“What are you gonna do with that piece of sh….. “

It’s been about four years since I found this, and every year, looking at it and pondering the next move, I’ve missed the opportunity to work it. Why? I needed to repot it, get a look at the roots, figure out what was happening under the soil. You can only do the root thing in the late winter/early spring, before the tree sprungs, or you’ll tend to kill it. We don’t try to do no killin’ ’round here.

It’s my favorite deciduous tree, Celtis lævigata, and you need to repot it before the new leaves emerge. This year I got to it in time.

Let’s see what we can figure out.

I love odd shapes and challenging trunk lines in my personal trees. This is a root, I’m sure, off a bigger tree, and I love it.

The dead wood. The reverse (inverse, obverse, blah blah blah) taper. The species. I call it the ficus of the deciduous world. You just have to search “Hackberry ” in the search on the front page and you’ll get a bunch of hits on articles I’ve written on the tree (except that one Brazilian Raintree hit….).

Funny thing just occurred to me. When I write my blog I try to explain what’s happening, or what’s going through my head, as I work on the tree.

During a demo, I’ll often just get lost in the tree, and forget that the audience is there and I’m supposed to be performing. A bonsai demo is really a kind performance art (and I say that tongue in cheek, because many bonsai practitioners are kind of conservative when it comes to bonsai-as-Art, no matter their taste in art or politicians. Me, I can’t stand the taste that a politicians actions leave in my mouth, except I don’t mind that one bonsai guy in Virginia. You know who you are, Roberto).

When I’m asked what’s going through my head during a demo I usually say “not much”. It gets a few laughs. Or I’ll say “you don’t wanna know what lives inside my brain”. That gets some too.

Sometimes I tell the story of how the chicken came to the west.

I’ll say, ” How many of you have heard the chicken story?”

Those who have, groan. But they encourage it because, though they’ve suffered through it, they want others to know the pain of sitting through it as well.

Shared pain is lessened, after all.

Anyway, the chicken story:

What you may not know, is that the chicken originally came from Asia. Look it up, I ain’t lyin’. And in Asia, there is a strong Master/Apprentice relationship in the passing down of knowledge.

Now, anyone who’s raised chickens knows that it’s prit’near impossible to tell the difference between a male and a female chick (baby chicken). And it should be self explanatory that a female chick is more valuable than a male chick, because of, you know, eggs and all that, so there evolved a very prestigious occupation in the world of animal husbandry know as a “Master Chicken Sexer”. A real job. A dirty job you might say (you remember Mike Rowe and Dirty Jobs? There was an episode about just this thing).

So, being that chickens are from Asia, and they were imported into the West (how else do we have omelettes?), it soon became clear that the western farmers needed help trying to figure out how to distinguish between a male and female chick. Still obvious, right?

So the western farmers hired the Asian Master Chicken Sexers to teach the westerners how to do this.

The scene: we have the apprentice chicken sexers sitting at the conveyor belt, and the yellow chicks are coming down the chute, onto the belt, and the apprentice picks up the chick, tickle its butt or something, and throw the chick into either the male bin, or the female bin.

The poor male chicks are mostly made into….ah, feed for other chickens. The females were let go to make nests and lay eggs for the farmers to harvest and make their scrambled egg breakfast or quiche (if they’re French farmers).

As I mentioned before (about 100 words earlier) it is exceedingly hard to figure out the difference between the male and female chicks; they’re both yellow, the males haven’t learned to cock-a-doodle yet, the females don’t even gossip. So the apprentices are sitting there, chucking the yellow birds in whatever bin they thought they should go into. When they got it wrong, the master, who was standing behind the apprentice, would whack the poor student on the back of the head.

Slap!

Eventually, the apprentice could unfailingly tell the difference between male and female chicks.

Now, they had no idea how they knew, but they did know. That slap hurt.

Again, obviously, the point of the story isn’t about chickens or East and West or even farmers. It’s more about how to teach. Some bonsai teachers teach using the rod, telling you you’re wrong and to do it again, and again, and again, until you have it right.

That’s not me. My online name is Adamaskwhy. Most people think it’s that way so you can ask me “Why?”

And you can.

Most of the time I know the answer, or I can find it.

Or I make something up that sounds plausible.

But the real reason for my name is that, as a student, I don’t just want to know the answer. I want to know why. I was (and still am) that annoying kid in the back row that said “oh yeah, prove it!” And it angered some teachers, bothered others, and I was loved by the smallest percentage. Those were the good ones.

I’ve talked about this before, so excuse me if I’m repeating myself, but a teacher who doesn’t know why, ain’t much of a teacher.

If you can only recite your lessons, then you haven’t learned a thing.

Which brings us to the initial styling of this hackberry. You remember it? The subject of this article and all? I know, you got lost in the chicken story. It happens.

What in the hell is going through my head?

Well, you’ll have to trust me on this one, and see what happens this year.

It seems that a lot of “rules” are being thrown away with this tree.

I mean, they do say that “rules are meant to be broken”. But why do they say that?

Let me tell you another story, this time about a boy named Pablo. Pablo’s father, Ruiz, was an artist that specialized in realistic drawings and paintings of wildlife. He was an instructor and professor at several art schools. He started training Pablo at the age of seven, and insisted that Pablo learn how to draw and paint properly, in the classical and realist style that was popular at the time, and was profitable, as artists jobs back then was to paint portraits and art to be hung in wealthy patrons homes.

So Pablo learned. It came easily to him. At age thirteen, his father, Ruiz, proclaimed that Pablo had surpassed him in talent and technique, and enrolled him in a prestigious art school in Spain.

Pablo quickly understood what art school was for, and formed serious friendships that would help him later in life, all the while slacking off on his lessons. He knew them anyway.

That, by the way, would be the one lesson to take away from this parable, college is to make contacts in school, that will help you later in life. The bosses who hire you only want to know that you got the degree, not that you were a “C” student. But if they know you were in their sorority or the chess club they were in, you, my friends, are in, as they said in my youth, like Flynn.

Pablo was so good a draughtsman that, in his later years, when everyone called him Picasso, he would sit and drink his coffee at the cafés in Paris, and draw photorealistic flies and bugs on the walls. Drawings so real the waiters would rush over and try to swat the fly off the wall. Pablo, as you might think, got great pleasure in these escapades.

We are all just boys and girls, trying to smile at the tragedy that life sometimes is.

What is to be learned by this last story?

If you learn to do the work, as a craftsman should, you can then use that work to accomplish the Art that your soul requires to feel alive.

It seems I’m at the end of the work.

I would try to get a good pic, but my photography area has been battered by a hurricane or two. It’s on the list to repair.

And here’s the obligatory tortoise pic. I need to build him a proper enclosure. That’s sooner on the list than the photo spot.

This is the best I can do for now.

I’ll post updates as I make changes in the tree. Maybe. I have a long list of “To-Do’s”.