bonsai

Watching Moss Grow.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

One of my more recent interests has been moss. Yes, I know it just lays there, and yes, I know you probably have moss growing in inconvenient places around you, like steps and walkways that aren’t used that much1.

For bonsai, though, it definitely adds a nice touch.

Presently, it’s also been hard for me to find in Trinidad and Tobago. I’m sure that there’s moss somewhere, though the heat and lack of rain haven’t had any I could find near me, or so I thought.

I spoke with the guy who cuts the grass in the compound – he’s pretty passionate about growing things himself, so we share knowledge. I asked him about it, and it happened he knew 2 spots on the compound where I could find moss, so I went and seemingly rescued some dried moss. There wasn’t much of it.

It made sense that I might have to grow my own moss. It shouldn’t be hard, it always seemed to be present to be removed in my teenage years. In searching the Internet I found there’s an annoying amount of marketing content in the search results with little to no actual scientific stuff2. I did glean some anecdotal information here and there and have a few moss propagation projects underway, which I hope will show progress in 30 days.

In researching all of that, though, I found that moss gets it’s nutrients through the air and produces quite a bit of oxygen. As it happens, it seems to be a pretty important part of our ecosystem that people overlook. I wondered about it filtering air, and I found that there are projects already underway testing that very thing – though moss doesn’t appear in NASA’s list of air cleaning plants.

It slows erosion. And, honestly, I have never personally found it disturbing to look at.

Take a look at this project in London – they say that the moss in the city bench absorbs as much carbon as 275 trees in 1% of the space. That’s impressive.

Yet in Trinidad, it’s supposed to be wet season and it hasn’t been very wet at all. The weather pattern here no longer seems to have as much of a wet and dry season as it does a less dry and dry season alternating randomly with a less wet and flash flooded season.

Suddenly, my moss project became an indicator of weather patterns and climate change that is hotly shouted down by some and resolutely upheld by science. Largely it’s the same battle that Claire Patterson fought regarding lead poisoning, where public opinion is swayed by marketing and lobbying rather than science.

How does a decrease in moss during drought conditions in the tropics impact global air quality?

I have no idea. I couldn’t find papers on it. Seems like something someone should be checking out.

And that’s why I haven’t been writing. Moss ended up being very interesting.

1Incidentally, I always suggest taking the mossy walkways and steps. At some point something was important enough for people to go there that went away, and it’s a fun mystery to solve.

2Maybe that’s the reason people are becoming gibbering idiots who can’t make rational decisions.

The Experiment.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

One of my latest interests has been revisiting my interests in horticulture – in particular, with bonsai. The 3 hours I’d dedicated to learning bonsai more formally have been very useful as I clean my outer area overlooking the valley.

I have a few bonsai started, and I had this ficus I had let go wild a few years ago. It was sold as an asian ficus, but that’s about as informative as talking about an American hot dog. I installed a few apps to identify it and – surprise – everyone pretty much wanted me to pay for one identification, and I ain’t subscribing for one identification.

I have come to the conclusion that it’s probably a ficus elastica, also called ‘Robusta’ and better known as a rubber tree. It had grown to about 3 feet tall, air roots hanging everywhere, and I was taking clippings from it now and then so that I could start some bonsai from clippings. One I was concerned about started sprouting new leaves today!

Anyway, I decided to just deal with that massive bit of bush it had become, air roots and all, dropping leaves despondently that I constantly had to clean. It was a tree being a tree, living it’s best life in a pot and desperately trying to climb beyond it.

About a week ago, I trimmed it down to about 1 1/2 feet, shaping it and hoping to start some from the clippings. It’s an interesting tree to work with, but I did not know just how interesting til today.

I had trimmed it down and shaped the branches I left by wire, trimming it’s roots as well and stuck it into a 10 inch diameter pot that is about 4 inches deep. I stuck it where it wouldn’t get too much light after I soaked it in some stuff to help it through the shock I had done to it. I suppose it matters to me that it was done with good intentions, though I’m not sure what the specimen will think of it.

There was this one long branch, low down, that was too big to cut I thought. It was straight and curving below the pot, which might work for some styles, but it would end up being an odd part on the little tree. It bugged me, and was too big for the wire I had, so I went and found some aluminium for a splint, and bent than, tieing it to the branch by wire and using other wires to pull at it in ways I approximated to what I wanted.

It worked to an extent, but it just didn’t seem like it would do anything nice for the tree other than be… irritating to me.

Today, sitting down looking at it and wondering whether I would ever be proud enough of it to show someone else, it dawned on me. That branch, It, like the rest of the tree, was sprouting leaves. I immediately unsplinted the branch, cut the tip off and stuck it in the ground, pulling it and holding it with wire to form an organic angle with the main trunk.

The idea is to make it into a 2nd trunk. I don’t know if it will work, but I do know I can bend the hell out of this tree even as it’s older to shape it. If it works as I hope, it may not become a ‘real’ bonsai based on style, but it will be it’s own beauty, I think. At least to me.

I had done something similar on a Jamaican plumb tree at a house I lived at in San Fernando, where to get the branches to cover a broader area and be easier to trim (while keeping the grass down under it’s foliage), I hung bricks on the broad branches, forcing it to grow across rather than up.

If it looks good in about 6 months, I’ll mention it again here. Yet that one moment where I saw what I might be able to do was a wonderful and rare thing.

Growing, creating things, bending things to our will – but not to support the systems around us that don’t support us…. just for the sheer fun of it. To try something new, to stretch ourselves in new directions by stretching what we know in new directions by hypothesis followed by experiment…

Ahh, I love functional works in a dysfunctional world.

Learning Bonsai.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

I had the opportunity to take a class on Bonsai through Exotic Gardens TT, so I took it. Up until yesterday I had just been someone who plays with ideas now and then, which is really not the best way to practice bonsai. I knew that, the plants knew that, and I buried many a mistake.

Since I wrote about the way we bonsai things ourselves recently, it was also a good opportunity that got me away from the keyboard for a while. Among other people.

I’ve been playing with bonsai for years and have managed to kill more than my fair share of trees doing it – and in the class, I did learn why those failed, so I’m likely not going to be a serial bonsai killer anymore.

This type of horticulture, creating dwarf trees, is very old. Originally done by the Chinese, it’s popularity as we know it today comes from Japan as well. The trouble in the tropical regions is that tropical plants aren’t the same. Since I live in a tropical region and have limited space outdoors, it’s a nice way for me to have plants around without occupying too much space.

I suppose another thing that draws me to this way of dealing with potted plants is that they are functional works. In the class I think that it was called ‘living art’, which is also true. There is science, there is art, there is aesthetic (which I have never been terribly good at) and there is just maintaining potted plants.

The bonsai tree I worked on was already well started, which was fortunate for me and not to be expected all the time. It’s a Barbados Cherry, not to be confused with the more well known West Indian cherry tree more often seen in Trinidad and Tobago, and mine was actually started years ago by the instructor. This likely won’t happen for future classes as much simply because of availability, so if a class starts up soon and you’re nearby, you can benefit from the early classes.

In fact, this was the first class they held, and it was very nicely done. It helps that everyone there wanted to be there, that everyone was interested in the topic, and that we all enjoyed each other’s work. It might even be a different kind of team building exercise in that regard, because everyone is working on something different and looking for a different result – which is what teams do in minutiae.

The practical aspect of the class covered the pruning with tips and tricks, the shaping with wire as well as an explanation of how to not use wire with some plants, the trimming of roots and repotting. One thing I didn’t understand before the class was the surface roots (Nebari) and how to create them, and within a few minutes I was taught these things. I’d wasted years trying to do things the wrong way.

Of course, bonsai isn’t about immediate satisfaction. Each plant is years of commitment. In many ways, it’s like having a pet, though with this the satisfaction is maybe having the vision and shaping the plant toward that vision.

I look forward to seeing what else Exotic Garden TT will be doing in the future.

Bonsai and Education: Human and AI.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

Bonsai is a fascinating art form of living sculptures of carefully pruned, shaped and dwarfed trees. It is a hobby of mine and I’m not all that great at it. It requires time, patience, commitment, and not getting lost in your head and forgetting to water or deal with them on a daily basis.

A good bonsai captures the eye and evokes emotion. Each bonsai is it’s own little functional growing sculpture. Prune a branch here, trim the roots, and patience – I believe that to do this properly you have to have a picture in your mind of how the final work will look. There’s a plan.

Education systems aren’t very different. They cultivate minds, but largely to the same specifications. A little stream of bonsai trees come out of them looking remarkably similar yet all individual at some level.

How artificial intelligences learn, too, is also not very different when algorithms are designed to learn through a specific dataset.

The commonality of how we educate humans and artificial intelligences is, at least in concept, the same, but the results are not really the same. It’s peculiar that artificial intelligences are given large datasets to be trained on even as humans don’t have the same availability. In some ways, maybe we have it backwards, but time will tell.

We prune the knowledge we give to students and machine learning, or deep learning.

We provide students with knowledge based on accidents of geography. Every individual’s world is subject to geography, the geopolitics of the area, the socioeconomics of the area, culture, religion, language, etc. Some get transplanted and get exposed to differences (third culture kids), some don’t.

What languages a child can communicate dictate what information they have access to. A religion can forbid some knowledge, or even young women from having an education at all – which is an introduction into how gender can impact the available experience. A poor child is less likely to have opportunities than a child born more wealthy, and even then with how we address things, a poor child who is of one ‘race’ may not have financial help because they happen to be the wrong color.

The list goes on even before we touch the education systems themselves. It’s impressively and annoyingly complex. Then the education systems run by different governments – or not – have curriculum designed, increasingly for getting jobs rather than learning. These curriculum are focused on things that some groups think are important for the future, but to stay in business they have to make money so they attenuate things toward that end. Some books get banned in some geography, some due to content publishing/licensing are simply not available. Paywalls hold things at bay, too.

Memorization and regurgitating facts are rewarded. Understanding is hoped for, but not necessary to run the education gauntlet. Imprisoned by what the cage of what has been taught, few go further than their cages and simply rest in place when they’re done, breathing a sigh of relief and happy they made it through. They were told this was a necessary part of Life.

At the end of years of the education system, we kick students out of the nest and are expected to be something an employer wants to hire.

Artificial intelligences, on the other hand, have a different path. A group of people spend a lot of money on computer hardware and software, they find content that they want to train the artificial intelligence on. We’re not even sure what they are because that’s not made public. Neural networks crawl through the data, training predictive analytics, building natural language processing and recommender systems, and it gets released, imprisoned by the human knowledge it was fed. Garbage in, garbage out.

The concepts are the same between educating the artificial intelligences and humans. The artificial intelligences are given the best opportunities to learn as judged and afforded by those who train them, as our human education systems. The difference is that there are significantly less artificial intelligence systems, and human education has become a manufacturing process that produces plants in pots that at a certain angle might look like a bonsai.

Here’s the thing: In my life, I have not many of either I would call a bonsai.

Have you? Shouldn’t that be our goal?