Bonsai Focus Magazine Review

By Thomas J.

For those of you who are into reading the bonsai forums online, I'm sure you'll recall a few months ago all the chatter about Bonsai Today magazine being bought out and sold to Bonsai Europe. The questions about already paid subscriptions to Bonsai Today were plentiful, and rightly so. Well today the bonsai community has a new magazine in which to glean it's pages for info and for the fun of it if you will.

The new magazines' name is called Bonsai Focus, and if you look in the upper left hand corner you'll see in small print both the names "bonsai Europe" and "Bonsai Today".

What you'll also see when you begin your journey through this new mag, is the addition of quite a few more pages, 130 compared to 98 from the last official bonsai Europe edition which was for the months of March and April.

By the way, if you look at the bottom left hand side, you'll notice the continuation of the monthly publication number for both "bonsai Europe" and "Bonsai Today".

I was kind of stunned to see page after page and article after article of such high quality material. I must say they will have their hands full finding this many quality articles every month.

As I opened to the first page I was greeted and welcomed by the editor, to this new magazine now officially for those of us in America also. To those who are not new to bonsai Europe, most of what I can tell of the magazine is still the same, such as the "question and answer" section. And that's a good thing because sometimes it's good to leave some things just as they are without trying to improve it so much that you lose a lot of the former quality.

Let me give you a quick summary of what I found in this first publication of "bonsai Focus". Not one but two galleries of two of the most famous bonsai exhibitions in the world, Kokufu 10, and the Noelanders Trophy 2007. Like I said earlier, very high quality stuff here.

An article by Peter Thali on the European Spruce with some wonderful pics of this species used for bonsai, were right up my alley. I just loved the way he styled these trees.

Another great article with some fantastic pictures was the one on "Yellow Mountain" in China. If the pictures in this article doesn't move your soul, well you better stick yourself to see if your still alive.

I could go on and on with this new magazine, but then I would spoil a lot of the fun of just finding out for yourself what's in it for you. If your not one to buy into subscriptions, don't forget that Dallas Bonsai sells them individually for $9.95. So the next time your ordering bonsai supplies, why not purchase a copy of this wonderful new magazine. I'll bet you'll be back for another.