In this episode, we take a short excursion to Steve DeSilva’s house in Fowler, California. Steve is an avid collector and creator of shohin material. It amazing during these trying times our members are willing to share their bonsai garden for the club to view. Its amazing that the bonsai community here in California are willing to film and share their garden with other members and YouTube. Please if you like these type of videos please like, comment and subscribe. It give us an idea you enjoy them!
Nice to see you come on in thank you so much for letting us come by oh awesome yeah nice to have you so steve how long have you been at this location uh we built this house in 2006 and so i’ve been working on it constantly since and it’s taken a lot of time but i’m kind of getting more comfortable with it you’ve been out here since 2016 you said uh six six so you’ve been almost 20 years now oh 10 years um so what’s what’s your favorite part of your garden so far i think you have a lot this is great i mean you have your tokonoma there you have your garden over here yeah what’s kind of your favorite thing to do well i mean obviously my bonsai is my favorite thing to do but i like you know the tropical and summertime we live in a hot area so have a swimming pool i could swim and stuff so you know it depends i guess on what time of the year it is summertime the pool is my place to be but now my bonsai area is my my pride and joy all right let’s kind of look at some of these some of these trees um any you can talk about anything you like if you want to talk about um your favorite tree sure um so anything with legs your legacy trees okay yeah um one of the things that i do also uh i’m an aesthetic pruner so i prune like maples and pines and olives and things and so i have a piece there this is a wisteria that i like to do so i do stuff that’s in the ground also and this is a special piece here this was planted in memory of my dad and so it’s a nice remembrance of him and something i get to enjoy especially in the spring when it’s blooming awesome yeah it’s cool this is a regular uh kind of bluish blue white cool so you’ve been doing bonsai for approximately yeah a long time i like how people say that i bought my first tree that i knew nothing in back in 1984 and uh been you know limping along trying to learn uh following different people and you know this is my style um it’s a combination between chinese and japanese bonsai i watched the huntington thing yesterday so i could say that so how did you get into bonsai i think it’s a common story um i was telling the karate kid yeah renting a house love trees uh watch karate kid and it’s like boom there’s an idea grow trees and pots and that’s what started it all awesome yeah yeah yeah it’s so funny how that one iconic movie has really pushed um this hobby in in the us yeah yeah i was real fortunate that i got to meet pat morita he came to fresno for this banquet a friend of ours was hosting and we got to meet him take a picture with him but he knew i did bonsai and he came up to me says hey i heard you do bonsai i said yeah i do and he goes um he goes i had a bonsai once and i killed it he says i know nothing about bonsai he started laughing he was a great guy awesome yeah yeah one of my olive trees this is one that i’m proud of it’s a was a collected of an old orange grove and it’s starting to kind of take shape and after a lot of years um had it at a workshop with ted matson one time and he told me to cut all the branches off and reluctantly i did it very happy that i took his advice why did you tell me tell you to cut all the branches off because um basically the the shoulder angle coming off the trunk wasn’t right so can you point out like give me an example yeah so like an example here is how this kind of curves up that’s not ideal this is probably a branch that i didn’t cut off this would be more desirable where it comes more straight off the trunk line and it just develops better and then is that a regular it’s like a fruiting olive yeah this was uh well this is a wild olive so a bird dropped it and it grew and then they would cut it down every year because there was a weed in that field and i had the opportunity to go in and collect some and so this tree here is the same age that tree was the same but i also have some landscape trees over here that are the same age wow okay and so anyway gives you a good uh example of that so olives are known for their fruits do these fruit are they they don’t really fruit too much and so when you use them as a landscape tree you don’t want fruit yeah right so they work well with as landscape trees but basically i say there’s three categories of olives there’s a type that you grow for fruit have the biggest leaves then there’s a seedling olive that has a little bit smaller leaf and then there’s this miniature variety that has the smallest leaf this is the one i like better this is the one i like to grow because it has such small leaves i mean let me compare the two sides i mean side by side they’re almost a good quarter yeah big difference big difference is that the european small leaf olive you know what it’s a one i’m not sure uh it came from maz ishii the original stock came from ichi so i’m not sure what variety i don’t think it’s like that little ollie or none of those it’s a different one but it’s a big difference oh yeah a huge difference yeah and this is the one i primarily grow now unless i collect something out of an orchard or something do all of you go well with grafting between the the two different varieties or you know i’ve never tried uh grafting i you know they’re so easy to grow i just cuttings and yeah i’ve never climbed in california lucky our mediterranean climate here you know our olives the pomegranates um you know those type of trees do very well here awesome you got to talk about this pomegranate yeah this one here is a really old pomegranate that over a hundred years old came out of an old farmhouse not too far from here it’s now a housing development i had the opportunity to go in and dig the owners let me dig this out and so it’s maybe not the most beautiful specimen but it’s old it’s gnarly it fruits it flower you know flowers but the interesting story on this one is this thing was pretty much rotted out and i had some mice that were trying to nest in it and one day i came out and my german shepherd had his mouth around us ready to rip this thing apart to get the mouse and so i caught them and so i had to fill that hollow in and so i’ve used a little bit of a cement type product and that was my first go-around i still had some hollows so i got the idea to use that spray foam and i filled it up with spray foam and that seemed to work really good was pretty easy to use and the color blends in pretty well so i’ve been happy with that it’s just foam yep that’s crazy yeah yeah and how does it like permeate water does it rot it hasn’t rotted i’ve had it filled up for probably three years or more and it hasn’t changed at all in three years and it doesn’t seem to you know hold water it just kind of wicks it off it’s like a i don’t know like a plastic base type stuff i’m not sure and it probably holds the um holds the uh with the dead one from the inside it seemed to solidify the trunk because it like i say it’s old i mean it there’s a lifeline on it but the dead wood is very fragile so it’s almost like glue on the inside yeah kind of yeah it’s kind of cool i remember i’ve never seen that technique at all yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah don’t you know they’ll be everybody want to go out and buy foam now right spray on foam you got some really big pieces out you want to talk a couple of your big pieces sure sure this is a one that’s in progress uh sierra juniper that i collected a number of years ago trying to work on it i took some wire off it i was trying to set some primary but i’m thinking i might be changing the front to the other side and add some dead wood into it what makes a sierra juniper different from you know california juniper that we have commonly in california the sierra has a bluer foliage to it some of them are pretty compact i have a one over here that has just been styled that has really pretty compact foliage this one has a little bit more coarse foliage but i think as i start to work on it more i’ll be able to get the refine the foliage a little better the colors really it’s mainly the color yeah they do very well down here in the valley uh we could collect up in our sierra forest up here with permit of course um and so and they do well down interesting here yeah yeah another piece is my chinese elm this is uh when i first started field growing this is my first attempt at field growing i grew about five of these in my backyard and i let them get about 10 feet tall and chop them down 10 feet tall chop them down and out of those five there was one that was decent it became a bonsai i don’t even know what happened to the other four awesome tree thank you tom well ramified any die back at all i mean almonds are pretty damn pretty you know a little bit but if i stay on top of it repotting properly it stays pretty good it’s when i start to see more die back that’s my clue that time to repot yeah yeah and what’s your soil mix that we could ask i use the basic i mean i’ve transitioned over the years but now i’m using that basic one one one the pumice lava akadama seems to work pretty good that’s nice and you’re watering is it like once a day well it really depends on the tree it always depends it depends on the tree the time of year but in the summer i mean we’re daily watering here it gets very hot and that’s the challenge for me is that i work so sometimes i rely on automatic but then some trees get over watered and under it’s that’s very challenging so i do try to do a lot of hand watering uh when i am retired uh i will primarily hand water that’s the best way to do it yeah it’s a little uh california juniper that i’m working on this was an air layer off a bigger one that i have you said air layer an air layer i never heard anybody air layer california um the bark or the cambium is really thin not very easy to work with yeah it actually air layered pretty easy um and it transitioned into its own pot uh pretty good this year i just took a big piece off here do some gin i’ll probably be taking this will become a gin and then one of these will become my tree awesome that’s that that’s unusual i never heard anybody like air layer successfully usually they graph roots onto them but never narrowly yeah no i i’ve done it i mean and um and it worked so uh you might have to show the secret sauce [Laughter] here’s another olive that uh collected out of that field and it’s kind of interesting how the genetics change a little bit where this one has a really nice bark on it and a smaller leaf and it was collected that same field as that other one that i showed earlier but this one is really uh a very unique olive and these were just like yard trees they’re not even they’re not grown for fruit they won’t grow very there they were wild planted by a bird out in the middle of an orange grove that’s crazy yeah yeah real crazy [Applause] pretty wild looking fig here very unique it’s not quite maybe the japanese style maybe more uh pinjing style but i like it is that a fruiting fig a fruity fig regular yeah regular fruiting edible fig what’s your favorite tree i know you’re looking at it what’s one of your favorite trees yeah you know i’ve over the years i’ve got into shohan more just because the ease of repotting i could develop a showhand trunk faster than i can a bigger trunk and i like the idea of the display part of it uh i live a hour and a half from where they have the showhand convention and so i could go to that on a regular basis i usually teach a workshop there um so i like shohan but this one here is probably one of my favorites this is a masichi tree but one of my favorites and then another one here is also this one is an advantage of having shoheen you have more trees in a smaller area that too yeah that too pots are a little cheaper you know so there’s a lot of good things to say another one that i like is this is a pomegranate and so it could be shown from either side oh the dual face one yeah this is a regular fruiting pomegranate and that big one over there that i told you 100 years old this was a piece that was just growing off the side of it that i took and made so you’re saying if this ever flowers and fruit the fruit will be the same yeah right so this one i would never let it fully develop because it just wouldn’t work but it’s more about the trunk the size the the taper that kind of thing on this one it’ll be kind of funny to see you know the full challenging display and you’ve got this fruit the size of a softball yeah yeah i’ve seen stuff online like that you know it looks crazy so what’s uh how do you get so how do you get into bonsai as a sense of your your background in horticulture um did someone train you did you go to someone um yeah so i started out my backyard you know and then and back in 84 uh there was no internet none of that stuff so we were looking at books magazines i got a books what the heck are those yeah a big stack went to the library you know started doing that teaching myself my backyard then i hooked up with a club i used to live in the bay area so i logged in napa valley bonsai club and i went there for a while and long story short i met dennis makashima from the bay area got into the aesthetic pruning part of it as well as the bonsai they cross cross connect there so studied a little bit with dennis and then um you know just going to conventions uh the fresno bonsai society excuse me bringing in some speakers um that kind of thing so i’ve never really had a true teacher lots of different people ted matson [Music] he used to come through fresno quite a bit working with julian psy a little bit now and uh really enjoyed julian’s enthusiasm it kind of i was kind of maybe getting a little burnout and then he got me motivated again to try new things so i got into a little grafting and things like that yeah yeah so it’s cool you really collect it you collect a girl right exactly backgrounds in horticulture yeah i’m a horticulturist i work at a local college i manage a greenhouse there and that’s where i got into a little bit of the tropical stuff because i had access to a greenhouse and so i really like the tropical stuff too now some of my friend local friends will kid me and saying that that belongs in the flower category and things like that i’m like nah i don’t think so her background kind of really merged with this hobby yeah absolutely absolutely you want to let’s go see your uh you have something really cool on premise you do have a uh indoor coconut outdoor outdoor toconomo sorry that’s really cool not many people have a display a formal display on the outside and this is something kind of cool as you know i move so i’m looking at your ideas i’m like well i like that that’s one i think it’s awesome i’ve never seen this anywhere else so um you know obviously i seen tokenomas and it’s kind of back of my mind i was online one day and morton albic that did the shohan book he had an outdoor toconoma and i thought you know that’s really cool so i thought about it i drew it up i built it and i’m very happy i did it’s a great place to have a guest over i could put a display up i could you know take pictures of my trees in here if i’m getting ready for a show i could put different displays together see how they look with a nice background and so that’s why i did it i had the space i kind of had an open area here and so it worked out it’s great for practice isn’t it oh yeah big time yes it’s nice you know like some of the artists will say that once you put that tree on the turntable then you can really see it and it’s the same thing here when you got a background and you can really see it and then you take a picture you look at that picture and you can say all right i see that branch needs to go sometimes you don’t see it in real life other than on a picture that’s real that’s a really good tip what’s some of that what’s some disadvantages having an outdoor token are there any really any disadvantages i mean so far there hasn’t been too many disadvantages of it i mean it’s held up i use a kind of cement board for my windows was easy to cut out so as far as maintenance goes i’m letting it just kind of gray out the wood yeah and so i’m not planning on keeping it stained or worrying about that part of it so i’m hoping that it’ll outlast me and i’ll enjoy it all all these years it’s it’s uh it’s what you call it the stat is uh yeah it’s metal yeah i had a student that was my helper at the college and he was a welding student and he was trying to think of a a um a project for his class and i’m like you know what i got a project for you man i started online showing a picture of the stuff he’s like i could do that so he ended up making me a couple of these stands and i like them when they rust out i like that color and then he went on to make a couple for the clark collection and was able to sell those so i i got him a few jobs making that’s really cool i i know your family was part of the raise there’s a raisin or they used to be raising growers uh-huh and then i know you have a couple you want to talk about those couple trees back here the almonds no the um oh the grapes the grapes yes so this is one of the nice ones this is called the zany currant and it’s a also called the champagne grape very small cluster ideal for bonsai and my uh in-laws my father-in-law heard marcarian used to grow these he would you know use them they use these in baking and for a garnish and so he had these commercially growing and i salvaged a few when he we transitioned to almonds got rid of the grapes and so these are left so these have a lot of memory for my in-laws and there are also some really old gnarly pieces so do they still fruit and flower they do fruit and flower yes is there any hints of how to get them to fruit well because some people can’t get in the fruit yeah so you can see this is probably one of the smallest pots that i have grapes in and i like them to be bigger i’ve tried to do showhand size they don’t work well they don’t fruit okay you might get them to fruit one year and then that’s it really hard so i use bigger deeper pots um and let them grow that’s very important to have a lot of root growth to get these to produce uh you know the fruit i mean to flower i think so from my experience yeah yeah awesome and i i know and now you have a lot of trees here and um but i know you have a special growing around the back so some people might want to see how how you actually produce some of your trees here sure we can go out there take a look yes some of these like this just came out of my field this year this is a chinese elm more of a multi-trunk some of these pomegranates came out this year so it’s fun i mean i could grow stuff a lot of my olives my little small leaf olives are from the field so let’s take a look i’m jealous because you know my wife won’t let me grow in the back it’s kind of often to see different people how people propagate trees yeah i’ve got a good deal with my wife going uh that you know she lets me take care of the outside and do whatever i want and she takes care of the inside so we’re happy yeah beautiful day today um so this is my back forty here but look at this so you grow your material i grow it yeah so this is grown in the ground i don’t i’m having been messing with bags um when i first started my time is very limited so cuttings in the ground sometimes i’ll twist them up put them in the ground sometimes i leave the wire on sometimes i don’t i like to experiment with different varieties see how they work so i’ve got the junipers pines um you know crab apples twisted pomegranate has done really well uh you know kishu junipers um some beautyberry a lot a little bit of everything and it allows me to you know practice on something see how it grows um and then i get to cherry pick what i want and then i put stuff out for sale at some of our local shows have people occasionally come by and dig stuff out in the winter time so it’s all good stuff oh it’s awesome let’s show uh let’s show some of the honors some of the items i think the two she’ll be kind of cool okay that’s really unusual um people may not know what the difference between social and juniper compared to other junipers but i think this is kind of cool so this is uh tosho the needle juniper the true you know juniper rigida um these were grown from cuttings and believe it or not these are probably about three years old look at how you’re kidding me no there it’s amazing the growth that we get here um all from cuttings dude that’s like six foot tall in three years that that’s insane that is totally insane yeah yeah and these are some new ones here that are going in and these have been in for maybe a couple months and you could already see the new growth going on so uh that’s the size they started at three years yeah that’s insane it’s incredible this is really uh a sandy loam i mean this is why this is the bread basket of the world because of our soil we’ve got pretty good water and it works out awesome well steve thank you for your time today um i’ll put a foot description the link for your phone number and contact information and someone to contact you they want to purchase some items uh or you can come down visit it it’d be really important to come down visit people um if you have one or two tips for our viewers what’s one or two tips about bonsai that you can give it to our viewers you know what uh somebody told me early on i got a little discouraged they told me to enjoy the journey so enjoy the journey take one day at a time if a tree dies you know start another one don’t let it just quit bonsai and that’s the thing if you only have one bonsai it dies you’re out of business so strengthen numbers wow awesome man thank you for your time steve you’re welcome man thanks for having me if you guys like the video like and subscribe on that i’ll see you guys next time you
