age.
But the Utahs, for whatever reason, are just very slow.
So I'll give you an example that if I'm on my game and have a good year for any number of reasons but weather and Mother Nature cooperating. Where I live, just enough sun, not too hot, not too windy. If I collect trees in May, June came out in junipers. And especially if I can plant them in Anderson Flats, if I don't have roots growing out of the bottom of the flat by September or Octo, somehow I'm.
It's a bad year. So this year was the best year in seven or eight years. I had stuff growing out of the bottom of the flats in six weeks. And you've seen some of my trees, they're older in general. And where I was going with that is spring collected trees will have roots on them, effective new roots growing capillaries out of the bottom of the containers by October. Most every year it's not until the following year you get the foliage growth.
The Utahs are fully one year behind that and sometimes two. So it takes three years. What I'm saying is three years for a Utah to do what a Rocky Mountain juniper will do.
And Rockies are slow compared to Shimokus and Sierras. I don't have any experience with the single seeds or the one seeds or there's some alligator junipers. And a few others down in that southwestern country, which is just a little bit far from me. And I've been there and I've seen them and I know about them. I've never really collected them.
But you. There's a fellow, a nice guy named Richard Lee, who you probably know.
I've talked to him about some of what. How he collects things. And Richard's a great dude and he collects in a very different manner. But I know from Todd Schaefer and other professionals that have gone on to take these trees out of the boxes and repot them into bonsai containers later that he has tremendous capillary roots on those. And.
And I'll.
I'm not going to share how he collects. I think people know, but it's not my place to share.
But they are basically growing in the soil, which a lot of really good Utah junipers grow in the soil.
But there's the size of the boxes. You're talking about using equipment. Right. So this is never going to be a public land permit thing that you're going to be able to do. It's like a private land scenario. So with that, that's something I'm never going to do and I'm just out.
[00:54:57] Speaker A: That totally makes sense to me. And I've saw the same experience with Utah in terms of they're just slower to recover and harder to. To dig. So I completely get where you're coming from there.
[00:55:11] Speaker B: One thing that I would share that might be helpful to some of the people listening.
The Utahs that I typically see are growing in sandstone. Sandstone has cracks and fissures. And if you. If you worry enough trees, you know, go up and wiggle them periodically, you're going to find one that has that fine capillary root structure. Close. But they also grow in basalt a lot. And I won't even get out of the car to go look at trees in basalt country, which is most of Oregon.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:55:38] Speaker B: It's just painful to see a hundred trees that are uncollectible.
[00:55:44] Speaker A: Makes sense.
Can you name. And this may be a very long list, so you might not want to name all of them. But do you know every type of tree that you've collected? I would assume.
Or you could even just throw a guess out there. Is it 25 different subspecies of trees?
[00:56:04] Speaker B: Oh, well.
[00:56:06] Speaker A: Or species.
[00:56:07] Speaker B: I would say if you're talking about like there's shore pines and there's lodgepole pines. Same tree. But they're. Yeah, a little bit different.
But I would say it's probably in the 20 tree range.
[00:56:21] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:56:22] Speaker B: Give or take.
When I had a nursery I had something like with the different cultivars at one time I had 122 different species in the ground.
[00:56:33] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:56:34] Speaker B: Let's be honest. You can have five different kinds of larches and seven kinds of black pines. So that number, you could push that number into the hundreds if you wanted. Easily.
[00:56:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
What are the top five species that you've collected? I'm sure it's Rocky Mountain juniper number one, Ponderosa pine. Oh, you said ponderosa pine number one, Right.
[00:56:58] Speaker B: I'm known mostly for Rocky Mountain junipers. Ponderosa pines are my favorite tree and they're my favorite tree to collect.
I like those two. I like limber pines which sometimes you get into pockets of them and you have a great year and then sometimes you have two years where you see a bunch of them but they're not, they're unworthy. So you just don't have any. I really like lodgepole pines. They're common where in your state but in the Rocky Mountains it's hard to find good ones that are worthy.
I like, I've had luck with western whites, but there are a lot of places that you can't get. They're not on the permit.
I used to like. I don't know why I thought about this. I love to collect Engelmann spruce.
[00:57:43] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:57:44] Speaker B: Tremendous success with them. And Douglas firs out in the Rocky Mountains. It's a different subspecies than we have here.
We. And we just don't have the right kind of rock in the Pacific Northwest to get.
Never say never. But good rock. Good Douglas firs are uncommon here.
[00:58:00] Speaker A: Makes sense.
[00:58:01] Speaker B: As I'm saying this. Everybody knows about Scott Elser and his Douglas fir that came out of a road cut dirt bank in western Oregon. So it's always possible, but it's not. You wouldn't come here to.
If you're after Christmas trees in Oregon or Douglas firs, you'd come here for a Christmas tree.
[00:58:17] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:58:19] Speaker B: I love mountain hemlocks. I don't mess with them very much anymore because they're a root sensitive species and when it comes to repotting it takes finesse. And it's my opinion that they're best handled in literally like a two or three week window in the spring and that could vary from nursery to nursery. And if you miss it, even if you. Sometimes they just look at you. If you look at them sideways and almost slip pot them, they can die. And so I don't, I don't collect them because again, if. If it dies at repotting, it's going to be Randy sold me a defective tree.
[00:58:57] Speaker A: So.
[00:58:58] Speaker B: And then they also have a very narrow range of the Pacific Northwest is where they're happy. And I guess I really mean Oregon and Washington and the west side because the eastern side of the state they would struggle. There is a subalpine furs I really like and there's some tremendous ones. But again, they really are only happy here in the western Oregon, western Washington. So the market for them is limited.
[00:59:23] Speaker A: Got it.
Are there any species that you see yourself possibly collecting in the future that maybe you haven't experimented with?
[00:59:34] Speaker B: I have collected Colorado spruce, which everybody refers to as blue spruce. That's really Colorado.
[00:59:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:59:43] Speaker B: But Todd Schaefer is my friend and I like to not step on his toes because that is his forte and his. That feels like a Todd thing. I do know some places to get some ratty specimens that don't compare to his, but they are very niche oriented. I would like to collect some more of them.
They're also a very hardy tree. They're much hardier than an Engelman. But another species that it could be next August that I go up to southeast Alaska and climb around in the bogs and collect Sitka spruce.
[01:00:16] Speaker A: That would be cool.
[01:00:17] Speaker B: People get all hot and bothered about the cedars and I don't remember if it. I think it's yellow cedar, but it could be white cedars.
They don't do very much for me. They've got some tremendous limes, occasionally more Bundgenesque stuff.
But the foliage is always droopy and it's messy and it needs a lot of attention to make it look pretty.
So I've avoided those. There is one species that I wish that I could collect successfully and that is coral leaf mahogany or mountain mahogany.
[01:00:50] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:00:51] Speaker B: I can collect it out of the southern Oregon region in the soil and it grows just fine.
And it's got dead wood in character, but it's not like the stuff you see in pockets in the sandstone in the Rocky Mountains. And I've literally collected that by lifting them out with literally a full root pocket and just slip potted it into, brought it home and been very gentle. Hardly touched the roots and they just slowly wither and die. Much like a Kinnickinnock will.
[01:01:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:23] Speaker B: I think that it's my opinion mostly that it's ph related, but I don't know that. I do know that they both have very fine, delicate roots that would remind you of a Satsuki azalea. Root. If anybody has successfully collected these and had them live long term, I'd love to hear it. The same thing with manzanita.
[01:01:45] Speaker A: Manzanita, if I collect it out of.
[01:01:46] Speaker B: The dirt, I can bring it home and it'll grow. But if I pull a pocket manzanita out of Northern California with perfect roots, they're untouched and all they do is cut an acre. I bring it home and it slowly anguishes and dies over the course of about a year and a half. On a side note to that, I was in a hunting camp in Alaska with a retired BLM range manager. I forget what he told me, but it was his job to know like a couple 300 species of plants that were on his the different ranges. And he reminded me that a tremendous number of plants are so adapted to their unique little micro environment.
Yeah, use different words. But that little zone where they live, to move them out of that, they simply can't do it.
But there's more to it than that. Because curl leaf mahogany, for instance, and Kinnick. Kinnick are grown in nurseries in bark dust, pure bark dust. I mean, you can go buy them in 1 gallon containers for $7 at your nursery store. And those trees you can pick up, plant them, do them and put them in the dirt, put them in your bonsai pot.
They're unworthy as bonsai, but they grow.
So, yeah, there's stuff that I don't understand.
Always will be.
[01:03:00] Speaker A: Sure.
Yeah, that's so interesting. And personally, I am a massive fan of manzanita. I went down a hardcore rabbit hole with manzanita and I was growing them from cutting for several years. I was twisting them up, I was adding shari on them. I collected a couple of them.
I wonder if it has to do with the beneficial fungal relationships, the mycorrhiza and the mycelium that's going on within the plant. If it could be something like that or just like you said, moving it out of its unique microclimate. But it's so interesting. It's like bulletproof. If you put it in the ground and you can, they'll grow all over the place in the ground. But something about repotting them or trying to keep them as bonsai. They just don't want to live. And I don't know what it is exactly.
[01:03:53] Speaker B: So I guess I agree with what you're saying. And when I said like microenvironment, I would include the, the beneficial bacteria or the mycorrhizae as part of that. The system for the mountain versus your yard.
One Thing that I can share with because I collect sagebrush too.
[01:04:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:14] Speaker B: Is if you use chemical fertilizer, let's say Miracle Grow or standard triple 20ish chemical sagebrush doesn't like it and will die and the manzanita will as well.
So. And I've done tests on this. They weren't good trees. They were just stuff because I always got experiments and chemicals will kill them. The, interestingly enough, the curl leaf mahogany, that is, they're older. I don't know how old. I would guess 60 years old out of the dirt. Maybe. Maybe only 40. You can, I can fertilize them with Miracle Grow and it doesn't affect them. And I would.
[01:04:53] Speaker A: Interesting.
[01:04:54] Speaker B: My guess would have been that they would die too, but they don't. Sagebrush likes Bio Gold.
[01:05:01] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:05:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:05:03] Speaker A: Nice. Very interesting. There's a lot to unpack there and things that I'll probably never know. But I sure would love to learn manzanita. And please keep me updated if you learn anything else regarding mountain mahogany or manzanita or any of those other turkey species.
[01:05:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I will. And if you have listeners that have had success with that, I'm all ears.
[01:05:26] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[01:05:27] Speaker B: I'm curious as well. One thing that I alluded to about chemical fertilizers, and I'm going to share this with you and people that might listen to somebody will listen to this, I'm sure. When I collect my trees, I bring them back and I have extremely small root balls. I buy screened pumice by the yard and then I put it through a 18 inch screen. And anything that I can, I'm aggressive at getting it through that. If there's anything fine that falls out is gone. So I've got a very coarse mixture and I also have a very wet environment. But because when I collect a tree, I'm not interested in top growth so much as getting a bunch of new, abundant root growth so that it can carry on to the next stage.
I fertilize pretty heavily. In a perfect year, I would fertilize every two weeks in the growing season with full strength Miracle Gro. It's not that I buy a nursery mix, it's more affordable, but it always ends up being something like 18, 19, 22, for instance.
But it's blue. It would look just like Miracle Gro. And I run that full strength out of a garden at the end of garden hose mixer. And I fertilize the bark, the foliage, the roots.
And the reason I can do that and get away with it is because my Field soil amount in the original tree is quite small. So as you're watering, the top of that water's running out of the bottom. If you were to do that with the standard bonsai mix, you would hurt trees.
But for what I do in my niche, it's very, I believe wholeheartedly in organics. It just takes so long to get things up and running and the concentrations are so low.
One thing that we haven't talked about, but you've heard it in some of my other aftercare things, is I always think of collecting a tree like sending a person into surgery.
Young people, young people up and bouncing around in a day or two. Older people might take three or four days to be up and bouncing around. And the longer you're in the hospital languishing, the better your chance to get a staph infection or pneumonia.
So the faster you can get those trees out of the ground and growing and flourishing. This is important, in my opinion, to.
That. It's my opinion that that tree not only is available for sale sooner, but more importantly, it doesn't have like a blemish on its record where it laid dormant and sickly for a year and a half. Sick trees that have become sickly and then get healthy, it's not uncommon for them to become sickly later on. That's a real thing.
That was just an analogy I share, but that's why I use chemical fertilizers. And I actually do have bonsai trees at my house and up at Mariah that are in three way mixes. They don't really get the miracle grow. I do get them with it, but it's not the same regimen.
[01:08:23] Speaker A: Gotcha, gotcha.
[01:08:25] Speaker B: Be aware.
[01:08:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I, I. The aftercare video that you did for Mirai, I thought was just absolutely phenomenal. And I follow all those things. So whenever I collect a tree, first off, I try and get as many fine roots as possible.
I put it in a nice tight box with sifted pumice and I use like a medium to coarse grit of pumice.
I try and get that balance of water and oxygen. I set them on the ground like you recommend, and I've had very good success. And generally I put trees in full sun right away, my Sierras, and they start growing very quickly.
So I really appreciate you putting out that resource. I think it is a very good resource for learning about aftercare.
[01:09:14] Speaker B: I'm happy to hear that you say that. And I've had success because there have been two or three students in the last year that have been up at Mirae. I've had at least two of them specifically say, what do you think about the fact that you put out all that aftercare information? These guys both live in the Rocky Mountains, and they both said, some of the stuff you talked about, I didn't understand the sod as to why we'd put it on the ground. But I did what you said. My success rate has gone through the rough.
And he says, so now any collector can kind of do what you want. How do you feel about that? And I've told them, I say, you know, I vacillate back and forth on that because it does affect my livelihood. But at the end of the day, it was the right thing to do. And I feel good about it because I think that anybody that is truly interested in yamadori should go collecting once or twice. It's probably going to turn out not to be their thing, but they're going to learn a tremendous amount of respect for what it takes to get those trees out alive and have nice ones. And they're also going to learn a tremendous amount about what their own abilities are. And, okay, here's a tree in the mountain. How am I going to do this? Oh, look, this is going to be really important here. And that doesn't seem to matter at all.
And it's a learning curve. It's just like anything else. It broadens your.
Your experience with trying to keep a living thing happy, healthy, and vibrant in your world.
And what could be bad about that?
[01:10:53] Speaker A: Absolutely.
You know, I wanted to ask you a bit about your personal collection.
Do you have a lot of bonsai trees that you keep at your house or at Ryan's house? Like, how many personal trees do you have?
[01:11:11] Speaker B: I think the number's down. I have 80, about 85 trees in my yard. And I just have a small lot in a little town, a corner lot, and it's maxed out from one end to the other. I have 300 trees in the ground.
[01:11:25] Speaker A: Here, you know, field growing 300.
[01:11:28] Speaker B: 300 seedlings that have been root pruned, grown, dug up, rework, planted, because I. Nice sickness, you know.
[01:11:37] Speaker A: It'S a good sickness.
[01:11:39] Speaker B: So not counting those, I have about 85 trees and pots.
And a few of those are things that are unique, but a lot of them were things that were at the garden and never sold. And after three years, they have to be repotted and dealt with. And if I put it in a bonsai pot, it's not going to sell.
Randy touched a tree. They're like, no, I want a wild tree. I don't want something that's tame, but it's good practice because it forces you to work with trees that typically have defects. And so I also have quite a few deciduous trees here, stuff that I grew in the field and some that I salvaged at a Tilperian.
They got a lot of work to be done, but it's not that easy to find affordable 30 year old trident maples with 6 inch trunks that are, you know, that are 2ft tall. So I've got, I've got that here. And at Mirai, I try and keep.
I had 50 trees at one time up there. I think I have 35 still that are for the most part more or less show ready.
Sometimes, you know, they have hiccups and it might take two or three years, but they're in, in good pots.
A lot of them have been worked on multiple times.
[01:12:55] Speaker A: And are these trees not for sale?
[01:12:58] Speaker B: No, but these are for sale.
[01:13:00] Speaker A: Like everything is for sale. Is there anything?
[01:13:03] Speaker B: I've.
It's for instance, it's not uncommon for me to turn offers down on trees. I feel like there was a tree that won the Artisans Cup. It was very, I think they call it Big Blue. I don't name my trees. I feel like if you do that, it's gonna die.
I have koi fish. If you name a koi fish, the heron's gonna stab it, it's gonna get sucked down the body. Something horrible will happen to the named fish.
So I don't name anything.
[01:13:29] Speaker A: I have koi too, and my kids named all my koi. So hopefully the herons don't come, but they're all named.
[01:13:39] Speaker B: Well, there you go. I don't know what to tell you.
It's good to be optimistic.
[01:13:45] Speaker A: Okay, well that's good, that's good.
[01:13:49] Speaker B: And I think I have another 40 or 50 trees up there that we call style and cells that are really good trees that they get singled out and interesting. A lot of times they're leftovers. They're incredible trees that people just didn't pick, didn't see.
And so we'll work on them, get them into a pot and we have an arrangement where there's a base price for the tree and then the stuff Marai does to it adds value and we have a way to, to share that. And it's, it's tree dependent. So I wouldn't be surprised if I have 50 trees up there total. Now.
I originally had 50 of my own, but I know that at least 20 of those have sold and primarily smaller chuhine and size trees that are. They're what I call one man trees. I have an overwhelming number of. Of two man or dingo trees that are so big we put them on the dingo because they're as you know, the bigger the tree, the more difficult the pool of potential buyers dwindles rapidly. And in my driveway at my house Max could lots of people could tell you this. I've got half a dozen trees out there that I literally. They're within 20ft of a public road.
People walk by them all the time, but they're so big that you couldn't really.
And I have precautions in place so that nobody gets them. But I don't put tiny little passers by can walk up, pick it up and walk away with it because those, a couple of those did go missing.
I. Most of my tree in the. In the backyard I keep small stuff. None of it's show quality in general. It's fun stuff that I can wire and dink and do crazy stuff that would be considered unacceptable by common bonsai standards. But a lot of times I'm starting with some pretty hideous trees too that have some outstanding characteristic and it is fun to try and make it look pretty somehow.
[01:15:49] Speaker A: So do you have a desire to have a collection that you keep forever or is there not much of a desire there? Personally.
[01:16:01] Speaker B: No, I definitely have trees that I.
I like to keep. I like to walk by them every day. I like to see them and like anybody else, it's fun to work on a tree that you've had for 15 or 20 years, right?
[01:16:20] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[01:16:21] Speaker B: If you keep pictures. And I'm not super good at this. I know a friend of mine, Walter Paul, keeps succession pictures and he's super organized so he can look back and. And you can go almost like a slideshow of the tree's evolution. I'm not that organized, but I am oftentimes shocked when working on a tree. And it's getting to be so, so good. And I'll look back and see even three or four years ago when I first styled it or worked, I think, wow, that was quite a dog, Randy.
And look at that. It's actually going to turn out to be something.
I also like to have some really big trees in my driveway so that when I every time I come and go from the house, I walk by these big colorful character trees. And some of my biggest trees have very little styling on them. And I'll do a little bit of manipulation. But my stuff at Mirai would be considered when they're prepped and ready, they're gorgeous. And they would be considered show type trees all dialed in.
But at my house, I have a lot of things that would have a more wild feel that remind me more of what I typically spend most of my time around in the mountains.
[01:17:33] Speaker A: Okay, so. So I'm not sure if I understand what makes you want to keep a tree or not as opposed to sell it, because I think I've heard you say that you sell your best trees. Is that correct?
[01:17:47] Speaker B: That's true.
[01:17:48] Speaker A: I.
[01:17:49] Speaker B: With only a few exceptions, I have sold way better trees than I keep right now. For instance, in my driveway, there are two trees that I want to keep. They're both ponderosas and the others are big and crazy or unique.
But I would sell them and they are available, but they're also stuff that I keep here. My nursery is about five miles from here where I keep the bulk of my stock.
And for me, moving forward, I like limber pines and ponderosa pines. They also are less finicky than Rocky Mountain juniper. I'll be the first to tell you that they are probably the most finicky species I deal with. I think mountain hemlocks might be equally. Might be second.
And the Rocky Mountain junipers, my best one, my best trees overall would be up at Mirai. I don't know if that's. If you know this story, but I'll share it. I think Ryan wouldn't. I think it's common knowledge for some of his older students. When I first met him in about 07 or 08, he was still in Japan. He would come out. He would. He would come home at Christmas every year to see his parents. And then he would have four or five days on his way back to Japan. He would stop at my house and work on trees with me and trees that he had purchased or was thinking about purchasing.
We'd work like mad for three days or four days straight, and then he'd hit the plane and go back to Japan for a year. In the process of that, he helped me with a bunch of my own trees. So when he came back in 2010 and began his nursery, he had a lot of raw, unstyled trees, or they were first year in pots. You're not really styling them because in general he would prefer to style it first and then plant it later on. But sometimes just because of time, you have to plant it first and say later.
He had trees that he couldn't work. And my trees were more.
I had 20 or 30 or more trees maybe 50. We started with 50 that were further down the road to progression. So he could work on them and his students could work on them. You could have classes. Everybody worked on them and then they looked pretty. So they were. They went on his benches, which had a lot of unstyled or unfinished or. A tree after its first or second styling just needs time for growth before you can continue its. Its evolution.
So that's how my trees came to be up there in the first place. There were things that, because you started with glasses, that needed trees in all stages to work on progressions through the. The different seasons and the different, you know, whether you're repotting or working on pad development.
So that was the beginning of how my trees ended up up there.
And what's left are. I would say there's probably 25 out of those 50 that have been up there for 15 years now or close to it.
[01:20:46] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:20:47] Speaker B: And you've probably seen some. Some of them. I've had several trees and shows over the years, so I have some trees that are noteworthy up there. In fact, if you were to pull all my trees out and put them on benches, you would say I had a collection.
[01:21:02] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[01:21:03] Speaker B: The trees at Mariah are significantly better in general than here in my house.
[01:21:09] Speaker A: Makes sense.
I definitely know some of your trees and congrats on the PBE award that you won. That was a pretty impressive Ponderosa there.
Will you be attending the next. Next pbe? Will we see you there?
[01:21:27] Speaker B: Well, I have just recently chatted with that about Ryan. I kind of wanted to be in the last one and things just didn't work out that way.
So as far as I'm concerned, I'm going to have a tree in the next pbe.
[01:21:41] Speaker A: Fantastic.
[01:21:43] Speaker B: I expect competition has gone up quite a bit. I also know that you had a pretty good year about a year ago.
[01:21:50] Speaker A: Thank you very much.
[01:21:51] Speaker B: So as far as I know, it sounds like there's going to be Mirai student trees and Ryan's going to participate next year. I can't speak for him, but I feel that that's the way things are headed and I hope so.
[01:22:04] Speaker A: Great. Great. Do you think you'll vend there?
[01:22:07] Speaker B: I had more fun at the Expo with just meeting people and the camaraderie and people just being happy and friendly as.
That was about as much fun as I've ever had at a bonsai show.
[01:22:20] Speaker A: Awesome. Awesome.
[01:22:21] Speaker B: You know, those two guys worked pretty hard to make it happen and they must have.
Yeah, they must not sleep very much. I don't Understand it. But they're going to do it again.
It's a lot of work.
[01:22:32] Speaker A: I'm aware.
Yes. Yeah. Shout out to Eric, Jonas and now Andrew. They put in a tremendous amount of work I think that they've created. It sounds like they've created maybe some systems that they've been able to put in place. However, even with those systems, I'm sure it's just a crazy amount of work that they still have to do. And I think they deserve just a ton of credit for everything that they've done. So I'm really happy to hear that you will be there. Do you think you'll be vending as well as showing a tree?
[01:23:02] Speaker B: I would like to vend, but I don't really know. I can say that it's. If you're vending, it's better to show up with trees that are established and I don't have.
I got picked pretty clean this year.
[01:23:16] Speaker A: Got it. Okay.
[01:23:17] Speaker B: I can say that since COVID Covid didn't hurt me. In fact, it was a great year. But something has changed in the bonsai world as it affects me. And this relates to your earlier question about customers. It could just be the passage of time and people are aware that this. It's immodest for me to say, but I collect really good trees.
[01:23:38] Speaker A: You do?
[01:23:39] Speaker B: People know that. And I don't have. Have a lot of carryover from year to year. So a lot of stuff gets sold very early in the game and I just maintain it until it's healthy enough to make the transition to the customer's house.
So it has everything to do with whether I have a really good early May, June, spring collecting so that I've got trees that are healthy enough to be there, which is really going to be six or seven months after the fact. Right. Because I think it's February. Having said that, I just realized that it's not November. I. I will have trees available if I set some aside and just say they're off limits.
[01:24:15] Speaker A: Very nice. Yeah, sweet.
[01:24:17] Speaker B: It would be. It's a goal.
[01:24:19] Speaker A: Very nice. Very nice. Randy, do you mind if we take a two minute break really quick?
[01:24:24] Speaker B: No worries.
[01:24:26] Speaker A: Okay. I'll be right back. I'm back. I'm not sure if you are.
[01:24:31] Speaker B: I am. I'm ready.
[01:24:33] Speaker A: Awesome. So what. What is that a elk or a caribou behind you? It's kind of hard to see.
[01:24:40] Speaker B: It's actually a reindeer.
[01:24:42] Speaker A: Wow. Okay.
[01:24:45] Speaker B: It's. I live in a small house and I'm running out of room.
[01:24:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:24:51] Speaker B: And he's actually considered to be quite huge. It was something I, I, I harvested about.
Well, I guess it was middle August of the year, so it's about 16 months ago.
Okay. And sea with the Eskimos.
[01:25:08] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:25:10] Speaker B: And he was very old. He's still got velvet on his horns.
I actually have a caribou that is significantly bigger than this.
It's actually just got shipped out of Fairbanks today. I'm picking it up on Friday.
[01:25:27] Speaker A: Wow.
So that's awesome.
[01:25:30] Speaker B: I need a house with taller ceilings, Jeremiah.
[01:25:33] Speaker A: Absolutely, you do.
So I understand that you are into several different hobbies. I know hunting is a big passion of yours. How does everything, can you rank everything? So I've heard about beekeeping. I've heard about koi keeping, hunting bonsai and pigeon keeping.
How do they all rank? And I'm sure I'm missing some. Like, is hunting number one?
[01:26:01] Speaker B: Actually, tree collecting is number one.
[01:26:04] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:26:06] Speaker B: Hunting would be number two.
The hunting vacillates depending on time and effort. For instance, I live right along the Columbia river, but there's really not many ducks around this year. And primarily it's because our weather is so mild. They're still in Canada.
And this has been a recurring theme for the last, let's say four, five years. For sure. They're all up on the Canadian border in Skagit Flats. So that's ordinarily would be this would be the time of the year for that. November, December, January.
But I've been trying to do some mountain hunts. Last month I was in Kyrgyzstan for kind of an exotic sheep. Biggest sheep in the world in an ibex.
Wildly expensive, cheap, cheaper to go there and hunt sheep than it is in North America. Half the price.
But it was at 14,000ft. On horseback, I did well. But at my age, I'm still pretty athletic and I get around well in the mountains. But my pull dates coming sooner than yours. For instance, at some point I'm not going to want to be on a horse in a blizzard and 20 degrees below zero, you know, sucking. Do you have any air chase looking for an animal with horns that's not going to be that groovy.
[01:27:37] Speaker A: I can tell you're in good shape, Randy. And because you collect all those trees, I mean, it's easy to tell that you are in phenomenal shape. Do you have any tips for me to stay in really good shape as, as I get older?
How, how do you stay in shape?
[01:27:55] Speaker B: Don't do stupid things that are going to mess with your shoulders and your knees and your hips. If you're involved in any sports that are going to wear those out, I would tell you to slow down on those. I feel like you're a martial artist of some.
[01:28:09] Speaker A: I'm into jiu jitsu, Brazilian jiu jitsu, which. Which is typically pretty bad on shoulders and joints and things like that.
But there's things that you can do. I definitely try not to train with too much ego. So say, for example, if I'm lifting weights, I never try and max out. I have no desire to. I'd much rather lift to try and be lift with a larger rep range as opposed to try and max out and. And have a bunch of ego or anything like that. Like, my main goal also with jiu jitsu and with bonsai and with collecting, is to be able to do it for as long as possible and have no, no ego in terms of like, oh, I gotta beat this guy, or I need to do something that's really gonna hurt me.
Now, there are times, say for example, in collecting, if there's just a badass tree and it's at the top of the mountain, like, you gotta figure out how to get it down. But I'm all about doing it as safe as possible and trying to eliminate as many risks as possible.
And so I think it is important that if you should tie yourself in to a rope, you should tie yourself into a rope. Recently I started using like a hiking pole or a walking stick sometimes for. For really steep hills, just be. Which is something I used to not do.
But if you think about it, you want to have a tripod of three points. Hitting the. Hitting the ground as much as possible as opposed to just your two legs or two feet. I feel like I have taken some falls on the granite and it is not fun like you said earlier.
[01:29:52] Speaker B: Hmm.
Well, let me go back to a couple three things. I'll clear up the list real quick. Tree collecting, hunting. And then my other hobbies are I don't have bees right now.
I have struggled periodically with the diseases and trying to time the treatment in the fall to keep the varroa mites at bay.
One of the biggest problems we have here is we just are so wet. Trying to keep the hives dry and keep mildew and mold out of the bees. Trying to keep them dry.
You can keep them dry. You can't keep the humidity out. So I'm taking a pause from that right now. I'm also in the city and it's legal now. Finally, again, before, I may have had beehives when you weren't supposed to, but the Neighbors were okay with it.
The pigeons in the koi are more just because I like to nurture things. I like the sounds of the pigeons. I like to fly them. I don't really actively race them, but they are racing pigeons.
I trained them to come home. I currently have too many. If you know anybody who wants free pigeons, especially if they have kids, I have some beautiful birds. Ah, they're free. They're free. They wouldn't be good for eating, really. And the koi, I don't know. You have koi. They have personalities. I've got two ponds in my backyard, and it's just fun to look at them and hang out with them and drink coffee. I just like to sit and watch both of those. And I'm pretty active, so they are a mellowing influence for me.
[01:31:26] Speaker A: Definitely.
[01:31:27] Speaker B: Both of the ponds are set up so that I can look out my window and see down and into them.
And they're just colorful and beautiful.
[01:31:36] Speaker A: I just. They are.
[01:31:38] Speaker B: So for me, bonsai is more about. My thrill with bonsai comes from getting out and finding good trees and successfully getting them out of the ground. Do I still like to wire and style and do that?
I do, but nobody knows me for that. And my wiring would be. I mean, if I was in a Mirai class, I would probably get with anybody. I'd get in trouble for some take cheating on the wiring.
I can do show wiring, but it's a struggle. And if I have to do it, it's like, well, this isn't as much fun.
Yeah.
So.
And I.
I used to collect artifacts, which mostly amounted to walking around in the desert and picking up arrowheads or on the beaches.
And I've kind of gotten away from that, but I feel like I might do more of that again.
I've done other outdoor pursuits. I fish. I try and go somewhere every year to go fishing for something in a new place. Exotic. I went to the Amazon three or four times. That was fun.
Last year I was in Louisiana. Before that in Panama.
Hunting is kind of unaffordable.
So I don't. I don't do as much exotic stuff as that.
But I'm going back to that, like, the she punt, where at. At some point, I just won't. I'll live to be 90, barring disaster.
Genetically, that's 25 years.
And at some point, going down into the jungle and getting bit by things all day long or. Or freezing, you know, and can't feel the end of my fingers for a couple of days, I'm going to say I'm done. So I am really trying to get a few things accomplished in that order.
And I'm currently actively saving for. It took me two years to save for that sheep hunt because even the best collectors don't. There's way better avenues to make a living than trying to be in the bonsai business. You've heard this. You. You can observe it. It's like, yeah, you could go out and get a regular job and do way better and you'd have like a 9 to 5, if that's your thing.
I digress. Oh, I'm saving money to try and get a little bit bigger house, actually. So I have one room with taller ceilings. And what would be perfect if I could be in the city and have two extra lots so that I could move my nursery and have it on site and then enough ground to field grow about a thousand trees. Maybe 2000, 2 or 3000. Be surprised they don't all come out good. Lots of them are coals and, you know, end up on the burn pile.
But yeah, yeah, it's a, It's. That's a fun pastime. I have quite a fancy yard with trees and bushes and flowers and I like to garden weed. I. I'm an outdoors.
My world and my life revolves around being outside.
[01:34:32] Speaker A: That's fantastic dog.
[01:34:34] Speaker B: I may be getting another puppy.
That makes no sense, but it might happen anyway.
Yeah.
And the dog was with me in the mountains. She just did 60 miles and. Well, that's a lie. We did. We did 40 miles in the Sierras.
[01:34:50] Speaker A: Wow, that's impressive.
[01:34:52] Speaker B: So.
Yeah, I mean it's. Well, you have dogs. I've seen pictures of you with dogs. It's fun to.
That's a pretty awesome.
[01:34:59] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Did you get some good trees in the Sierras this time around?
[01:35:06] Speaker B: I got.
Say it. Repeat the question.
[01:35:11] Speaker A: Did you get some trees in the Sierra?
[01:35:14] Speaker B: Some good ones I actually got.
I found a place that I'd never been. Permits were available and easy, which isn't always the case or a lot of times I've had permits in areas that I considered to be kind of a waste of time. It was more like a nature hike.
[01:35:31] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:35:34] Speaker B: I got one very nice Sierra juniper.
I got a few trees that were. I would say they weren't terrible, but they're mediocre. They would be like commercial sale trees. But I got half a dozen lodge pools that I would consider to be shown trees.
I know that I've heard in the past and I don't know if this is true that people in California don't really like their lodge poles because they don't bark up very well and don't exhibit old, old age characteristics. Is that true in your opinion?
[01:36:05] Speaker A: I don't know. I, I will say it seems like lodge pole are not the most popular trees in California.
I don't know why. I mean, I think, you know, a fine specimen would be a great tree and people should like them. I have some pe. I have seen some individuals grafting white pine onto lodge pole which I think looks really good and have had some success with that. I know Boone had a few lodge pole that he grafted with white pine which looked really cool.
So I don't see why people should not like them. But I do think like generally speaking, junipers are, are always going to be the popular thing and maybe Ponderosa after that.
[01:36:51] Speaker B: So I'll just say this. The stuff that I did bring home, people will be fighting for the lodge poles, no question.
[01:36:57] Speaker A: Awesome. Awesome.
[01:36:59] Speaker B: The biggest problem that I have found with Sierra's down there is the dead wood can't compete with the Rocky Mountain junipers. And it's hard to get a heavy trunk with good movement that's under knee height. As you know, they tend to be. They just get too big. The best ones are always like so.
But having said that, I will also say that it's my opinion that the old Sierras typically they're, they're upright trees, but they're just massive bases and they come to a.
They exhibit characteristics of old, gentle, just grandeur better than any tree in the, in the Rocky Mountains.
The best Ponderosa pines are about the same, but the Sierras are striking and I think the Sierras are actually a little prettier than the Rockies, which I say hesitantly because I spend. I've been to the Sierras eight times in nine years, but the Rockies, I'm in the Rockies four or five times every year and it'll always be that way.
Going to the Sierras is more about an adventure trip, doing something because of the time and the weather permit it. Much like Alaska would be. If I went to Alaska and collected trees, it would be a personal trip and I'd probably have a few extras and be able to sell them for sure. But just it's more about going to a brand new place and trying to figure out through observation and hiking and spending time in the mountains, trying to figure out what's really going on there and just spend time in the outdoor world all alone and then at the end of the day trying to make it be successful at what I Do. I mean, I love to look at trees too, but if I'm going up there to chase trees, I chase trees and look at nature as I go. It's not the other way around.
[01:38:54] Speaker A: Totally.
[01:38:55] Speaker B: So there was something else you'd asked me about my tips for being in good shape.
[01:39:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:39:02] Speaker B: The longer you can put off knee, shoulder surgeries or hurt your. Everybody hurts their back. But fortunately I like to go to the gym. I like to lift weights.
[01:39:12] Speaker A: Nice.
[01:39:12] Speaker B: I work out with puny weights. If you saw what I bench press, people would giggle out loud and say, what the hell is that? But it doesn't take that much if you work on perfect form to isolate specific muscles. And I've been told that there's a difference between gymstrong and farm strong. And I'm just coincidentally, I'm probably a little of both.
But when I want to get prepped for the mountains, one, you just need to have your muscles need to be strong. Yoga. I love yoga. Stretching. I used to see a chiropractor quite a bit and he was a yoga teacher and he showed me how to fix most things.
The biggest problem is trying to remember how to fix a certain muscle in my shoulder that I hurt for years ago because so much has come and gone.
Foam balls and tennis balls are pretty awesome. I take them with me on trips.
[01:40:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:40:06] Speaker B: And if you for me to get in the best shape, the stair machine. The StairMaster.
You on the StairMaster for 20 minutes at a medium speed. 20 minutes. You do that every day for two weeks before a trip.
You'll see.
[01:40:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:40:24] Speaker B: One thing that can be an issue is I live at sea level or 200ft and I commonly work at about 7.
Between 7 and 10,000ft. And as I get older, I can tell, you know, degradation in my ability to. The first couple of days of getting acclimated. It takes me two days to do it. Used to take me a day 15 years ago.
So. And that's not going to get better.
I have a peer that is equal to me, but he only hunts lives locally and the stair machine doesn't work for him. He swims and he swears by that.
I've swam too, but it doesn't use the same muscles.
[01:41:06] Speaker A: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I don't think you can. I mean, just in terms of for hiking up and down hills. I feel like the StairMaster is a fantastic machine to use.
[01:41:19] Speaker B: Yeah. You can. You can make that even more awesome too by putting a backpack with about 30 pounds on and going up the stairs.
[01:41:26] Speaker A: There you go.
[01:41:27] Speaker B: Turn the speed Way, way down.
[01:41:30] Speaker A: Yeah. When you made those trips to the. When you go out to the Rocky Mountains, what type of vehicle are you taking? Are you taking like a big semi or a big box truck or a van or something?
[01:41:45] Speaker B: No.
[01:41:46] Speaker A: And how long are you out there?
[01:41:47] Speaker B: Just like everybody else.
[01:41:49] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:41:51] Speaker B: But what I do do is I rent a trailer and I'm out there and I bring trees home in that.
[01:41:56] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:41:57] Speaker B: And I've talked about this pretty commonly, and it's interesting because in the last couple of years, I've been in three different places where people from the Midwest had come out and filled and collected trees and rented a U haul trailer to take them home in. So I know other people have keyed in on this.
They may have thought of it on their own too, but I've shared that all along. I could have bought fancy, fancy toy haulers.
I could have bought five or six of them by now.
But I live in a wet environment and I don't like to work on cars, but I can. There's axles, there's bearings, there's tires, there's electronics. The electrical wiring always gets messed up here. It's going to get moldy and mildew and wet, unless you pay to store it. And then you're hauling at 1200 miles empty.
And if you're moving back and forth to locations, where do you store it, where do you save it? You pull them on rocky roads, they get flat tires.
It makes my life simpler. I was a contractor for a long time. I like to rent things and return them when I'm done with them.
[01:43:03] Speaker A: That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. Okay.
And how long are you out on these trips?
[01:43:13] Speaker B: Fifteen years ago, I used to average 12 to 14 days. Now I can do it in about. I do it eight to 10 days.
Usually in seven or eight days.
I wear a Fitbit the last two years. Typically I am on a big day, I move 10 to 12 miles.
That's not necessarily all walking because it moves.
It registers on the motion of your arm.
So while you're digging, chopping, you know. But you can look at your zone minutes and how often you are in elevated heart rate zones.
10 to 12 miles is a pretty good day. And this will be 20, 18 to 30,000, 28,000 steps.
And I can do that for about eight days.
And then more or less, I'm tuckered out.
And it takes me 20. It takes 16 hours of driving, just driving one way or the other.
So you're usually one big day out and a day and a half Coming back, I always, no matter what I do, I've developed a pattern to work all day and then try and knock down 303 to 400 miles that first night, get in somewhere at midnight and then so that I can get home the next day in a big day.
[01:44:31] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:44:31] Speaker B: I get tired of staying in hotels, but camping.
I tried camping to save money early on and you're always, you're typically covered with dust, dirt and mosquito repellent and you just want to get that wash. You can take a solar shower kind of, but rolling into your sleeping bag, dirty, and then getting up and it's.
I camp out a lot. I sleep in a sleeping bag plenty. So I'm happy to roll into town and cache my trees day by day until either typically I am pulling out when I have a full load, whatever that means. In pine country you can get a lot more because you can stack trees literally on top of one another. If you're getting junipers and anything with exotic deadwood or brittle branches, you get maxed out by volume, you know, because you can't typically, you cannot stack. You don't want to touch very much. There are times I've come home with the passenger seat, a tree in the passenger seat that had super delicate, exotic Bungeonesque deadwood, and one or two in the back seat. And I'm yelling at the dog, and the dog only weighs 13 pounds not to touch anything because it's. That's the valuable characteristic on that tree. And as you probably know, once you break dead wood, no matter how you try to attach it, screw it, glue.
[01:45:55] Speaker A: It, wire it, it's not the same.
[01:45:58] Speaker B: It's never the same. And most times it's not. It doesn't have a very long shelf life.
Yeah, once it's broken, it's more or less lost.
A couple other things I'll share, I run across a lot of people. If you live in Portland, in the city, I'll have friends say, well, I couldn't go to Beaverton, that's 12 miles away. That's going to take me like a half an hour to drive there. Traffic, it's like it's 12 miles. Do you really hear yourself?
And I know that it's a long haul, but I go to the Rocky Mountains because that's where the best collecting is for me. And I built relationships with lots of ranchers, lots of.
And I have all sorts of backup support with friends, and the majority of whom aren't even bonsai related. They just think I'm.
They don't often Remember my name. They recognize my face. And I say, I'm Randy from Oregon. I remember we. And they. They know me and they're happy to see me and chat and we talk because oftentimes I don't see them. But every two or three years, and that's likable. I mean, that's human nature to want to go back up and catch up with some ranching couple or an old timer that lives out in the boondocks. And what have you been up to, what's new, what's going on?
And I like that. That's one of the things that makes me want to go back to a lot of places.
Colorado is the only place. I have bonsai friends there. But people in Colorado aren't very friendly.
[01:47:26] Speaker A: Really.
[01:47:27] Speaker B: People. When I go to California, even down in Southern California, I almost never have anybody tell me no. If I ask for permission on private property, I explain what I'm doing. Oh, yeah, that'd be fine. Feel free to drive out across the field if you want.
[01:47:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:47:44] Speaker B: In most other states, a pretty good response. Unless it's hunting season and then, you know, ask. I just don't go on to private properties in hunting season especially.
I don't.
People get weird about it, then things happen.
It's just a fact of that lifestyle. But In Colorado, people, nine times out of 10, will tell me no, even if they only own two acres. But there's six square miles of national forest land and it's only 200 yards away. They won't give me permission to cross, and I don't know what that's about.
I've been pretty vocal about this because it's a recurring theme. Yeah, I've had a lot of people say, well, you know, they moved there from California and Texas. There's a lot of that.
But most of them are just, this is our ground. You can't. That's our backyard. You can't go there.
They've got it. There's a term for it. I forget what it's called. The acronym. Not in my backyard. Maybe. Is that what it is? Nimby, I think that might be.
Is fun to explore, too. But I find that if I go into new country to explore and I start to find good trees, the exploring's out and I'm. I've got purpose.
[01:49:03] Speaker A: So absolutely.
[01:49:05] Speaker B: I try to make exploration trips in the spring when I know that for the first four days I'm not going to collect a tree, even if I could pull it out by my hand next to the road. I don't I don't. I just continue to explore mountain ranges and I know that the younger, the younger generation of people in general embrace Google Earth and technology and probably drones and other stuff.
And more and more I've come to realize that there is some possible use for some of that Google Earth maybe, but I don't care about that. So I don't do it, have I? I absolutely have done it. And sometimes I'll look stuff up to try and figure out how a road system works because it's not in my paper maps, but I navigate by paper maps and binoculars and just putting the miles in on the road and talking to people and meeting people and that there's joy for me in that.
So that's part of my process.
I didn't always know that that was part of the joyful reading maps looking except. But something I learned from my father and it's like, oh, you're just like him. This has become a thing for you. And so I embrace it.
And yeah, it works pretty well.
It actually works really well. But it is time consuming. You've been in the mountains, you can blow up a couple hundred miles in two days. You can do two or three hundred miles in a day because you go from range to range and the weather's not right. There's snow cover, the rock is wet, you can't get out on it. Well, you can, but you can't cover enough ground to be useful.
The roads are muddy. Oftentimes in the Rocky Mountains in the spring it'll be perfectly good until it rains. And then driving on flat ground is dangerous because you might.
Your truck will go off what's basically a dike. You're 30ft in the air and you're going to roll your truck in the prairie, which almost happened to me once. And you know, the backcountry boys love those guys. So Steve and I are really close and we, we, we chat all the time and we both had similar experiences where like, I just couldn't control the truck and I'm sliding towards the edge of the road and it's like if I get over the edge, it's just prairie. But I'm gonna roll my truck.
[01:51:24] Speaker A: Oof. Yeah.
[01:51:26] Speaker B: So there's, there's always something.
[01:51:30] Speaker A: Definitely. I can't imagine the number of miles that you've probably put in. Just scouting different locations. It's gotta be astronomical.
[01:51:39] Speaker B: I know that this year I put 45,000 miles on my truck.
Wow, 35 to 40 is standard. 45 is a pretty big year. It's a Lot.
[01:51:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:51:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:51:54] Speaker A: That's a ton.
[01:51:55] Speaker B: But it does come with the.
It just comes with the territory. And I know collector friends in the Rocky Mountains and I could move there, but I have way.
I was. I get tired of the rain here. In fact, I've got seasonal affective disorder right now. Doesn't make me depressed, just makes me sleepy. But I know that it's there. So I get outside and I stay active. I've got ways to overcome it.
But if you live in those dry, desiccating environments, collecting the trees in the aftercare and the high success rates with really small root balls, because, again, immodestly, I collect things with tiny little roots and I come home and take even more off. I do things that they simply couldn't because they're dry and windy or cold and windy. And windy. And windy.
And it would take some of the joy out of.
To be successful would be harder work and you're.
It would be less satisfying.
So.
And that's just coincidental that I live in a. Such a perfect environment for tree recuperation.
[01:53:05] Speaker A: Yeah. With all the rain that you get.
I think Max was telling me that sometimes you actually cover the trees, though, because they're getting too much rain. Is that something that you do sometimes?
[01:53:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So coincidentally, just yesterday I moved all my Rocky Mountain junipers under a greenhouse rough. It's really just a simple 2x4 shed I keep at the farm.
And I don't know how big it is, but it's probably 18ft by 25ft and it's not very high off the ground. Four foot at one end and maybe seven feet at the other. Tapered. And I just put cheap plastic on it. On the roof only. And I move the trees underneath it. And its only job is to let the roots breathe, even even though they're growing in screened pumice.
[01:53:55] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[01:53:56] Speaker B: I did this. This will be the third or the fourth year. So I just. I taped it up two days ago. And yesterday I moved all the trees in.
[01:54:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:54:02] Speaker B: And it will actually take weak trees or limber pines or some other stuff that I can. You know, you can look at a tree and tell that it's.
It could be stronger. I. So I put all sorts of other odds and ends underneath that.
And the whole goal is for me to be able to control the moisture in the roots.
But we are so wet up here that most winters I will only water that underneath that once or twice between now and April 15th.
[01:54:28] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:54:28] Speaker B: I probably won't water until the 1st of March.
[01:54:31] Speaker A: That's So different.
Yeah, but totally makes sense.
[01:54:37] Speaker B: The last three weeks have been really wet here, but the trees don't languish as much. They rebound more quickly in the spring.
The pine trees don't seem to matter as much. Limbers being a white pine. I have some really nice ones that are in my yard or in pots in my driveway that I leave out all winter, and they do okay. But I know that trees in transition do better if you can water, if you're in control of the moisture.
I think maybe 10 years ago, maybe 12 or 15 years ago, I lost Rocky Mountain junipers and a couple of ponderosa pines and what they call screen pumice that you buy by the yard that drowned.
And so that's when I started to screen, screen pumice and get the vines out.
And then in the last four or five years, I've really started trying to get higher quality junipers because I've got people that are interested in them, like noisily asking and kind of scratching at the door for them. And so that's kind of what pushed me over.
It's not a precipice. I don't know why that. I don't know why I waited so long to do that, because it's a simple, easy scenario and it has benefited me in the trees hugely.
[01:55:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:55:55] Speaker B: I also keep the trees on the ground there underneath that too. If it's a tree in transition, it. It doesn't come up off the ground ever.
[01:56:03] Speaker A: That's great.
Yeah. I've found a tremendous benefit in screening pumice or getting out all the fines. I even go so far as I rinse my pumice before I put it in the bonsai pot or in a box, just to make sure I get as much of those fines off as possible. And I dry it after that just to make sure it's really dry and there's no dust on it because I think that dust just clumps up, clogs drainage holes and just doesn't allow those roots to breathe. So I think it's so important.
Definitely a vital, vital, important point.
[01:56:42] Speaker B: Well, so I don't rinse mine, but the first time that I plant them and chopstick everything in and then I wire the tree in and everything's solid. The very first time I water them, I use a garden hose, a water, a jet, you know, like the nose and with under pressure. And I work methodically around where I know that the root ball is. And you can just watch the water runs gray for quite a while. It's not Unlike the first time you plant a tree in three way, it runs brown or tan for a little bit.
And I know for a fact that I don't get it all because I have to plug drain holes or the floor with the coarse sawdust so that the pumice doesn't all run out.
And when you take the trees out to repot them later, there's very often about an eighth to 316 of an inch of sludge right on the bottom of everything on a round container. You know, it's got standard four side holes, so hopefully trees don't spend more than two years in a container or three before they're moving onward to the next home.
[01:57:44] Speaker A: Totally.
Well, Randy, I have really enjoyed this conversation and it's such an honor to get to chat with you and pick your brain on things. I guess I kind of had one more question for you and maybe kind of a deep one. I don't know if this is a good question or not, but I'm just going to ask it. I'm curious. I mean, you've done so much with collecting Yamadori and like, I really consider you the great, probably the greatest of all time in terms of collecting Yamadori.
Is there anything else that you want to still accomplish in terms of to leave a legacy or do you have any goals that you're still chasing after?
Are you pretty, pretty content at this point in time?
[01:58:31] Speaker B: That's interesting because I typically don't listen to podcasts much, but this summer and fall I made a point out of listening to podcasts, Bonsai and then just some other oddball things because normally I'm an audiobook guy.
I just listened to one.
Well, I'll share it. You can make of it what you will. But it was by Cameron Haynes, who is a famous bow hunter. But the audiobook I listened to is really him talking about wanting to be an endurance runner. He didn't really address it that way, but. And I forget what it was called, but I endure, I think. But he made the point that if you, if you don't work, pick, pick one thing. He's very singular. Most of us have multiple things we're interested in. We're never going to be as pinpoint laser focused as this guy is. But he was saying something that I've heard in different ways at other times. One of them was Outliers a few years ago. That was a book.
But at some point, if you don't work really hard at the thing that you love or want to be successful at, unless you really are all in. The best you're ever going to do is be average.
And it's funny because I don't think of myself that way, but I think of myself as an average collector that just works harder than the other guys. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's how I see myself and I feel like I can get better. It's like, yeah, I want to do better. I want to get better trees. I want to get healthier trees. I want to get root systems that come out that are flawless and do a better job of finding that incredible show tree that just isn't got quite enough roots and being better at letting.
Letting it go.
It's like, you know what you'll find when you just need to cover more ground, let it go. There are more trees, hundreds of square miles of rock right here that you're never.
I'm gonna run out of time before I really get good at what I do, so just better all around. And I'm also mellowing with age. I'm probably easier to be around and less.
I'm not really driven by money so much as experience.
And I've had people tell me that, that I collect experiences.
That's cool, really. I've mentioned this in podcasts. I'm very comfortable alone in the mountains.
When I come back, I like to live in town and be around people and do things. But when I'm in the mountains, whether I'm looking for a tree or an arrowhead or a dock or a deer, I would way much rather do that alone.
And in a perfect world, in the old days, you would have hunting camps where you'd have family traditions, people get together for a few days or a week, and you'd probably all go out and hunt on your own during the day, but you'd come back and make dinner together and have camaraderie in the tent and around the stove. That's a fading, dying tradition.
It's just because of the way we manage populations and how you draw permits.
But that's nearly gone now. When I was in my youth, that was standard thing.
And I enjoy that with my son when I collect with him sometimes. But he's got his own life and he does that to hang out with his dad because he's old enough now.
It's not embarrassing to hang with me.
I like the fact that I was able to train at least one person to carry on this if he decides to do it in the future. Will he? I don't know. I think he doesn't like that much.
But it's not impossible that someday I have an apprentice to.
I don't know how that would work. And I've had lots of people offering this is, please don't call me and say, hey, I want to be that guy. I got a strong back tonight. I'll just watch and help you carry stuff. I'm not there yet, but at some.
[02:02:32] Speaker A: Point, I'm sure people blow you up about that all the time.
[02:02:35] Speaker B: I remember years ago, a guy named Larry Jackal, who you may know from Denver, he runs.
[02:02:40] Speaker A: I remember.
[02:02:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, nice guy. And he runs the bonsai garden there at the. I don't know the name of it, but it's in Denver. He told me once about 15 or 18 years ago about trying to teach younger people to carry on the collecting generation. And I remember at the time thinking that was nonsense.
And it's like, why would I want to train a bunch of people that are going to be.
Not necessarily my nemesis, but they're going to be competitors? Because the bonsai world is limited. It's not like we could go out and grow a thousand of this and sell them every year or collect 100 of these and sell them every year. The market is simply not that big.
But now as I've gotten a little bit older and the more that I realized that younger people just for whatever reason, aren't in the natural world as much as people my age, it's not just in bonsai, but it's in hunting, it's in fishing, it's in. I don't know about hiking or camping, but because Covid caused a resurgence in some of that REI type stuff, Mazama things, and in hunting, too. But in general, I will probably have. I will probably find a way to deal with that in the next five to seven years. That would probably be a goal.
Because if you just go out there on your own, which is how you may have learned how to collect, the learning curve is steep and it's. It can be wildly frustrating to go out and just be unsuccessful. Unsuccessful. And then you. You do get a great. When it comes back and it dies because you. You just don't have the skill set yet.
It should be addressed somehow. I'd be the last person to. To be able to tell you how to do it. I don't know yet, but it feels like that would be worthy.
[02:04:26] Speaker A: Very nice.
Awesome. Well, I actually also enjoy listening to Cameron Haynes. I like his.
Well, his podcast and everything. I've heard him quite a bit on the Joe Rogan experience and talking about training for ultramarathons and that kind of thing. But I think that. I really like the quote that you quoted from him, and I think that that's the right mentality to always trying to become better and always be trying to improve and never settling. I think that's the right way to do it. And I think that speaks to your character and why you've been so successful. And so I think that is awesome. And I love to hear about. I'm really curious to see the future with collecting and yourself. And if you do maybe take on some type of apprentice or something like that, that would be very interesting to see. And I do feel like I would like to see some people learn how to collect properly, and you would be the best person to teach them that. So that would be fantastic.
[02:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll be. You'll just have to ask me. I'm not trying to talk about what I do. You know, I typically just don't. I never talk really about specific areas and specific techniques.
But as you're probably aware, collectors are like fishermen. They're a little bit secretive.
[02:05:50] Speaker A: Yeah. For good reason.
For good reason.
[02:05:55] Speaker B: And.
[02:05:55] Speaker A: Yes.
[02:05:56] Speaker B: And I get it. Yeah.
Food for thought, at the very least. Yeah. All I can say is, at the end of the day, I'm just lucky to have fallen. Literally fallen into a job that suits me and my personality.
And I was able to become pretty successful at.
And planning had no part in that. It was just happenstance and lucky. And we're also.
You know, I'm going to make one quick little pitch here that North America is blessed with an abundance of trees, outdoor environments.
And I guess I'm making my case that if done with rational thought, collecting doesn't have to be a predatory thing that people could equate to looting the natural world.
It's not the same as standing.
Standing on the last dead elephant and the amount of land out there. I don't know if you've spent much time in the Rocky Mountains, but the western United States is, like, big. When you fly over it, it takes a couple of hours.
[02:07:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:07:11] Speaker B: More people should get out. And at least I wish more.
A lot more people would get out and think about collecting trees, whether they do or not. But just to go out and see them in the native environment and see how trees actually grow in the real world.
Not everybody's gonna like it. I understand. I'm biased, so I don't. I don't see real well, but to me, it's perfectly obvious. But anyway, it was just passing.
[02:07:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
Awesome. Well, I enjoyed all your thoughts and passing thoughts and I really, really appreciate your time. And I need to get a. I think one of my goals is to have a Randy Knight tree in my collection. I still technically don't have one right now, so I'm hoping we can make that happen at some point in the future.
And I would love to come see your place someday. I think that would be absolutely awesome. And really, really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for speaking with me today.
[02:08:10] Speaker B: More kind words. Thank you. Well, let's just work on trying to make a tree in your yard happen and you're welcome to visit anytime.
[02:08:20] Speaker A: Really appreciate it, Randy. Thank you so much.
And happy holidays. Merry Christmas. Thank you so much.
[02:08:26] Speaker B: Well, happy holidays to you and your family. And I hope you can edit something useful out of the witness.
Chatty.
[02:08:32] Speaker A: Oh, it was fantastic. It was great. Thank you so much.
