The tree looked more convincingly decrepit but still grew strongly in its branching and foliage. The container made of chestnut wood also became more picturesquely weathered as it aged. For a few years everything was right about this planting and it attained that golden stage of development when the illusion of timelessness seemed permanent. Then the bubble burst.
Read MoreThere is a sense of timelessness inherent in a finely crafted bonsai. When the viewer stands before such a piece, there is the illusion of a moment suspended, an impression of all that came before and all that is to come obscured as if under enchantment. It is as if the bonsai came into existence just as it is and will always remain just so.
Read MoreIt is impossible to know what the future might hold for young and undeveloped talent. When I was young and collected baseball cards, the card manufacturers treated rookie baseball players the same way for the same reason. "Rookie" cards combined two unknown young players on one card. Usually, neither of the players would amount to much.
Read MoreOnce Don designated the bougainvillea as being excess plant material — not worth the trouble — it became valuable to me. I was not trying to prove anything or setting out on a mission to save it, but once the bougainvillea was deemed unworthy that meant nothing I might do to it would mess it up. I could try to make a good bonsai out of the wild bougainvillea just for practice, and if it didn't work out the plant could still go to the compost pile.
Read MoreThose little trees earn their keep at this time of year by providing a leafy green bonsai presence in the Baker greenhouse from December until the middle of May. People appreciate seeing the tropical bonsai looking so vibrantly alive while the temperate world outside, wrapped up in the somber cloak of dormancy, settles into the relative dullness of cold winter.
Read MoreThe beech trees used in this planting were grown from seed at the Arboretum in 1993 as part of the landscape nursery operation. When California bonsai artist Ben Oki visited us in 1996 we gave him some of these very young trees and asked him to make a group arrangement of them.
Read MoreIt might be supposed by people who don't know the backstory that this specimen was given the poetic name The Ogre in reference to the gnarly features of the deadwood, which can be read as a monstrous creature with one small, beady eye glaring out. But really it was named for the person who collected, styled and donated the little tree to our collection: Nick Lenz, the original wild man of American bonsai.
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