"Asian Sensibilities, Northwest Style"

Source material: Feb 2019

          Hello my bonsai fam, today I'm here to remind you that TOMORROW, SUNDAY MARCH 1st is the last day of the 2020 Northwest Flower and Garden Show at the Seattle convention center! Returning readers might be tired of hearing about this show every year, but too bad! Today we have just one more NWFGS-themed blog as we review the display garden that I helped the Elandan Gardens team create for last year's show. Your semi-irregularly scheduled bonsai content will be back after this week, I promise.

As in every year, would it really be a Robinson garden without beautiful niwaki landscape trees, natural boulders, and other one-of-a-kind artifacts?

          If you missed our previous NWFGS reviews posted regarding the 2017 and 2018 shows, the process of constructing these massive indoor display gardens is nothing short of an amazing. First, the organizers truck in huge piles of sawdust, mulch, and natural boulders into the convention center's main hall.

          Then, a little good old fashioned redistribution happens and everyone gets their own pile of sawdust. The Elandan style of display garden is typically unique for a lack of man-made structures (houses, playgrounds, etc), so Dan and Will instead are free to loosely-improvise how we should shape the sawdust mounds.

        Now we add some rocks to make our sawdust piles look more natural. I am constantly amazed by how much weight the convention center was built to support. When these rocks are dropped into position, you can feel the room rumble. You would be surprised to know that in a gardening event, this flurry of construction creates quite the din of industrial noise to assault your ears.

        Then, on to adding some odds and ends to spice things up! - landscape trees (aka niwaki) trucked in from Elandan Gardens, locally-sourced beach driftwood, an artificial pond, some rock sculptures, an earthy layer of mulch, and finally some flowers and ferns to accent it all. We're going to speed through some progression photos now with less commentary by me. Scroll to your heart's content!

Hi Hansy!

          Unfortunately, I was out of town for a family wedding during the actual flower show last year. As a result, I did not document the other finished gardens as I typically do (if you're curious, the flower show posts old photos on their website). I hope you'll instead settle for my first youtube video showing Dan's completed garden. Much more to come!