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How much of our everyday life is experienced on auto-pilot? That is to say, how much of the time are we walking around in a state of chronic assumption, seeing what we are conditioned to see and acting out of habit? The world around us is a limitless source of sensory stimuli. If we had to be constantly monitoring all that information all the time and attempting to respond to it on a moment by moment basis, the overload would paralyze us. There is a body of psychological research that suggests we protect ourselves from overstimulation by operating in an a priori mode, wherein we expect conditions to be a certain way because that's how they usually are.
I mention this because of the recent storm-induced circumstances of life in western North Carolina. An event like Hurricane Helene totally disrupts the normal patterns of everyday life, which in turn upsets our assumptions and can leave us struggling to make necessary adjustments. The result is a type of behavior similar to being in a state of shock. The storm struck at the very end of September, so more than a month has passed and the process of cleaning up and trying to get back to normal operations is well underway. Still, it demands some effort to shake off the dullness and uncomprehending stupor that can take hold when the status quo is temporarily and unexpectedly suspended. The situation here now resembles what was experienced the world over as the Covid19 shutdowns were lifted — people generally want to get back to how it was before but there is some hesitation. There is doubt that things could or should ever go back to how they used to be. It is unsettling to the core to have your habitual sense of reality revealed to be largely illusory.
Short of taking the sackcloth and ashes route and resorting to a life of humble debasement as penitence for having lived with eyes closed while whistling a happy tune in the face of the brutal randomness of our existence, there's little for it but to gather ourselves up and get back to business as usual, best we can.
The North Carolina Arboretum reopened to the public a little more than one week ago. Only a small portion of the Arboretum is currently accessible because work crews are still clearing fallen and hazardous trees from our property, but it's heartening to have visitors here again. Many guests in the bonsai garden this past week expressed gratitude for the little trees surviving the ordeal intact. I think local people find solace in being in a place that seems more or less the same as it was before the storm. Despite the fact that the bonsai and the bonsai garden weren't directly harmed by the hurricane, it has taken some effort to keep them in presentable shape over the past month. The dedicated work of four good volunteers is required week in and week out to help maintain the bonsai collection's generally excellent condition, and volunteers were not allowed to come to work while the property was officially closed. Added to that, the Bonsai Assistant, who is primarily responsible for the care and maintenance of the garden but also handles a good deal of the bonsai watering needs, was on furlough for the month of October. Fortunately, at this time of year temperate plants are shutting down and preparing for dormancy. If a similar situation arose during the active growing season, the result would have been horticultural chaos.
Once help returned, it became necessary to rouse myself and get back to more routine business. Casting an appraising eye over the bonsai collection earlier this week, I found no shortage of work needing to be done. It happened that a certain shaggy looking Japanese black pine (Pinus thunbergii) was at that moment sitting right nearby. There was no particular reason this little pine tree should be the recipient of my reawakened attention when so many other equally qualified candidates were available, but that's how it went. What follows is an account of this specimen's history and its current state of affairs.
This bonsai was donated to the Arboretum by early supporter Dr. Beverly Armstrong, right around the year 2000. The first image we have of the tree is from 2003:
2003
The tree as pictured above was a bit tidier than when we received it, but the basic form of it was mostly unchanged. Its health was good, although its branches were all loosey-goosey and its needles were too long. The tree’s appearance was due to my relative lack of knowledge at the time about growing black pine bonsai. That in turn was due to the fact that we had only one other black pine in the collection, so they were not a focus for us. To be honest, I also did not have much interest in this specimen because something about its shape was not appealing to me. Dr. Armstrong liked it, though, and that was all the reason I needed to keep working with this pine.
The next available image shows the black pine on display at the opening of the Bonsai Exhibition Garden in 2005:
2005
Despite my ambivalence about the look of it, this specimen was frequently on display in the garden in the ensuing years:
2008
2009
2011
In time, I began giving this specimen more attention. Over winter I would thin out the branching and trim off old needles, then dutifully wire the entire tree. I chose to stay with the basic layout the tree had when it arrived, and I always presented the same view as the “front”. I made no substantive changes in the overall design because I was at a loss as to how it might be improved. Dr. Armstrong and others had invested years of work to bring this bonsai to the form it had, and without a clear idea about what made it unappealing I felt obliged to keep it going in the same direction.
Presented in the following gallery are complimentary pairs of images showing views of the black pine from four different perspectives. In all the pairings, the first image shows the tree immediately following a work session done in February of 2013. The second image comes from September of the same year and depicts what occurred during that year’s growing season. See what differences you can notice (click on any image for full view):
One easily discernible difference is in the foliage. The wintertime color of the needles is a lighter, more yellowish green than the dark green needles present at the end of the season. Notice, too, how in the earlier images almost all the younger, more flexible branching and the needles at the ends of those branches have been wired in a more horizontal posture. In the images from September it can be observed that all the new needles produced that year, and the branch tips that carry the foliage, have oriented themselves in a more upward position. Trees grow toward light.
The pictures from September also reveal that the black pine was repotted that year and placed in a different container. It can be seen that slight adjustments were made in the tree’s posture when the repotting occurred. The trunk in the new position leans slightly to the left when seen from the preferred viewing angle, but stands more upright when viewed from the side. In standard bonsai design the tree is supposed to lean toward the designated front. Bonsai growers are reminded of this by the advice to have their trees “bow toward the viewer.” Following this advice commits the grower to presenting the bonsai the same way every time, and can result in a strange distortion of the tree’s shape when seen from any other perspective. I noticed that distortion was strongly evident in this particular specimen. Giving the pine a more upright posture was my attempt to mitigate the problem, although the benefit of doing so was admittedly minimal. It had not yet occurred to me that the problem might be with the idea of trees having a “front.”
By the time of the next image the black pine was in a different container:
2014
The new pot for the pine was made by North Carolina potter Preston Tolbert, and to my eyes it made an immediate improvement in the overall presentation of this specimen. The design of the tree was still problematic, however.
In the next image can be seen my next attempt to modify those structural elements of the tree that bothered me:
2016
By this stage of the game I had been doing bonsai long enough to begin having more nuanced ideas about designing small trees. The stiff and static feel in the branching of this tree had become ever more undesirable, so I started to loosen it up and promote a more relaxed, dynamic structure to develop. Compare these two images of the same two lower branches:
2013
2016
In both of the two images above, the branches in question have been fully wired and shaped. Whereas in the first example all the branches have been flattened down and set up to grow horizontally, the second example shows branching that undulates and is allowed more loft in its profile. I began to feel like I was on the right track.
In the following two images from 2017, take note of how this stylistic trend continues to its logical next step (click on either image for larger view):
As seen above, the bonsai now has a more naturalistic appearance, with branching that expresses itself in a manner more reflective of observable tree behavior. I enjoyed this iteration of the black pine for a couple of years. Before long, however, I found myself once more feeling a sense of dissatisfaction with it. The branching looked naturalistic enough, but the overall structure of the tree still appeared to me as predictable and contrived. Besides that, as the tree grew the pot began to look too small.
In 2020 the black pine was taken off display, transplanted into a larger container and allowed to grow more or less unrestrained (click on either image for larger view):
Trees in general grow slowly, and bonsai trees more slowly still. When a bonsai reaches the stage where it is desirable to completely overhaul its design, the process typically takes years. The Arboretum’s bonsai collection is fairly large in number. Putting any individual specimen aside to have time to grow unbothered is not so difficult because there are always plenty of other trees to which I can give my attention. The black pine was not entirely neglected during this period, however. I made a few pruning moves here and there, but the overall objective was to erase much of what had been and encourage new parts to present themselves. Once enough new material emerged it would be possible to create a new design.
At the end of the 2022 growing season I felt the time had arrived. The following gallery presents two views of the black pine, in “before and after” sets (click on either image for larger view):
These next two images from the following year show the developmental work continuing (click either image for larger view):
As earlier stated, I recently took notice of this specimen sitting on a bench in the hoop house and decided to spend some time with it. Here is the result of this most recent work session:
November 2024
The following sequence of images gives a three hundred sixty degree view of the tree in clockwise, quarter-turn increments (click on any image for larger view):
This black pine doesn’t look much like a bonsai anymore, does it?
It is a bonsai, though. It’s a miniaturized representation of a full-scale tree, grown in a container, and that’s exactly what a bonsai is. The difference in appearance is in the way the tree has been styled. Previously the black pine was designed as a neoclassical style bonsai and now it is presented in the naturalistic style.
The following gallery contrasts the two different methods, showing the black pine as it was styled in 2013 as compared with how it is now (click on any image for larger view):
This final gallery of images tracks the changes that have been visited upon this specimen over the course of twenty one years of development (click on any image for full view):
Anyone can have an opinion. If you feel like sharing yours, leave a comment!