President’s Letter for June 2023
It is almost Picnic Time!
On Sunday, June 25th, we will hold our annual picnic at Cantigny Park, 1S151 Winfield Road, Wheaton, IL. This year we have reserved the pavilion immediately to the left after you pass through the booths collecting parking fees. We have been in this location before and have typically drawn a lot of interest for our trees from other picnickers in the area.
As always, we encourage each of you to attend to enjoy the company of your fellow club members. We hope you bring at least one tree to display, to work on, to seek advice on or all of the above! We expect to have a demo for people in the area that day and plan to raffle off the demo tree.
Chef Nick will be grilling tasty burgers and hot dogs, and the club will be providing buns, drinks, and condiments. We ask each member to bring a dish to share, whether a salad, dessert or whatever.
Further details to come.
Let’s start planning for the show at the Destination Asia Festival
Our biggest event of the year, our Bonsai Show at the Morton Arboretum Destination Asia Festival, is scheduled for August 4 thru 6, 2023.
As you work through your collection, begin to think about which tree(s) would best be ready to display in this year’s show. I was originally thinking that some of you may think it is a little early to plan for the show (although it is in only two months!) but then was reading an article in the June 2008 edition of Bonsai Hai which suggests the same idea. You can read the article discussing how to prepare a tree for the show in that newsletter, which is this month’s Bonsai Prairie Roots.
Please find a tree that is one of your favorites and give all of us a chance to fall in love with it as well. Remember we always also have our “Trees in Training” tables to show the process of preparing a bonsai.
Also, we will offer six workshops on Saturday and Sunday on various topics/trees. I just checked the Morton Arboretum website and see our workshops are not listed yet. Please consider signing up for a workshop during that weekend. More information will be coming soon.
We hope to see you at the General Membership meeting on June 7th at the College of DuPage and again on June 25th at Cantigny.
Craig
