Join us in a bonsai discussion with Sam Doecke from the Aussie Bonsai Bloke. A discussion filled with accents and bonsai.
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My name’s sam doki and i’ve got the aussie bonsai bloke channel on youtube been doing it for about three years uh where in australia are you i’m in south australia so the middle of australia but down the bottom so i don’t know if you’ve heard of kangaroo island or any of those tourist places but south australia it’s not very well known we’re considered the back water of australia well thank you for um sharing your morning with us is is our right now is some almost 7 p.m here and what time is it uh we’re about nearly half past 10 now okay okay yeah on the uh on the next day so we’re on the we’re actually on the sunday you guys are saturday so you’re talking from the future yes yeah from the future you guys are from the past yeah um so i guess the first question that we have for you since this is um coffee with murray and jerome do you do you drink coffee uh yeah but i’ve already seen it at 10 o’clock i’ve already had three so i’ve already had too many you already have three yeah okay yeah yeah i was sort of i was sitting around waiting for this meeting and i just make another one and another one so how do you drink a coffee uh weekdays black uh weekend so i put some milk in it yeah so you actually have a week coffee and a weekend coffee the first time i hear that yeah so i guess we always like to start from the beginning when we get to know you um so how did you get started in bonsai um probably got started well i got started not that long ago probably 12 years ago but originally my um grandma used to talk about bonsai and um had us out in the garden doing some gardening you know propagating bulbs and seedlings and stuff like that so she sort of got us into gardening and then sort of um i guess over the years just didn’t really have a garden myself when we first first bought a house so first few years had weeds up to me waste in the driveway didn’t have any interest in gardening at all then i started looking after the lawn so that sort of got me into gardening looking after the lawn then i started planting a few trees and uh believe it or not uh the first plants that i planted were lavender bush and uh i killed him i couldn’t even look after lavender bush yeah which is like the most hardy plant to look after couldn’t even look out for that didn’t didn’t worry about gardening for another couple of years after that disappointment and uh then i just sort of slowly started planting some trees and they started to grow and then i don’t know i guess the daughter was probably just born i think yeah just born and you know the crying kid in the house i wanted to get out the house so i’m like what can i do you know i needed you know just a day or two on my own out in the shed so i thought ah maybe i’ll try my bonsai because i’ve always been interested in it and a guy at work he did uh he did bonsai and he started talking about it so i thought okay so he took me along we bought my first bonsai which was a an ash tree still alive still got it today um and that’s where it all started then i just started collecting trees i went from one tree to a hundred in the first year um mainly yeah mainly just whips from the local hardware shop you know little tiny sticks um seeds as well and i just planted them all in the garden the whole lot just planted everything in the garden and watched it thicken up so i wasn’t really interested in small trees so i just put it all in the ground yeah so how many trees do you have today uh today i’ve cut back i got way overloaded so at one stage i would have had over 300 um all mainly just yeah mainly just crappy stock mainly and i just had it in a big group with a sprinkler over the top and it ended up just full of weeds and too hard to manage um then i had a few i still had a few of my good ones and now i’ve sort of downsized sold up a lot of the other stuff and now i’ve got about 80 trees still above but it’s it’s a lot better than three yeah a lot more manageable yeah it’s still a lot wow where are your favorite species uh in bonsai and why um mainly i like deciduous and evergreen um don’t really like pines mainly because i don’t know anything about them um i think i only have one red pine but i live would be my favorite all-time species i reckon because it gets up to 49 degrees celsius here which is i don’t know 125 fahrenheit maybe i’m not sure um and olives love it olives just grow really good but how do you manage to keep uh deciduous trees in a climate like that where it gets you said 125 fahrenheit yeah yeah how do you still keep because i know you have japanese maples and stuff like this how do you manage that uh well originally they would just burn in the summer but still survive but just burn um and i have an automatic watering system so when i’m at work it waters four times a day in the heat um and they would just get burned but now i’ve got a you know a bit of a shade structure up and the maples have actually got really good leaves on this year first year i’ve had them under shade and things are growing really good so do you have any favorite styles um not really i’m starting to lean towards this one here which is um a new style i’m trying to develop which is grows a bit like the australian tree uh i call it the mallee style i’m leaning towards that i also like you know your informal upright style really love that um don’t really like cascade and other styles too much but mainly in formal upright broom and i’m starting on malice style to do some australian natives and maui style yeah i call it the mallet um well a lot of our trees here are called mallee trees we’ve got mali tree and eucalyptus and that’s pretty much most of the australian outback and our mali trees grow similar to this they have you know three or four layers of canopy in the tree and um it’s almost like little parachutes of foliage that go up and it’s almost like you’ve stuck three or four trees together into one big tree like you just overlayed them on top of each other so if you have a look at the bottom of a tree it almost looks like a tree there and then you stick another tree on top and then another tree it’s like you put three or four trees together um and they’re generally pretty elegant styles they’re um you can see the branches all the way up with finer foliage eventually i’ll take out more foliage here and have thinner canopies but um that’s how the australian mallee trees grow yeah okay sounds like you’re inventing a new style that’s really cool yeah yeah just something i’m mucking around with so it’s gonna be interesting to see how it turns out um this one as you can see it’s still in a black pot so it’s only been done for the last two or three years like that okay what are the uh the two tree species that you have next to you so this one’s actually a bottle brush okay um or a callistoman um i think you guys have have one or had one in the past bottle brush yep yeah that’s it yeah so that’s um they have the red the red bottle flowers as you know um and grow super fast really really fast growers really hardy one of the only australian natives that you can actually dig out the ground um that and probably eucalyptus a lot of the other ones you can’t dig them the roots go so far away in all the dry soil that they just die if you try and dig them up but the bottle brush you can quite often dig and get away with um so that’s that one and this side here we’ve got the uh pomegranate so so that’s the broom there so that was one of my first ever bonsais that was the uh that was the first ever one that i started was that one and i did this really long ugly looking s curved thing with wire with this ugly looking cascade i thought it was great i was really impressed with it showed my friend showed him photos and he was like oh yeah looks looks good yeah and i was like man come on it looks great come on and looking back it looked like a really really bad crappy tree um so once i realized how bad it was i just cut everything off and chucked it in the ground for about five years and dug it up maybe four years ago five years ago and i’ve just been developing it ever since it’s great yeah here it’s actually really hard to find a pomegranate with that trunk that yeah thick yeah yeah that is really nice also your your bottle brush is really nice too i actually remember that when we when we did those photo brushes videos i had a lot of of our subscribers saying like oh like from australia and we have those everywhere or something like that so i’m guessing that’s uh yeah who’s very popular there i think it is native to australia bottle brushes right yeah yep i think pretty sure it is native yeah i think they’re great species for bonsai to bottle brush i mean they have small leaves and even a young tree can look very old very quickly with the with the rough bark and perfect it grows fast it’s very forgiving so very species yeah yeah super fast growing yeah and they also uh sorry what was that no i was gonna say do you collect or um yeah so i do collect i collect uh bottle brushes this one here i didn’t collect i just bought this one with one little sheet on it that someone collected uh for 30 bucks or something and mainly bought it for the pot it had a nice pot and i was going to throw the tree away but i thought no just put in a put it in a bigger pot and let it grow and it’s you know it’s just cranked along really well um also i collect uh sorry what’s that i was gonna do you say 30 dollars yeah 30 yeah but it was only the trunk yeah yeah things are cheaper in australia especially especially south australia where no one has much money things are a lot cheaper so you got this in the black market [Music] i know i got this a show um the city of south australia is adelaide so i’ve got that at the adelaide show okay yeah bonsai show [Music] sorry i collect a lot of olives too because we have olives on the side of the road just growing wild like we could we can just go into the adelaide hills and dig up 20 30 olives on the side of the road and a lot of councils even give you a permit to dig them up because they’re classed as a weed so we have lots and lots of olives ranging from trunks this big to little little things um some broken off branches so we have a lot of olives we can collect also i’m a little bit jealous so do you what are your advices for a beginner starting in bonsai like if you had to give us like three advices or something that you know now that you wish you knew before yes um one thing i wish i knew before is don’t take advice from everybody um there’s there’s a lot of people out there normally i say my saying is the people that try to talk the most to you probably know the least so just just be careful look for the quiet guy in the corner that’s you know not saying much he’s probably got the best trees apart from that i would say have fun that’s the main thing we do it for just to have fun and [Music] third thing i would probably say don’t overwork your trees um if you find you’re overworking your tree go and buy some more trees so you can keep working on them don’t overwork one tree if you’re if you’re overworked in a tree don’t have enough trees me i can’t overwork the tree because i run out of time that’s a very good advice actually yeah so get 300 trees and you’ll never overwork a single tree simple yeah get three get 300 and you’ll never overwork a tree exactly and then you’ll come back five years time and you’ll have a heap of trunks sitting there and you’ll be able to work on them that’s true yeah yeah not taking the advice of everyone um actually i would say the people that will know that i wouldn’t say that some people know more than others specifically but i will take advice from someone that has a climate like the one that you are in so let’s say um let’s say that you are like in australia and and then you will be like a great um or like the best piece of advice because you have the same environment so the environment of the tree is so so so vital we always heard you know like when we were in florida there were things that we could get away with that other people will not get away in other places so you know sometimes they would be like what i cannot do that here or they will do it you know thinking that they can so for us it’s always important to say like make sure that you know your climate and everything that we’re doing here is doesn’t apply to every single climate and everything everybody so it’s really good to know which advice you’re gonna take and should be someone that has similar climate as you have yeah definitely like horticulture is number one in bonsai you can’t keep the tree alive you have no trees so definitely horticulture and on top of that also i would say um go and look at the person that’s teaching you trees and if they have good trees they’ll be great to learn from but if they have crappy trees go somewhere else it’s that simple we cover all questions we have for you um but thank you so much for for being with us uh today too and for telling us a little bit more about yourself and about your experience and we’re looking forward to see um oh specifically me i’m looking forward to see that video with uh with the border brush for sure me too yeah absolutely yeah thanks guys thanks for inviting me um really cool good chat thanks very much thank you and we’ll see you around yeah no worries cheers guys [Music] cheers [Music] you
