Text Box: Southern Bonsaist Text Box: Watering my trees and giving them the old once over each day, the past couple of weeks everything seemed normal, except for some caterpillars I’d found on a couple of Elms. Then the rains came and for two days I didn’t have to water. Hence no inspection except to make sure the trees were still on the benches. Resuming the watering/inspection revealed, to my surprise, somebody else’s trees? This couldn’t be the same trees with the leaf tips turning brown or specks on the leaves. Some of the trees had already shed a lot of leaves or the leaves were turning yellowish/brownish. Text Box: With the summer fading and the crisp mornings of fall I noticed in the woods the Poplar’s were turning yellow, the Black Gums were red and yellow, the Oaks were shedding their leaves and the acorns were raining down in abundance. The change had been gradual and I realized there was nothing wrong with my bonsai they were just like the trees in the woods, Mother Nature was shutting them down for the winter and yes they were still my trees. Leo Fortner Text Box: Cleaning up the hurricane damage was important, keeping life, job and all going was in the mix so I did my best to keep on top of it all. Somewhere along the ling I was walking in my garden growing area. Some Japanese Black Pines caught my eye. With needle cast a constant problem brown needles are a constant. I walked over and saw hundreds and hundreds of small caterpillars eating every needle. I quickly mixed up some liquid seven and killed them but lots of damage was done. Joe. Text Box: some time you will want to take a picture of a tree for publication . If you see how it looks now you might be able to improve the faults so the tree matures into a tree that photographs well. As the years go by those photographs will become a treasure to you. Our trees change so much from year to year. Change happens over the year so it’s very difficult for the eye and mind to Text Box: As you work on your trees this fall and winter go ahead and take pictures, front, back , side, inside and from a distance. With digital camera’s selling for almost nothing it’s not a large investment. What you will see is something different than your eyes are telling you. The trees are a different shape. A lot of that comes from the loss of depth in a photograph. I tell you this because at Text Box: remember and allow you to see the change. When you think the work is just not paying out take a look at your old pictures. I have some going back to my very first days in bonsai. I keep some of those trees each year, not because they are great bonsai , but I admire how far they have come. I don’t think about how far they need to go to become good trees. That doesn’t seem so important anymore. They are keeping Text Box: Page # Text Box: The Ben Oki Workshop Text Box: Somebody Else’s Trees? Text Box: Do this and you will thank me later Text Box: for Ben so we do not have the exact date or location of the Ben Oki Workshop. We might have it at the November ACBS regular meeting. If I do I will announce it at that time and it will be in the December newsletter. We will need a list of ACBS member who will work with Ben. Think about what material you have on Text Box: hand and sign up to work with Ben. Ben has said that he would not be doing as much touring and teaching in the coming years so it’s important to work with Ben when you have the chance. We will have a sign up list at both the November and December meetings of ACBS. Joe. Text Box: It was late in coming but we do have someone in charge of the visiting teachers program for BSI. We will have Ben Oki for a workshop at his normal time, the first week of January. This will be our January program. At the time of finishing this newsletter I do not have the final schedule Text Box: