Stone bonsai drunk in old age

◎ Li Jie

"There are hills and ravines in the chest, and the mountains and rivers are hewn with stones." Among the stone bonsai lovers in the community, Dad can be regarded as a little famous, he has been fiddling with stone bonsai for nearly 10 years, and he still enjoys it today.

The old family in the countryside not only has a river but also a mountain, in front of the house, the green mountains are green, the old roots of ancient trees can be seen everywhere, and the unique natural conditions make my father play with stones, but also have an interest in bonsai art. After my father retired, in addition to picking stones every day, he carried a hammer up the mountain and found those strange old tree roots to cultivate bonsai. He likes to carve the stone into a beautiful landscape bonsai, like the thousand-layered stone is the most suitable for expressing the layers of mountains, and the water-absorbing stone is soft and porous, which is the best way to express the landscape of Guilin. The mountain stones from the flower and bird market, or the stones retrieved from the suburbs, under the carving of dad, soon turned into heavy mountains, plus a green pine, a flat leaf boat, a three-dimensional landscape painting is presented in front of the eyes.

Different from the stump bonsai, the stone bonsai is dominated by mountain stones, which reflects the great scenery of the country and the mountains, and has higher requirements for cultural accomplishment. Whenever Dad went out with his family on a trip or a trip to Qingqing, the family was enjoying the scenery along the way, while Dad was looking around for stones, and Dad would pay attention to stones with special shapes, sizes and colors. In the design and construction, Dad adapts to local conditions, using various techniques such as borrowing scenery, scenery, sub-scene, and partition to organize the space, and also likes to piece together some small stones with cement or glue to form the shape he wants, and then match it with small gadgets such as pavilions, boats, and small bridges, which reflect Dad's ingenious ideas everywhere and express Dad's inner hometown feelings.

One evening last summer, dad was walking in Riverside Park when he suddenly found a strange stone lying in a puddle of water in the mud after the rain on the side of the road. Hold it up with your hands, heavy! Carefully identified, it was an abandoned ornamental stone, so it was returned with force. After some washing, Fang revealed the "true face of Lushan". Poor thing, it turned out that it was thrown by its owner because it was disabled by a missing horn.

In the face of this broken, hard stone, Dad repeatedly pondered: How to make it trim into new, old and new? It's a bit of a brain drain. After some hammering and axe chiseling, the first shadow of Qian's shadow appeared; the two-day "plastic surgery" became the current appearance: the stone was nearly 40 centimeters high, the lower was rich and sharp, and it looked like a decadent ancient tower, towering and standing tall. Placed in an oval ruler plate, slightly embellished: a small stone temple is set up in the middle of the mountain, a stone lion is carved at the foot of the mountain, a number of green moss is transplanted between the gaps, and the mountain roots are scattered with dwarf river stones.

Inject water, sunlight, dustproof, moisturize, spray water once every other day. After a month, the moss is visible and the green grass is full of cliffs. Before long, the grass was full of stars and yellow flowers, weeping vines, lush and green, sparkling and shadowy, elegant and pleasant. Dad couldn't help but recall the poet Lu You Yong Kun Shi Calamus Bonsai's poem: "The Bon Mountain is in the face of the sun, and this thing has been swept away." ”

In the balcony of my father's house, the two pots of stone bonsai placed against the wall are even more annoying. A pot of blue-gray bluestone bonsai, made of thin pieces of stone with different widths and narrows, although the highest is only sixty or seventy centimeters, it is like a sheathed short sword, and the strange steepness is quite the momentum of the southern mountains. Dad said that the stone material used to make this kind of bonsai is called axe splitting stone, which is a kind of bluestone similar to stratified rock, and the longitudinal impact along the level with a hammer makes the stone pieces of different sizes and shapes shattered into stone chips of different sizes and shapes, and then the stone pieces to be used are selected, and the cement is adhered according to the concept, which becomes a wonderful pot of bonsai.

The bonsai of axe splitting stones is dotted with many ceramic costumed villains, some lying on small boats, some sitting against each other, and there are ceramic pavilions on the mountain. Next to the axe splitting stone bonsai is a pot of sandstone bonsai, which is a whole stone, and the length and height of the stone are similar, but slightly narrower. Except for the slightly carved marks on the top of the stone head, the rest of the stone spikes are scattered throughout the natural stone spikes, which look interesting and natural, and it is a rare whole stone. The upper side of the sandstone is slightly larger than the lower one, and the highest peak is slightly protruding to form a cliff, which makes the earth-yellow stone body have a majestic power of the northern mountains and an ancient wind. The style of the two bonsai is one south and one north, one dangerous and one male, one strange and one simple, one show and one clumsy, which are interesting.

Nowadays, Dad's production level and artistic level have been greatly improved. In the courtyard, on the balcony, in the large pots and small tanks, the spring is a turquoise, and the summer is lush, which is really lovely. Looking at his masterpieces, dad often accompanied the bonsai with poems: "Forsythia is fragrant with a string of gold, covered with snow and heat and is respected; spring and autumn birds perch trees, beautiful like plain paintings drunk pedestrians." A poem with a scene, the scenes blend, and Dad's old age is full and happy.