(Author’s note: The following essay was originally published in an online bonsai forum in 2015. It concerns observations from a trip to New Orleans made in February of that year, and is republished now because of its relevance in light of recent events in Asheville.)

When I travel to different places to present educational bonsai programs, if at all possible I'll incorporate a little sightseeing into the trip. My focus when making these detours is typically on natural areas, although historic sites are also of interest. Preparing to make the trip back home from a recent visit to New Orleans, after stopping at Rouse’s to stock up on Gulf shrimp, fresh crab meat, and Louisiana-raised catfish, I drove east a short distance and stopped at Bayou Savauge National Wildlife Refuge. It was still fairly early on a pleasant Sunday morning and I was the only one there:

At the welcome center, pictured above, there was interpretive signage explaining the role of bayous in the Gulf Coast ecosystem, and also showing how drastically this particular area had changed back in August of 2005. For those who don’t know, or have perhaps forgotten, that was the time of Hurricane Katrina. Most of the media attention surrounding the Katrina disaster focused on the city of New Orleans, which is not surprising given the fame of the place and the fact that many people live there. The calamity in New Orleans had much to do with the fact that the famous levy system, designed to protect the low lying city against flood waters from the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River, failed completely. But Katrina wreaked havoc all along the Gulf Coast, from Florida to Texas. Great as the devastation was to human habitats, it was no less so for the natural areas and all the life contained within them. Bayou Savauge, which is actually within the New Orleans city limits and behind part of the levy system, was severely damaged. A person visiting there now and not looking closely at things, however, might not know it.

There is an old adage: "Time heals all wounds". It has been nearly ten years since Hurricane Katrina occurred, and in that time much of the destruction the storm wrought (although certainly not all of it) has been smoothed over. During my visit to their club, a couple of friends from the Greater New Orleans Bonsai Society took me for a sightseeing drive downtown. Along the way the conversation turned to what it was like in New Orleans in the early post-Katrina days. I listened with great interest to their personal accounts of what they witnessed, and to me, as someone who did not see it for himself, their stories sounded fantastic. As I looked out at the city passing by the car window, it was difficult to imagine how the devastation they were describing could’ve transformed back into what appeared to be a normal urban scene. Every now and then, however, we would pass a shabby vacant lot or a building still boarded up ten years later, and these things were testimony to the truth of a terrible event and the ongoing process of recovery.

The story at Bayou Savauge is much the same. The interpretive signage at the welcome center tells of the damage sustained in the storm ten years ago and all the efforts made to restore the landscape since then, recounting what was lost and what has returned — and what hasn’t. There is a short boardwalk trail through part of the refuge. Here’s a picture of part of it:

At the welcome center a photo on the interpretive signage showed a similar view, but it also showed an image of how this bayou appeared before the hurricane. It looked like a completely different place. There were certain plant species — baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) and saw palmettos (Serenoa repens), for example — that were abundant in the "before" photo and completely absent now.

We think of damage from hurricanes as being primarily the result of high winds and an overwhelming volume of water. Much of the Gulf Coast plant life destroyed by Katrina, however, was due to salt water intrusion. During the Katrina storm surge, ocean waters were as much as fourteen feet above normal, which introduced salt water from the Gulf of Mexico into vast freshwater areas. Some plants can tolerate salinity to varying degrees, but others can’t tolerate it at all. Those plants, the ones that cannot tolerate salt, were just wiped out when the Gulf water came inland. After ten years, there is little evidence these plants ever existed in some places where they were once common. Other plants have taken their place.

The damage done by the high winds of Katrina is a different story. There are still some standing mature trees at Bayou Savauge, but none of them are whole. In some cases it’s plainly evident, I think even to the eyes of the undiscerning, that the trees underwent a traumatic event. For example, here are some sweetgums (Liguidamber styraciflua):

These trees appear to have had almost all their limbs completely sheared off, leaving their straight trunks standing like telephone poles. In ten years' time they have made a good start on growing replacement limbs, but none of those have yet the correct proportional relationship to the size of the trunk from which they emerge.

Here is another recovering tree, this time a southern hackberry (Celtis laevigata):

This example seems to have restored itself a bit more quickly than the sweetgums, perhaps partially owing to the fact of being a generally fast growing species. This tree looks almost normal, and I suspect when it’s in leaf it appears even more so. However, in its bare form we can clearly see where large limbs were ripped off, and where new growth has sprouted out of the stumps to carry on.

Another hackberry, featuring a different form of damage but the same story of regrowth:

Southern live oaks (Quercus virginiana) are among the most picturesque of North American trees, and the Gulf Coast region is rich in them. These particular live oaks are not so beautiful in their present form:

It's not difficult, when looking at these two trees, to surmise from which direction the strong winds blew. The trees have recovered to this extent in ten years' time, but what will they look like ten years from now, or one hundred years from now? Assuming they live so long, they may well be completely awesome in their form. These trees may cause tree lovers of the future to stop and stare in amazement. Right now they do not look so appealing, but they no doubt look much better than they did back in September of 2005. This is the nature of recovery — it takes time.

There is also inherent in the process of recovery an opportunity for the development of greater character. In order for any given thing to recover — whether a single tree or an entire environment, an individual human being or a great city — it must first suffer some serious setback. A thing must be beaten, broken, perhaps even brought to its knees before any process of recovery can begin, and there are no guarantees how the story will go at that point. From that low beginning, an entity seeking to recover must first endure and summon the will to go on. It must suffer the defeat but fight back, and persist in the struggle for however long it takes. Forever after, such an entity bears the stamp of the ordeal, for better or worse. These physical or psychological expressions of the toll paid for survival are what, in my view, constitute the essence of greater character. The trees I saw at Bayou Savauge survived the ordeal of Hurricane Katrina and have been in recovery for ten years now. They were reshaped by the experience and carry the scars to prove it. If these trees hold on, if they can continue to recover, time will continue to smooth over the damage until one day the scars will be mostly erased, and those that can still be plainly seen will be enhanced and made inspirational by the grace of time. And built into the very shape of these trees will be the indelible impression of calamity, yielding onto each individual a distinctive, one-of-a-kind appearance. These trees will have greater character than any of their kind that never underwent a similar ordeal.

Do I need to point out that this has everything to do with bonsai? This process of damage and recovery, as it relates to trees and other woody plants, is at the heart of what we do in bonsai, both in a mechanical and a spiritual sense.

On the mechanical side, the ability of woody plants to respond to loss by growing new parts is not only what allows a tree to recover when all its branches are ripped off in a hurricane, it’s also what enables us to prune trees and influence their form. Without pruning, the art of bonsai would be impossible.

In the spiritual sense, the character displayed by an old tree that has survived the hardships of many years, and particularly those that have survived life-altering ordeals, are what many of us seek to capture and pay tribute to in our bonsai work. In my view of it, the very best bonsai all evoke this sense of respect for the character that is achieved through the eternal struggles of life. First there is hardship, disaster and loss, followed by endurance and the will to survive, leading eventually to recovery and continued existence. Humans respond to this story at a deeply meaningful level. The story of recovery is what stops us in our tracks when we see trees of great character, whether they be clinging to life on some brutally exposed rock outcrop high on a mountaintop, or cultivated in a shallow tray in someone's backyard.

(Click on any image for full view:)

Recovery