Author’s note: Welcome to year three of Curator’s Journal! This entry continues a series of articles from year one of the Journal, dealing with the topic of age and bonsai. Readers may wish to refresh their memory by re-reading the previous entries. They can be accessed in a chronologically organized format by clicking on this link.

To begin, it will be useful to review the line of thinking previously laid out regarding the subject at hand: The question of age as it pertains to bonsai.

Curious people at the bonsai garden continually ask the ages of bonsai on display because there is no sign telling them an appropriate number. They are expressing interest in the little trees, but sometimes doing so from the perspective of ascertaining value. Tell me how old that bonsai is so I can be impressed by it. Those of us who work in the bonsai garden often attempt to redirect the visitor's attention to other considerations, such as health and beauty of the tree or the appeal of its design. As a bonsai collection that does not include any truly ancient specimens, this is a practical tactic for us to employ. But as a matter of fact, that lack of genuinely old trees in the collection was a prime motivation for The North Carolina Arboretum to stake out its own unique bonsai niche.

How old is old? To say the answer is relative is a cliche in modern culture, yet no statement could be truer. To establish a baseline, I suggest one hundred years as an acceptable age for a tree to qualify as old. Snorts of derision and howls of protest erupt from people who know that trees are capable of living much longer than that. And so they are. But one hundred years is a long time for any tree to survive because the vast majority of trees never make it to that age. It is long enough for a tree to reach maturity and bear the physical characteristics of maturity. Most importantly, one hundred years is long enough for the processes of life to work on any living entity, to give it shape through experience in the field of time.

What about trees that live multiple hundreds, even thousands of years? Those trees are remarkably special, worthy of veneration and deepest respect. There are comparatively few of them, though, and few folks ever see them. Ancient trees are worth seeking out and some people do, compelled by the allure of longevity. It is a challenge to the human mind to contemplate a tree standing right where it is for a thousand years, carrying on life in the face of all that has happened in the world over that length of time. The same effect can and does happen when contemplating a tree that is one hundred years old. One hundred years is theoretically ten times less impressive than one thousand, but it is still a long time relative to the duration of life for a human or most other beings on earth.

It is especially wonderful in our eyes when greatness of age is contained within an unusually small frame. Those gnarly trees from the harshest of environments, struggling to survive year after year, decade after decade, always hanging on but never able to grow robustly, capture our imagination. The incredible character of these naturally miniaturized specimens lies somewhere at the heart of the bonsai impulse. Nature has always produced such trees in environmental extremes all over the world. Humans have always found something in the nature of these trees that speaks to us, compelling us to a more philosophic state of mind. They inspire us.

At some distant time in history, somewhere in Asia, a person went to a place where the trees were all twisted and gnarly from countless years of surviving in inhospitable circumstances and dug one of them out of the ground. The collected tree was taken to a place where conditions were more comfortable. The tree was put in a pot and carefully tended, and the person who collected it looked at it and thought about it and showed it to others as a thing of rare spirit and wild beauty. Other people eventually did the same, whether in imitation or independently out of the same impulse. Eventually a greater number of the naturally dwarfed trees from the mountain top or the rocky shore or wherever they were found, wound up in the possession of people who had successfully collected them. That allowed even more people to see these rarities and admire them. The little trees became desirable because of their novelty. The difficulty in obtaining one of these natural wonders made owning one an exclusive privilege. The little trees became emblems of status. Wealthy people paid for them, allowing a handful of people to profit from their ability to go to the places where these special plants were found and successfully collect them. The little trees became a commodity.

That, I think, was the beginning of bonsai. Once gnarly little trees in pots became a commodity they began to be affected by market forces of supply and demand. Somewhere along the way, probably prompted by a lack of naturally miniaturized collected trees or the difficulty of obtaining them, people invented the idea of artificially producing them instead. The groundwork for this development would have been the careful horticultural handling required by the old collected specimens. Those trees that made the transition from growing wild in some forbidding place to growing under container cultivation in a more hospitable environment would have soon responded with new growth. That new growth had to be managed — pruned — for the rugged character of the tree to be maintained. Creativity entered the picture when people doing maintenance pruning started thinking in terms of enhancing the look of the collected tree. Manipulating the component parts of a thing for the sake of aesthetic effect opens the door to art.

But back to commerce. Those people who invented bonsai nurseries took the lessons learned from working with old, naturally miniaturized, collected plant material and applied them to trees that were not so old. They developed a product that could then be sold to satisfy a market for decorative, miniaturized trees grown in pots. Growers learned special techniques for mimicking the shrunken tree appearance of the valuable collected specimens. Aesthetic standards were gradually adopted, which led to these artificially miniaturized trees having a certain accepted appearance. Enough people had an interest in these commodities that bonsai production grew as an industry. Old, naturally dwarfed specimens were still being collected, cultivated and sold, but now bonsai was more accessible because it was possible to produce miniaturized trees as a crop in a nursery and sell them at a more affordable price.

A split occurred in the identity of bonsai at the point when humans learned how to produce miniaturized trees artificially. If we think of the art of bonsai as itself being a tree, it starts out a single trunk but then forks and becomes a twin trunk. One trunk line consists of the collected specimens, taken from nature as genuine aged survivors of extreme environment and then introduced to container culture. The other trunk line, branching off of the first, consists of the specimens that are not genuinely old but trained to look as if they are. In both instances the plant material must be designed before becoming legitimate bonsai. The difference is in the actual age of the plant material. This dichotomy, however far back it came into being, still exists.

Aged wild specimens are still being collected all over the world and sold for large sums of money. If a famous bonsai artist does the styling work on one of these trees, the status of owning it increases and the price of the specimen can go through the roof. Owning such a tree is the epitome of success in the eyes of many bonsai enthusiasts.

There are more than one hundred specimen-quality bonsai in the Arboretum's collection. Yet only three or four of our bonsai started their careers as old, naturally miniaturized, collected plant material. The rest of our collection, that is to say almost all of it, belongs to the class of material that can be labeled as artificially manufactured. That label sounds terrible, though. Let's call it something else: Creatively cultivated.

The bonsai collection of The North Carolina Arboretum consists primarily of creatively cultivated specimens. Our trees are not really old. That is, maybe one or two of our bonsai are in excess of one hundred years, but all the others are something less than that. In most cases, they are significantly less than that. If being genuinely old is what the bonsai game is all about, then our little trees are not special. Yet our trees are special. The extent of bonsai’s success and popularity at the Arboretum can’t be due to the age of our trees so it must be attributable to something else. Does this mean that bonsai really isn't about age? I would never take that side of an argument.

But I am here to explain why a bonsai does not have to be old to be good.

To be continued…

The Age Thing Again - Part 5