Thoughts on Dan Robinson - Part 1

Author’s note: This entry was written and originally published in an online bonsai forum in August of 2015.

I did not used to mind flying. I still do not mind the actual being up in the air part of it, but everything else involved with plane travel now I do not enjoy. The trip I recently made to Washington state required a longer time dealing with planes and airports than I had experienced in a while, and either I had forgotten how bad it is or it has gotten worse since the last time I flew. I was agitated by the time I landed in Seattle, and it did not help that I had been awake for more than twenty hours. I was fried.

Dan Robinson met me when I landed and we were soon packed into his vehicle and heading for his place, an hour or so drive from the airport. We talked easily despite the fact we had not seen or spoken to each other in more than nine years. When we finally turned and went up a long gravel driveway, the location seemed remote and was surrounded by big trees, more or less what I expected for a place Dan would call home. It was now one in the morning and we were in the deep woods dark. I was dead-tired as we stumbled through the night to the door of the house. I could not see so well but somehow sensed the house was of unusual construction, as Dan got out his key and opened the door. He stepped in and I followed. My head was lowered, making sure of my step in the dark through the unfamiliar threshold, and Dan said, "Say hello to Charlie!"  I was expecting a dog or a cat and I looked up. I found myself nose to nose with a black bear. We often have bears pass through our yard at home, raiding the garbage cans and the bird feeder, so I have a slightly higher consciousness of them and I know one situation you want to avoid with a black bear is finding yourself nose to nose with it. I jumped in shock. By the time I came back down I realized the bear was not moving and was not capable of moving. It was stuffed. It was posed in the sitting position and it was in pristine condition, the taxidermy work done with great skill. The small, shiny eyes were glinting with secret life as if they might blink. Dan looked at me with satisfied amusement. This was at the end of a long ragged day, but it made an appropriate start to an extended weekend visit with one of the true rugged individualists you might ever hope to meet in bonsai, or just about any other walk of life.

Dan Robinson has been in bonsai for a long time now, something on the order of 50 years or more, and for the great majority of that time he has been a figure of national and eventually international reputation. My purpose with this essay is not to tell the Dan Robinson story, but to report on what happened during my recent visit to Washington and the time I spent there in Dan's company. I cannot do that, however, without touching at least a little on who he is.

Dan has led an adventuresome life. He is a robust person with a keen mind who has achieved much in his chosen field, but he is also a lightning rod of sorts. He has upset a lot of bonsai people over the years, not necessarily on purpose, but I do not think he particularly cares so much when it happens. The problem with Dan is that he is his own person. He is adamantly, stubbornly, unapologetically individualistic in his thinking and in his work, and his bonsai vision falls outside the mainstream in a good many ways. In my experience, it seems bonsai people are generally rather conservative in their thinking. That is, they view bonsai as being more or less an idea fixed in place, completely established and not particularly in need of being re-thought or reinvented, just learned and practiced humbly. An individualistic take on bonsai falls outside the accepted parameters for people who think like this. Many of them see Dan’s approach to bonsai as misguided, maybe even wrong in a threatening way. No wonder Dan Robinson has made some waves! Some traditionalist bonsai lovers conceive of bonsai as being akin to the tea ceremony, to be practiced somberly as a refined ritualistic cultural exercise. In that austere context, Dan comes across as a wild man from the woods, crashing the party dressed in animal skins, talking loudly while tracking mud all over the tatami mats.

Yet Dan Robinson has enjoyed substantial success in bonsai. He has headlined numerous conventions and symposiums in the United States, sometimes causing controversy, and has traveled as a presenter and educator in Europe and the Philippines. Dan has followers, people who look up to him as a teacher. He has a major tree in the US National Collection, and he designed, built and operates a unique public bonsai museum featuring his own extensive personal collection. Dan's outdoor museum is the prime component of the Elandan Gardens enterprise he owns with his wife, Diane.

It was there at Elandan I first met Dan on a trip to the Northwest in 2001. My visit then was in preparation for design work we were doing at The North Carolina Arboretum, beginning the process that would ultimately lead to our Bonsai Exhibition Garden. I was traveling around to observe other public bonsai collections, to see what their display spaces looked like and steal any good ideas I might come across. The real object of interest for me in the Seattle area was the Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection, as it was then called, on the Weyerhaeuser campus in Federal Way. Having gone there and seen that, and having been duly impressed with the place, I then went to Elandan only as a secondary destination. I had not made any appointment, but showed up unannounced and began to nose around. Dan Robinson happened to be in that day and I soon ran into him. I introduced myself, explaining where I was from and what I was about and right away Dan started showing me around, giving me the VIP tour. I thought it was a VIP tour, anyway, but later learned that he is likely to do that with anyone who shows up. Dan is generous with his time and loves to talk bonsai with anyone who is interested. After the staid and formal feeling of the Pacific Rim display, the loose and eclectic look of Elandan was almost jarring. I recognized immediately I was looking at a labor of love, the product of one person's individualistic vision and a completely different take on bonsai display than I had ever seen before. The look of it appealed to me on some level, but I did not take it seriously.

I did not take it seriously. I had a well-established idea of what a proper bonsai display looked like, and it looked like the one they had at the National Arboretum or the one I had seen the day before at the Weyerhaeuser campus — benches with bonsai lined up on them, a blank wall running behind them; tasteful, restrained. Dan's place was a colorful jumble of surprises. Elandan was lush, even gaudy in places, with the hulking husks of large dead trees jutting up here and there and huge boulders scattered about, and all of it perched right on the shores of Puget Sound. It was disorientingly different. I enjoyed it, but I was pretty certain bonsai were not meant to be displayed in that kind of setting. I had never seen them displayed so, anyway. Then again I had never seen bonsai look like those I was now seeing at Elandan.

I have no difficulty remembering what I thought of Dan Robinson's trees the first time I encountered them. In fact, I remember exactly. His bonsai were old and gnarly and full of character, but they looked untamed and I thought to myself I would like to work on these trees! Meaning, I would like to make these wild things look like bonsai! I cringe now at that, the presumptuousness of it and how I did not understand what I was looking at, but I am being honest about it. I confessed this to Dan on this most recent visit, and apologized for it, too. Dan smiled and shrugged it off. He has heard these kind of comments many times before, such uncomprehending opinions, or worse — rude and ignorant insults. I have heard them too, about Dan's work. One person told me Dan's trees are not bonsai, but pre-bonsai (meaning they are unfinished). It is tough to be so far out in front of the pack, doing things other people have not thought of yet, or may never think of and never understand.

These recollections of the first visit were in my mind when I made my return this year. In the 14 years between then and now my ideas about bonsai have evolved, and now I was eager to see Dan's trees again and see Elandan again, to look at it all with new eyes. This time I went expressly to see them. I say that, but it is not quite right. I was invited to Seattle to present a program to the Puget Sound Bonsai Association and that was my ticket for traveling all the way across the country. Yet I do not know that I would have been able to justify taking the time off from work in March, the start of the growing season, and going all that way just to do a single program. I was glad to pack up my act and take it on the road to someplace I had never presented before, but the real lure was the return to Elandan and the chance to look again at Dan Robinson's work. I wanted to see his garden and trees, but I also wanted to talk with him in hopes of learning something. This time I wouldn’t be starting with the assumption that somehow I know more about bonsai than he does.

To be continued…