Bonsai Artist Harry Harrington Interview

Hi, my name is Harry Harrington and welcome to my garden. The Nabari Boys are here today to ask me 5 questions. So I have mainly deciduous trees in my garden, if you look around, and that has been the material that I've been able to source myself on a relatively low income as I've grown up and I started bonsai when I was 25 with a young child, so a lot of the material I started with, just digging out of gardens or collecting from the wild. As I've aged and my income's got better, I've started getting a lot more coniferous species, and I really, really enjoy those as well, and they tend to sort of light up the garden, particularly during the winter months. I don't think I have one particular favorite species in bonsai. Year-round, as the seasons change, there'll be certain species look better than others. At the moment, my deciduous trees are starting to look a little tired, and it's that sort of time of year where I'm playing with pines. And right now, to Today I'm enjoying pines far more than deciduous trees, and it really does change all the time. Now that's a difficult question to answer. I think the most important thing is the trunk line, not having straight lines in the trunk over and above things like taper and stuff like that. A good, good trunk with plenty of movement is the most important thing. I think the biggest learning curve has to be detaching myself from the basic guidelines, which are important to learn when you're initially starting out. And you need to learn those guidelines to be able to read a tree, but then breaking yourself away from that and knowing when you can break the rules, genuinely break the rules, for something that looks even better than what the guidelines set out for, for you. If I was starting again, I would do a lot more talking to people, a lot more talking to enthusiasts in real life, going to teachers. That's the fastest way of learning. I'll have people who come to me and have tuition of me and do workshops with me and other bonsai artists who will be leaps and bounds ahead of People who've worked in isolation. The internet has a lot of good information, but it has a lot of misleading rubbish, frankly, and it can lead you up the wrong street. So you need to use the internet to your advantage under the guidance of people in real life. It gives you that confidence as well to know when you can work and the patience to know when you can't work on a tree.