Let’s see what else we need a few flowers to make it look convincing and interesting and i only need to go to the nursery and here you have a lovely nandina bush and there’s some lovely berries on this you remember in that walk i took round the pond we had some beautiful nandina berries there so this is one now let me find something else and i noticed that the camellias are starting to bloom we have a lot of bonsai camellias i don’t know whether the light is good enough look at these beautiful little camellia flowers so i’m gonna cut a few of these off i’m just going to give it a good prune they will grow again prune a few more and there’s one there this is what they’re most useful for i’m only doing a bit of pruning because this tree needs to be pruned otherwise it gets too big too tall and the beauty with japanese flower arranging is that you don’t need a lot of stuff you only need to have a few few branches here and there and for good measure oh look at the deer can you are you videoing it look at that four deer three deer and then for good measure let’s get some of these old stems these are formosan lily stems all on a winter’s day and if we want some foliage i will just cut some foliage as well and we can see what we can do so we’ll now go back and we will do the flower ranging okay okay so i brought you in the comfort of the office so it looks a bit tidier and cleaner and i can show you what we’ve done with these off cuts these were the offcuts for making the cedar forest so rather than throw it away what can we do with it and as you know in the olden days the japanese flower rangers from these great famous japanese flowering schools the tea masters they used to pick up the fallen pine branches branches of trees wild flowers and do arrangements so i have a lot of containers this i have shown you before is a pot i made in 1967 one of the first pots i ever made when i was an amateur i used to do a lot of ceramics and i hadn’t started doing bonsai yet so this is a very favorite container of mine and i do a lot of ceramics as you can see we collect many ceramics and this is a very famous tea bowl this tea bowl is made by a potter called william marshall he’s now passed away and he is bernard leech’s right-hand man from the famous uh pottery in sinaives and i remember going to sinaives in 1967 and i couldn’t afford to buy leechpot but i bought a william marshall t-ball for 30 uh shillings that is one pound ten shillings one pound ten in those days one pound ten was i think one day’s wages so in today’s money would be worth about 200 pounds because in those days we only earned six pounds a week so this cost me one pound ten pence so that’s a tea bowl i have other tables sometimes i pick them up these were picked up in a charity shop and i paid probably only like four pounds for it but it’s a beautiful tea bowl i don’t know who made it and then of course these are pots that i buy from japan these are beautiful little pots this is also a pot i bought from japan look at that beautiful glaze there and this is a pot that my pottery teacher john eden made that’s his seal and this was made again in 1967. i think john eden now lives in america he must be in his eighties now he because he was about my age and this i use as a uh what to call it pencil holder but i will show you what i can do with this so all these containers i’m going to show you what we can do with them to make a little arrangement so let us begin first treating each individual pot on its own and see what we can do with that and these branches that come out there’s such a lot of choice in flower ranging as with bonsai less is more and the beauty of ikebana or flower ranging is that it’s the beauty of the line that is important now that is much too busy so let us see what we can do with that it’s almost like doing bonsai in a way so let us see what we can achieve with that that is a bit too straight many people don’t know that i dabble in this but i used to dabble with ikebana long before i ever did bonsai see just by pruning it it’s just like doing borsai and you see what a beautiful little arrangement i’ve got from that you see that will stand on its own like that so you don’t need to do anything more if you wanted to you can put a little sprig in there i know that those who do ikebana will criticize me but that’s the sort of thing that’s beautiful in its own right so that you can put on your dining table or somewhere just to enjoy so let’s leave that one there now this little thing we usually just fill with water and what do we do with that and this one it’s crying out for one of these lovely little camellias these were bonsai by the way bonsai camellias and all i do is i put either one flower in there or if you then put maybe one leaf there and fill it with water and that’s all you need to do not more than that if you wanted to you could try a sprig of cedar i’ve got such a lot just let your imagination run wild you could do something like that that also looks nice so we’re going to do separate ones now this is a little bottle we call it that’s a bottle shape and because there’s a bottle shape let’s do something different let’s uh let’s really do something different how about doing that that would work as well that’s tall i haven’t done anything to it that’s how it was cut and maybe to have a little contrast i have a tiny bit of cedar here that’s not bad so that’s the number three and what do we do with this potter let’s do the small pots first this is the famous tea bowl i want to show this beautiful effect there and with that one probably again i think to contrast that beautiful glaze i should use a red flower to contrast it and that is all i need to do to that one now this one this beautiful pot by my pottery teacher john eden because it’s a tallish pot let me use some of these sprays of the formosan lily lilies and other plants that have these sprays are favorites for doing ikebana you don’t need so many but just to show what we can do let’s try something more dramatic these are all the prunings from our bonsai creation i think you have to split the trunk so that it takes up water you can try different arrangements to see if it works so it doesn’t work somehow that doesn’t seem to work what about that that doesn’t seem to work you can’t try and see what works and what doesn’t work now what if we did something like this that may work better since we’ve got these materials here try that as with all japanese flower arranging as i say this less is more principle it’s always tempting to use too much i think that is getting a bit busy i think it doesn’t bring out the beauty of the pot too much i don’t think that works the funny about art something inside your very being will tell you whether it is successful or not if it doesn’t work you will know straight away that it doesn’t work i’m trying to force it somehow which is not happening now that doesn’t work i’m trying to use that foliage actually in fact just that foliage alone is quite attractive uh i think that is too much that is getting somewhere that’s not too bad that’s a possibility simple like that what if i put another leaf in there let me add to it so i think that is all i’ll do with that one and then i still have some other container this is a piece of bamboo that i purchased from india and this is just turned and with a tall thing like that that nandina would probably go quite well i have such a lot of it let’s try that or let’s try probably a branch of the cedar you notice i’m trying different things if one thing doesn’t work you’ve got to try something else don’t keep pursuing the same line now with that one just arrangement of cedar branches see that is probably all you need is green and then i have one more pot this is a lovely japanese pot one of my favorite pots let’s see if we can put these nandina nandina by the way is a favorite subject used by the japanese in winter because in winter when everything is drab and there’s no color this adds so much color and beauty so that’s something there again what is it taking me just five seconds you can play around with it till it looks right put it more upright see a little change in the angle will make it look different there you are so you can just still see the glaze of that pot in there and then let me just show you some other ideas my colleague was asking me in japan is it the men who do bonsai and the women who do the ikebana not so ikibana all the great masters in japan are men so even the ladies who do uh ikebana they’re called bonus ikebana masters even though they’re women they’re called masters so these are little japanese plates which are used for food and with a lot of the japanese meals the beauty of the meal really is paramount so you’re not just eating a meal you’re appreciating the beauty so when they serve a meal they will probably put something like that on the plate or how about this you could put that on the plate just that look at that for the beauty in there and if you want to you can even put it here like so if you don’t want so much foliage cut that foliage off cut that foliage off have it like that so these are the different things you can do and all these spare prunings and trimmings don’t waste it they can be used for bonsai so there you go i hope you’ve been able to appreciate what i’ve shown so the whole object is to show you that there is beauty in everything so you have several rooms i will now go and put them one in each room in every bathroom i will put them in so when you go to the toilet you can appreciate the beauty of each and every arrangement that there is so i hope you’ve enjoyed this little episode of ikebana using the trimmings of bonsai and these winter things there you go [Music] so so [Music] the
