Life and Death - Part 2, Making a Statement
There 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. This experience happens only in the mind of the beholder, obviously, and the spell does not work on everyone. But it is part of the magic in bonsai that this effect can and does happen with a great many people. Those who cultivate bonsai are themselves often most sensitive to this sensation of timelessness, and it can be a strong allure for taking up the practice and learning how to cast the spell.
Creating an illusion takes time and effort. Like a magician practicing a routine, a bonsai artist puts in untold hours fussing with their little trees to get them right. The work of making a bonsai and then maintaining and improving it as years go by can be meditative or even therapeutic. That experience has a magic of its own, but it is of a different sort. There is too much challenge, often accompanied by failure and frustration, for the one doing the making to so easily forget reality. Hoped for developments might never occur. An important branch might break while being bent. Poor timing and random misfortune might undermine progress. And then, the most illusion-destroying occurrence is always a possibility — the tree meant to cast the timeless spell might die. While illusions can obscure reality, they cannot ultimately defy it.
In February of 2005 I made a trip to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to present a program to a combined meeting of the Susquehanna and Lancaster bonsai societies. 2005 was particularly momentous for bonsai at The North Carolina Arboretum. The long anticipated opening of the Bonsai Exhibition garden would happen in autumn that year, and that event was on my mind as I headed up north for the program. In the back of the van I was driving was a big American hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana) in plastic tub, a large number of young red maples (Acer rubrum) planted individually in plastic pots, several shrubby St. John's-worts (Hypericum prolificum), a Carolina rhododendron (Rhododendron carolinianum), a flat full of dwarf Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginianum 'Shirley's Compact'), another flat full of rocks, two five-gallon buckets filled with planting medium, and a large, custom-made wooden planter measuring 60"x 24"x 4" in height. My objective was to use all those materials to construct a massive tray landscape. The further objective was to unveil the new planting in the new bonsai garden upon the garden's opening in October.
I had no real design scheme in mind for the large landscape, beyond knowing that the American hornbeam was to be the focal point. The hornbeam would be placed first, then some number of red maples arranged around that, with St. John's-wort, rhododendron, dwarf sweetspire and rocks appropriately deployed in whatever space remained. I did not have any help lined up for the project. My itinerary looked like this: Drive to Harrisburg (approximately nine hours), do the program (two hours), overnight at Nature's Way Nursery (approximately ten hours), drive home. I was younger then.
Amazingly, the whole escapade went off without a hitch. It helped that the main tree of the landscape — the big American hornbeam — was already styled. That specimen had been given to us some years before by Howard Kazan, a longtime bonsai grower from North Carolina who became an early friend and supporter of bonsai at the Arboretum. Howard had collected the hornbeam from the woods near where he lived at the time, in the Raleigh area. The tree was ten feet tall or so and Howard cut it down to a stump about two feet in height when he dug it up. His intention was to make a big formal upright bonsai from it. The tree survived the collecting, but would never cooperate with Howard's plans. The hornbeam just wouldn't grow new shoots in the right places needed for the preconceived design, so it was subjected to a bunch of attempted thread-grafts. When Howard donated the hornbeam, the trunk was full of holes he had drilled for the failed thread-grafts and it looked fairly abused. Howard said he figured the tree was too ugly to ever be made into anything, but he thought we might want to use it for propagation purposes because of its unusually small leaves.
This hornbeam had an impressive base and a stout, straight trunk. It had one decent branch about ten inches up from the base on one side and a smaller branch just a little lower down on the opposite side. Everything about the upper half of the tree was a mess. I brought this battered old soldier to a meeting of the Triangle Bonsai Society sometime in the early 2000s and used it for a dramatic demonstration. I was beginning at that time to have some idea about the possibilities of naturalistic bonsai. For years I had been seeing old deciduous trees in the forest that had been subjected to major damage of some sort, but had survived and recovered. The shapes of these trees were always interesting and sometimes extraordinarily compelling. I wanted to try and make a bonsai interpretation of this form, which was a look I had not seen done before with deciduous species. In the demonstration I removed the upper half of the tree entirely, then with a rotary carving tool opened up a big gap in the remaining trunk. I shaped it to look as if the upper part of large tree had been ripped off in some cataclysmic event. The two lowest branches still remained. These were wired and made to stand upright, to give the appearance of naturally growing toward the sun as they would have done over the years following the loss of canopy above them. I was excited about the outcome of the program. I think the Triangle club members were less so because the look of the resulting tree was unlike any deciduous bonsai they had seen before.
The program in Harrisburg was better received. The crowd was looser and more receptive to something different, calling out comments and asking questions. I was looser too, strung out from the long drive, propelled by an adrenaline rush from the challenge of taking on too much. I was up on my soapbox preaching about how bonsai needed to be more about nature as we experience it and less about exoticism. At the end of the program a bearded, woodsy-looking fella came up and spoke to me. He said he was a forester by profession. “You don’t seem like the type who cares much about approbation,” he said, “but I really appreciate what you were saying tonight.”
Once returned from Pennsylvania with the new landscape in a box, I did not bring it to the Arboretum. For the next seven and a half months the planting stayed at my house, out in the yard, where I further developed it through its first growing season. I did this so the new landscape could debut in the new garden without ever having been seen beforehand. An unexpected task presented itself not long after returning home when the Shirley's Compact sweetspire all failed to leaf out come springtime. Those plants had been purchased from a local nursery. I replaced them with some Virginia spiraea (Spiraea virginiana) grown from cuttings at the Arboretum, which all succeeded and grew without problem. Around this same time the landscape in a box received a poetic name: Appalachian Cove.
Appalachian Cove did indeed make its surprise debut when the Bonsai Exhibition Garden opened that October. Nobody really noticed. The garden itself, all new and shiny, was the star of its own show, and was rightly the focus of everyone's attention.
Appalachian Cove on display at the opening of the Bonsai Exhibition Garden, October, 2005
In the coming years Appalachian Cove enjoyed plenty of attention. It was on display in the garden full time, with each new year bringing further development of the mostly still-young plant material. People increasingly took notice of it, especially after hearing that the piece was a statement, the very embodiment of bonsai at The North Carolina Arboretum. To begin with, it was a tray landscape, a bonsai form for which the Arboretum collection is rightly known. The planting was also made in-house. That is to say, it was created using Arboretum resources, specifically for our collection. Additionally, it was composed of five different species native to Western North Carolina. The styling of the arrangement, and particularly of the American hornbeam at the heart of it, was purely naturalistic. Naturalism is the core value of the Arboretum's bonsai identity.
The following gallery features images of the early years of Appalachian Cove on display in the bonsai garden (click on any image for larger view):
Jerry King was one of the people who heard me speak this way about Appalachian Cove, and late in 2010 he shared an idea about enhancing the symbolic value of it. Jerry was a longtime volunteer at the Arboretum. He had been an electrical engineer in his working life, and as a volunteer he distinguished himself with his ability to problem solve and build useful things. He was the person who built the big box planter that housed Appalachian Cove. He had used redwood lumber for the project because of that material's ability to hold up under exposure to the elements. Now Jerry proposed to build a new planter box, this time using American chestnut wood.
(to be continued... )