December 2023 Bonsai Newsletter

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Happy Holidays!

To celebrate, the Conejo Valley Bonsai Society will hold our annual Holiday Pot-luck, Raffle and auction. It all happens on our normal meeting night of December 21. Festivities begin at 7:30 PM in our regular space, Westlake Village’s Community Room. Members are encouraged to bring their partner or a friend. This is a social event intended to get to know each other better.

Reminder: The evening’s Raffle and auction is the main fundraising event for our club. So please come prepared to pick up some bonsai treasures—bring cash or your checkbook.

Last month, in addition to our regular club meeting, CVBS held its 20th Annual Bonsai Exhibition and Demonstration on the 10th and 11th—our first in-person exhibition since 2019. It went as well as I could have hoped for!

Thank you so much to everyone who helped put this together! This was an exhibition to be proud of with a great amount of interest and engagement from the public. We displayed a lot of beautiful trees (see photos, pages 6 – 17), and the reaction from visitors to the displays was overwhelmingly positive. We also signed up five new members on the first day of the exhibition.

At our November meeting, we held elections for club officers. Three of our officers were reelected to their positions: me as President, Antonio Viscarra as Vice President, and Ken Martin as Secretary. Members elected Wendy DuBois as Treasurer. She will take over recording club finances in QuickBooks, which until now has been generously done by our past president, Marj Branson. In addition, Nancy Smeets has been appointed as Field Trips & Activities Chair.

On November 26th, we took a field trip to the California Bonsai Society’s sale at Yamaguchi Nursery in West LA. There was a lot of high-quality material available at great low prices. Everyone who joined the field trip went home with new trees. We’ve had a lot of new members joining the club lately and have been growing fast. In response to this influx of new members, we will plan more structured workshops to help those new to bonsai develop the foundational skills needed to be successful in the art. We will cover such subjects as wiring, pruning, repotting, watering, and most important of all, tree health. I’ll have more information on these workshops as we finalize the details