Posts in meditation
The Age Thing Again - Part 6, A Conversation

The experience is suggestive, not limited by any need for what the viewer is looking at to be literally "old." The plants are shaped to look like they are old, to mimic the effects of age, done in a way convincing enough that the illusion prompts a response similar to what people would experience if they were in the presence of full-sized old trees of great character. Bonsai art, like all other art, works on our minds at the crossroads of memory and imagination.

Read More
Accent on Herbaceous

To say the herbaceous plantings are accessories or accents or even filler can seem a little dismissive. They have their own merits and can be appreciated for what they are. If we think of bonsai as being a miniature, living expression of the human experience of nature, why should herbaceous plantings not be included? Are they bonsai? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask.

Read More
Bonsai as Fine Art?

A person ought not walk on ice. Ice is slippery and hard, and although you might move across it carefully, thinking you are doing okay, suddenly your feet are flying out in front of you and gravity yanks you down from behind. When you hit the hard ice you get hurt. Best altogether to avoid walking on the stuff, if it is avoidable.

Read More
Making Conversation

What do you want to be when you grow up? That is a standard question older people feel obliged to ask the young, or so it was when I was younger and I suspect the question is still out there. The older person who asks the question is only making conversation, trying to find out a little bit about you and what you are interested in.

Read More
Thoughts At the End of Year One

The Curator’s Journal began publishing the last Friday in March, 2022. That means this week's entry brings us around full circle and we now officially close out the first year of the course. Here at the juncture where one year ends and another is about to begin, it seems opportune to pause a moment and take in the scenery, looking back at where we've been and surveying what might be ahead.

Read More
Road Trip Out East

I was traveling with my friend John Geanangel, and we decided we’d make the best of the situation as long as we were already out there, so we toured around some. Our original plans were centered on trees so we kept that as the theme of the road trip.

Read More
The Age Thing Again - Part 4

Without the benefit of enormous size to indicate great age, most people would not necessarily recognize an old tree. It is another matter altogether to believe a tree no taller than yourself, with a trunk diameter no greater than the size of your leg, might be several hundred years old or more. Yet these trees do exist. Their size may not announce their age, but close observation of their appearance can reveal them.

Read More
The Age Thing Again - Part 3

Perhaps the most compelling physical feature of old trees is irregularity. Old trees are often crooked, bent, twisted, lumpy, asymmetrical and missing parts. These characteristics are the results of struggles with an unending variety of challenges faced by the individual tree over the course of a long lifetime.

Read More
The Age Thing Again - Part 2

It bears noting that the best way to know the age of any tree is to count its annual growth rings. If a tree has been cut down this task is relatively easy. On living trees a core sample can be taken using a tool called an increment borer, and the rings can be counted in the wood collected in the sample. This is not so easy to do and involves drilling a hole into the living tree. A good starting point is to look at a certifiably old tree and study its characteristics.

Read More
The Age Thing Again - Part 1

All old trees have struggled to some extent, because life is as full of hazard and difficulty for trees as it is for people, and the longer one sticks around the more it wears on that individual, and the more that individual wears the effects of it. Time takes its toll. The little everyday struggles of life add up.

Read More
Going Native

Along with an appreciation of the virtues of native plant material came a growing appreciation of the native landscape in which those plants originated. And in contemplating the natural native example, ideas about the cultivated landscape began to change. Now you can also find more naturalistic gardens featuring plants native to the region where the garden exists.

Read More
How Old is It?

How did age get to be such a big part of people's general conception of bonsai? There are bonsai trees that are authentically hundreds of years old, and that sort of information makes an impression. People are fascinated by longevity, particularly if the age is beyond that which any person might expect to attain in a lifetime.

Read More
Taking Notice

Trees are and always have been a subject of heightened awareness for me, and so I notice them. I notice them every day wherever I happen to be, and the notice is automatic, not necessarily conscious. I think about trees a lot, too, but often when I’m looking at them my response has more to do with feelings than words, emotion rather than intellect.

Read More
Thoughts on the Nature of Stress

Trees, like human beings and all the rest of organic life, are not only subject to stress but are actually shaped by it. Think of a tree limb. A big, powerful, undulating tree limb is the product of a life of stress — the stress of reaching out to hold its leaves in position to access sunlight, and to hold them that way despite their weight and the weight of the limb itself against the force of gravity.

Read More