High Summer Reflections

The garden is the thing. The Bonsai Exhibition Garden is The North Carolina Arboretum’s stake in the bonsai game. It’s our statement to the world about the art of little trees and their value as representatives of the world of big trees, and the importance of big trees in this world we think of as our own. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not the novelty of making things so large into things so small, although that’s a useful hook built into the bonsai concept. It’s not about the appeal of exoticism, although that’s the portal of access by which most people approach.

By intention, the bonsai garden is a place where reality is meant to be set aside for a short time. The garden creates an environment conducive to magic. The magic is not inherent in the garden, but is brought in there by the visitors who enter. The visitors walk in carrying with them their own unique set of experiences and, hopefully, their imaginations. Whatever magic exists in the world is to be found right there. Imagination is how our species has come to be what we are because imagination is at the root of all invention and art.

People come to the bonsai garden with varying degrees of expectation, based on what they know or what they think they know, or based upon prior experience if they have previously visited. They walk into the garden and the garden by its very design encloses them and screens off the world outside. The beauty of the garden is seductive. The texture and color and form of the intensively planted landscape creates a sense of concentrated immersion in nature. A path of discovery carries the visitor all through the space, winding this way and that, changing in elevation as it goes along, revealing new sights around every turn. The path brings the traveler to the display benches and on the benches are the little trees that are the heart of the garden. Each little tree tells a story. Each little tree is an individual, existing as the only visible component of its own imaginary world.

The imaginary world of the little trees was created by a person. The little trees in the Arboretum’s bonsai garden have been shaped to reflect the observed truth of trees in nature, as experienced by the mind of a human being. That, in turn, sparks the imaginations of other human beings who come to the garden as visitors, bringing to the encounter their own experiences of life and their own thoughts and feelings about trees. Virtually all people have at least some familiarity with the subject. Trees are all around us and we interact with them, knowingly or unknowingly, all the time. Humans have shared the earth with trees throughout our entire existence and the trees were here first.

The Arboretum’s bonsai attempt to speak to people through the vehicle of our collective tree experience. The images projected by the little trees prompt a response in our brains that taps into the human consciousness of trees as we know them, from historical association as well as from our everyday interactions. Imagination bridges the gap between the miniature cultivated plant before us and the deep tissue of nature’s place within the human psyche. A bonsai tree by itself might trigger the same response, but encountering the presentation of bonsai within the context of the Arboretum’s bonsai garden makes it more likely.

The garden is the setup. The garden primes the visitor to be receptive to the magic.