Heritage Day 2018 Exhibition Prepapation
It feels like I have been away for years but it's been just 24 days to me that feels like a life time. It's the longest that I have been away from Steemit. I have been busy with a roadshow the past few weeks and have been working 16 - 18 hour shifts. So you can image that the few hours left in the day was spend sleeping. I lived on coffee and energy drinks during this period. I feel so bad. I have been eating clean and living healthy for almost a year now and then I need to eat and drink what ever I can get my hands on as you do not have a choice. I'm glad that's over, now I can focus on what I love most, my trees.
Today I spent a few hours working on trees that I will be displaying as part of a Heritage day exhibition.
The exhibition will be at The Sanctuary Shopping centre in Somerset West tomorrow (24 September 2018) and will be from 09:00 till 14:00. I will be one of three bonsai artist that will be displaying bonsai trees in this exhibition. Please feel free to come and visit our stand. If you have any trees that you would like some advice on bring them along. I will be displaying three bonsai trees and two kusamono plants.
There will be two live bonsai demo's one from 09:00 till 10:00 and another from 10:00 till 11:00. I will be doing the demo in the second time slot. Please feel free to come over and introduce yourself.
Here are a few photos I took during the preparation for the exhibition. The before photos are not the best. I do apologize for that, but the sun was shining through a window in the garage and made it hard to capture the trees without it appearing over exposed. The after photos where taken later in the day so I had more controlled over the amount of light on the tree.
The tree above is a black monkey thorn tree that I bought on a auction about four years ago. I've been working on this tree ever since and repotted the tree last year. This will be the first time that this tree will be on display in public.
This is my favorite Ficus in my collection currently. I wrote a blog on it a few months ago.
The Celtis Africana in the photos above you should be familiar with as it is the tree that has been on the most exhibitions and blogs in my collection. I do not know what it is about this tree that I like so much but it's one of my favorite trees to display. It is a small tree but it makes a big impact. I think it has to do with the size of the leaves. Why you might ask? A Celtis Africana's leaves are normally around five centimeters in lenght. With regular prunning I got the leaf size down to one centimeter.
As you can see in the before and after images there is a huge difference in quality of the images but also the leaves and pots. I applied Oleum to the leaves and oiled the pots so that they can look better on display. I also topped up the ground cover and added more moss to the kusamono.
I am very pleased with the way these trees turned out.
I will be posting a few photos after the exhibition tomorrow.
Hope you enjoyed the blog. Please feel free to leave your comments below.
