Bonsai Society of Portland schedules practical May meeting, summer events
John Eads led BSOP's May 18 meeting on development techniques, while the club mapped summer shows, a members-only Suzuki event and a public swap meet.
John Eads gave Portland-area bonsai growers a practical target on Monday night: how to judge a tree’s stage of refinement and decide whether it still needed development work, structural adjustments or a push toward finish. The Bonsai Society of Portland scheduled the session at the Milwaukie Community Center from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., making it the kind of club meeting that rewards anyone working through raw stock, field-grown material or trees that are not ready for final detail work.
The May program sat at the center of a calendar that was built for more than one crowd. On June 21, the Portland Nursery Spring Show is set to open to the public. On July 20, Shinji Suzuki is slated for a members-only special event in partnership with the Portland Japanese Garden. Then on Aug. 1, BSOP’s summer swap meet will return to the Milwaukie Center Pavilion, open to members and the public and billed by the club as the biggest bonsai shopping event of the year in Portland. The calendar also points to an open studio series and later meetings still marked to be announced.
That mix of education, outreach and trading reflects the club’s long local footprint. BSOP says it has been active in the Portland area since 1966, while its main website says members have been sharing the art and joy of bonsai with the Portland community since 1965. The group says its mission is to promote bonsai through education, monthly club meetings, mentoring classes, library resources and social events, and the season’s schedule matches that outline closely.
Eads is a fitting presenter for a meeting built around practical development decisions. BSOP lists him as having completed a two-year apprenticeship with Michael Hagedorn before building Left Coast Bonsai, a nursery centered on growing quality bonsai from the ground up. Left Coast Bonsai says Eads and his family moved to a farm in Gales Creek in 2021, about an hour west of Portland, where he grows many species of bonsai material and teaches classes and workshops.
BSOP has already shown that this kind of instruction can draw a wide audience. Its 2022 Farm to Table seminar at the Milwaukie Community Center brought in about 100 participants from Oregon, Washington and California for work on developing field-grown material. Monday night’s session fit that same mold, with the club once again putting the hard questions of development first.
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