The Problem Child - Part 1
Some people like to make an analogy between having bonsai and having children. The analogy isn't referencing the act of giving birth, but rather the responsibility that comes with having children after they've been born. Admittedly, there are some parallels. Both children and bonsai are living beings, requiring constant care and attention. You nurture them, worry about them, protect them from harm, think about the lives they've lived so far while you plan for their future. I can see the connection. It's never resonated for me because I have real children. Put one of our best bonsai in a burning building and put one of my children in another right next door and I hope you don't need to think too hard about which I'd risk my life to save.
Perhaps I'm taking a simple turn of phrase too seriously. If I lighten up a bit and think of the Arboretum's bonsai as "my children," the bonsai that is the subject of this entry would be fairly described as a problem child. I have no one to blame for this but myself. I raised the tree from a seedling, birthed it as a bonsai, gave it its form, worked with it for nearly three decades and have always been fond of it. It was on display in the bonsai garden for many years and was even an Expo poster child. Yet somehow I've never been satisfied with this bonsai and have always struggled to work through my issues with it. I've never lain awake in the middle of the night waiting for it to come home, but I have spent many an hour looking at this bonsai and thinking about it, searching for a way to make it better. Along the way this specimen has managed to become one of the most photo-documented little trees in our collection. The time has arrived to make use of a few of those images.
The plant we're talking about is a Chinese quince (Pseudocydonia sinensis), the only representative of its species we have in our collection. It came to us as a one-year seedling, among a couple dozen of its kind in a gang pot, donated by bonsai legend Felton Jones in 1995. I separated the seedlings and potted each individual in its own container. They looked like this:
The seedlings were grown for a few years and given some rudimentary training. Most were then utilized as class material for bonsai workshops. One of them I planted in the ground and grew for a period of four or five years in order to build up its trunk. It was dug up in 2001. I took the quince, field soil root ball and all, to Columbia, South Carolina to use in a demonstration for the bonsai club there. The following images (grainy because they are reproductions of photos used in a club newsletter) show what the plant looked like before and after the program:
As I explained in the demonstration program, my intention in shaping this bonsai was to give it the look of certain trees I knew of in the mountains nearby where I live. The trees are chestnut oaks (Quercus montana) growing on a dry ridgetop. The trees are old, sizable in trunk girth, but not particularly tall. They grow in convoluted shapes because of the stress they are under given their exposure and thin soil. I admired the shapes of these trees and wanted to capture a sense of their rugged spirit.
This was an early attempt on my part at doing naturalistic bonsai. I wasn’t quite there yet, though. There were ingrained patterns of conventional bonsai design that still influenced my thinking and challenges inherent in bonsai naturalism I hadn’t anticipated.
Here is the first photograph I made of the Chinese quince bonsai, seen on a bench in the hoop house five years after the demonstration program:
2006
Here is an image of another chestnut oak on that dry ridge:
This particular tree is worth noting because the bonsai quince I designed happened to turn out in a similar shape. I was not consciously trying to model this very tree. It was only years later, on a subsequent visit to the same site, that this oak caught my eye. The following illustration makes more clear the contours of its wild form:
Part of the design idea for this specimen was to enhance the ground plane by use of small herbaceous plants and stones. The tree was also planted atop a small mound, and taken altogether these embellishments helped to recreate the sense of a dry ridgetop experience.
2007
The next sequence of images from 2008 illustrates the seasonal appeal of this specimen (click on any image for full view):
The following gallery shows the quince before and after an early spring work session in 2009 (click on any image for full view):
In the above images we see for the first time a side view of the tree, revealing an aspect of the design that has always bedeviled me. One old habit of thought unfortunately still in my mind at the time of the demonstration program that established the elemental form of this tree was a tendency to view bonsai as a two-dimensional object. All my design decisions were predicated on the idea that the tree had a “front.” That is to say, the tree would be presented to the viewer a certain way and only that forward facing aspect mattered. This was a standard teaching principle when I was learning bonsai, and to the best of my knowledge it is still prevalent today. As a result, when seen from the “front” the tree’s trunk has strongly sinuous movement. But seen from the side the trunk is drastically flattened. It is as if the tree has two distinctly different personalities depending on how you look at it, and one of them is considerably more appealing. There will be much more said about this at a future date. It was with this Chinese quince, however, that I first came to recognize the pitfall of thinking in terms of making everything look best from one particular perspective. The tree did not have to have this unfortunate characteristic — it might have been addressed in the initial design if I was thinking three-dimensionally.
In the “after” images above, also take note of an alteration made to the ground plane. A woody shrub was added, in the form of several spiraea (Spiraea sp.). This was an attempt to mitigate a sense of emptiness in the lower half of the composition, caused by the thinness of the trunk in combination with the spacing of the lower branches. Look again at the photo of the chestnut oak on the dry ridge and the simplified image of the same tree:
The bonsai as I designed it is fairly true to the natural example. But isolated from the forest around it, the bonsai version of the tree looks leggy. My hope was that adding the spiraeas as a sort of understory would fill up some of the empty space. Thinking about the problem as I perceived it with this Chinese quince prompted me to better appreciate some proportional conventions employed in classical bonsai design. That’s not to say I want to stick with those conventions, but only that I now more fully understand what they’re about!
The detail below focuses on an uncomfortable visual void caused by the movement of the trunk sharply to the left just above the crotch of a hefty branch that juts out at a ninety degree angle sharply to the right. The understory planting doesn’t do anything to help this situation:
There have been difficulties with this specimen, but it has its winning features, as well. Looking up from ground level into the tree’s canopy (the way we typically see big trees in nature), the character of the branching looks naturalistically true to me:
There is much visual interest created by the ground plane plantings and stones in combination with the base of the tree. This element also rings true with me:
Here is a pleasing image of the quince dusted by snow in spring of 2009:
April 2009
Four seasons of visual interest on display in 2009 (click on any image for full view):
The image below shows the Chinese quince with swollen flower buds in the spring of 2011:
April 2011
Chinese quince flowers are lovely and well-proportioned for bonsai. Our specimen does not flower consistently, but the beauty of the blooms are always appreciated when it does:
Colorful exfoliating bark is another fine feature of Chinese quince:
May 2011
2012 was a big year for the quince. It was on display in the garden the entire viewing season (click on any image for full view):
At the end of the year the quince stood in the spotlight as logo tree for the Carolina Bonsai Expo:
2013 found the quince once more showing off its great seasonal appeal (click on any image for full view):
In December of 2013 the Chinese quince traveled to Kannapolis, North Carolina to be featured in the Arboretum’s display at the annual Winter Silhouette Bonsai Show:
Although I haven’t mentioned it up until now, the reason many people grow Chinese quince as bonsai is for the fruit it produces. As a matter of personal taste, I don’t care for the look of fruiting quince bonsai because of the gargantuan size of the fruit. They look freakish to me and completely destroy the illusion of a miniature tree. I did allow our specimen to bear fruit one time, in 2015:
2015
The two images below show the quince on display in the garden in 2017 and 2018:
The casual observer perusing the many images of our Chinese quince bonsai featured in this entry may conclude the specimen has been consistent in its appearance over the years since it was created. Closer inspection will reveal that there have been many changes. Some developments have come about through natural maturation of the tree, as it was quite young starting out and now has attained some degree of age. Other alterations were the result of constant tinkering with the various elements of the piece in an attempt to refine it, to overcome the several aspects of this bonsai that have always sat uncomfortably with me. All the while, however, the tree has been prominently on display in the garden and even highlighted in formal shows. It’s a problem child, but problem children can sometimes be sentimental favorites.
People who are familiar with the Arboretum’s bonsai collection and visit the bonsai garden with some frequency may now realize they haven’t seen this specimen lately. The last time our Chinese quince was on display was in 2018. At the close of that viewing season my dissatisfaction with the form of this tree finally reached a point of critical mass. The spring of 2019 brought with it some major changes.
To be continued…