Month: August 2009

For the past few weeks, I have been hanging out in the workshop of Hong Kong Institute of Lingnan Penjing quite often. Since it’s in the outskirt of Yuen Long, it takes me over an hour to get there. But because I learn so much and really enjoy my time there, I always like to go there whenever possible 😀

In this post – My First Contact with Bonsai, you can find more photos of the workshop.

There is a greenhouse in the workshop too. Interestingly, my teacher is trying to grow small watermelons like grapes, training the plants to grow up along the rope. He said that by this way, more watermelons can be grown in a small place. This is the first time he is trying to grow watermelon like this. I am very much looking forward to see how things will go here 😉

Bonsai (or Penjing in Chinese) is the art of aesthetic miniaturization of trees and plants, recreating the beautiful scenery we find in nature in pots and trays.

So even though this tabletop garden doesn’t look like anything close to those potted trees and landscapes that we usually call as bonsai, I really think that this is a bonsai, for it is reliving a scene in the nature. Ok, we probably can’t find Doraemon in our world, but let’s use a little of our imagination. And didn’t we all want a Doraemon when we were kids? In fact, I still want one now… haha

I have joined the Hong Kong Institute of Lingnan Penjing recently (“Lingnan” means Southern style, and “Penjing” is bonsai in Chinese, and sorry guys, the Lingnan Penjing website is only in Chinese), and attended its mini bonsai class. The class was good. I have learned a lot and met many bonsai enthusiasts in the class. And by the end of the class, each of us was given two bonsai trees. Now, we can experiment and practice all the theories we have learned.