The first prominent bonsai professional the Arboretum hired as a guest artist was Chase Rosade, of New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1995. Chase was one of a small handful of Americans to first establish themselves as national, or in his case international, bonsai authorities back in the 70s and 80s. He did a public demonstration and a workshop for us, and while he was here I took the opportunity to walk him through our nursery to see the bonsai collection.

The first full year of bonsai at the NC Arboretum was 1993. At the time of Chase's visit we hadn't been in the game very long and I was personally only beginning to get a handle on the basics, so our collection reflected these realities. Chase was walking through the hoop house, not saying much. He stopped in front of a bench that was full of very young plants in plastic pots, things I had started from seedlings earlier that year or the year before, all pruned up and wired, and he said, "You should put these in the ground." I wasn't sure what he meant at first. I thought maybe he was being mean, saying my early attempts were not very good and I ought to plant them and let them go on their way, or perhaps he was saying they were so bad they ought to be buried! Chase, a good guy as I came to know him, meant no insult. He was suggesting that the young plants would benefit from some time growing on, in the ground, so that they might "trunk-up" and become more substantial. It was very good advice.

It took me a while to catch on. It was a few years later before I finally built a grow bed and put some of our training plants in it, and let them have some time to grow unmolested. I don't remember reading anywhere about how to go about growing bonsai material this way. Instead the information came to me through trial and error, and verbally, in bits and pieces from various sources. At the heart of the matter is the fact that woody plants, generally speaking, will grow big faster in the ground than they will in a pot. But isn't the idea with bonsai to slow down their growth rate so as to keep them small? Yes, ultimately it is. But if you take a very young woody plant, put it in a bonsai pot with bonsai media and begin restricting its growth rate through regular pruning, it will stay puny and insubstantial for a long, long time. You can make bonsai in this way, but it will take a good portion of your life to produce something that will impress anyone with the accomplishment, beyond perhaps a sense of amazement that you spent so much time doing it.

What most bonsai people desire is a little tree with a big, well developed trunk. The best way to go about this is to start with a big trunk and build the bonsai from that. Some people accomplish this by collecting naturally stunted trees from places in nature where, for one reason or another, the plant lived a long time but was never able to get very tall. Sometimes this will happen in mountainous conditions, where thin soil and harsh weather cause trees and shrubs to take on a gnarly appearance, although it can happen in other situations as well. Such naturally miniaturized plant material is a challenge to find and often difficult to collect successfully. There are people who do this sort of collecting professionally, and to buy these plants is expensive. The Arboretum's bonsai collection includes only a very few of these collected trees, and they all came to us through donation.

But the Arboretum's collection has quite a few nice little trees with big, impressive trunks, and many of them were produced right here. How was it done? In-ground growing is the answer.

Here are a couple of examples:

Over the past twenty-five years or so, I've been refining my technique for producing small trees with large trunks. In the following video I discuss what I've learned while demonstrating part of the process:

Collecting a Field-Grown Maple