Show Me

Building the bonsai program at the Arboretum was done incrementally, step by step. What was probably the biggest step was something that I saw from a distance early on, then watched grow in importance as time went by. When I returned from Japan it felt like the time to make that step must be getting close. 

Not much of what now exists at the Arboretum was in place yet back in the mid-1990's. The Education Center, known at the time as the Visitor Education Center, was the main hub of activity and interest, and almost all Arboretum staff operated out of it. Management occupied the second floor while Maintenance, Housekeeping and Grounds all worked out of the basement. The auditorium and classrooms on the first floor were used for educational programming and occasionally for staging events like the Quilt Show and the Carolina Bonsai Expo. There were restrooms at the Education Center, but at that time the Arboretum had no food service or gift shop. The Plants of Promise Garden had been built right outside the Education Center and was the only garden we had. Staff had designed and installed that garden, and did the same for the landscaping along the road leading to the greenhouse. A one-mile loop trail, now known as the Natural Garden Trail, had been cut through the woods, beginning and ending at the Education Center.

The few members of staff who didn't work out of the Education Center were based at the Greenhouse and Support Facility, a half mile away. That building had been designed for horticultural production purposes. It was meant to be a working greenhouse, and was never intended to be a public space. All the same, recognizing the thinness of what we had to offer our visitors in those early years, the Arboretum opened the greenhouse facility to guests and invited them to drop in and see what went on behind the scenes. This was a regular added attraction, open every weekday from nine in the morning until three o'clock in the afternoon. A volunteer sat at a desk in the little lobby and greeted visitors as they entered, welcoming them to the Arboretum's "state of the art greenhouse". The guests would then wander into the work area where greenhouse staff were busy with their daily chores. After passing through the work area, visitors would then go on into the greenhouse to have a look around. If they were interested enough they could also continue out back of the greenhouse to walk through the two nursery hoop houses.

People enjoyed seeing the greenhouse facility and it really did help fill out the visitor experience. It was not a good arrangement, though. There were many problems with having guests in the greenhouse itself because space in there is tight. The long metal benches in the house are on an ingenious roller system that allows for creating rows between benches for worker access. The benches are six feet wide and seventy feet long, usually heavy with many plants in pots, yet a person of average strength can move them without difficulty. Guests would often lean on the benches and accidentally make them roll, sometimes squeezing someone elsewhere in the greenhouse who was standing between two benches. As in any large greenhouse operation, there are hoses everywhere to trip over or get tangled with and usually lots of water on the floor. People did like poking around in there, but it wasn't particularly safe and it made life difficult for the greenhouse staff.

The inconvenience to staff was secondary to the objective of creating an enhanced visitor experience. The Arboretum was still very new, about ten years removed from when the institution first came into existence on paper, and even in Asheville most people had never heard of us. Around this same time construction was underway on the core garden complex that would be dedicated in spring of 1996, but initially the gardens weren't much to look at. Critics of the day complained our gardens were little more than a network of broad walkways, heavy on the hardscape with little baby plants scattered around in a sea of mulch. The parking lot that was built as part of the same project seemed ridiculously oversized in comparison. The main entry road (more paving!) was the next construction project, eventually to be opened for use in 1998. Prior to that there was no parking fee, so anyone who drove by the unimproved entry to the property (now the service entrance off of Wesley Branch Road) and saw our sign could pull in and look around for free. 

This thumbnail-sketch history of The North Carolina Arboretum's early years is useful for understanding how bonsai was able to find its way into the mix. At the time when bonsai was first trying to establish itself within the institution, the institution was still trying to establish itself overall, and this general state of flux created a briefly wide open window of opportunity.

My initial position as a nursery assistant caused me to be one of the original six staff members assigned to work out of the Support Facility when that building opened in 1992. The two hoop houses out back of the greenhouse were constructed to hold the Arboretum's containerized woody plant nursery. I was one of the people visitors encountered when they came through to see the greenhouse operation, and I'd be either in the work space potting plants or weeding and watering out in the hoop houses. When the Staples bonsai donation arrived, the little trees found a new home in either the greenhouse or the hoop house, depending on whether they were tropical or temperate species. Thus bonsai became something additional to see for visitors who found their way over to the Support Facility.

As the bonsai collection began to gradually increase and improve it attracted ever more attention from the public. When visitors explored the Support Facility workspace they would now find me or one of the bonsai volunteers working on little trees and this activity always pulled people in. The volunteers and I would energetically engage the visitors, talking up the bonsai program and eagerly answering the many questions people had. This was a true grassroots operation — we were on the frontlines, engaging customers, pushing the product to anyone who showed the slightest interest. All Arboretum employees were encouraged to be welcoming to our guests because we were trying to build an institutional audience. I went about it with a particular zeal, however, because I was a man on a personal mission. I not only wanted people to enjoy and support the Arboretum, I wanted them to most of all enjoy and support bonsai at the Arboretum. If that meant engaging each and every individual visitor who happened by, then that's what would be done. If that meant giving impromptu tours of the bonsai collection to people who expressed particular interest, I'd put down what I was working on and show the folks what we had.

It didn't take long to recognize that our bonsai would greatly benefit from having a better space in which the public might experience them. I managed to have the tropical bonsai positioned on the greenhouse bench that was most visible and accessible to visitors, yet the best location available still suffered for want of a more visitor-friendly environment. There was more space for people to move around out in the hoop house where most of the bonsai were kept, but the conditions were hardly better. The surface underfoot was coarse gravel and the little trees were lined out on crude block-and-board benching with virtually no consideration given to aesthetic concerns. Everything in our bonsai holdings at the time was out there all jumbled together, the best trees we had side by side with little sticks in plastic pots that were a decade or more away from being presentable. Often enough visitors would tell us, "You need a better place to show your best bonsai!"

Before long, in addition to advocating for more time to do bonsai work, I was trying to achieve better visibility for the little trees. At any significant public event staged in the Education Center, I'd do what I could to have a bonsai on prominent display in the building. I looked into the possibility of having a "permanent" bonsai display in that building, which would have required rotating trees in and out every couple of days, and this proved impracticable. I looked into the possibility of building a very simple outdoor display area in a vacant space between the greenhouse and the hoop houses, but this idea received little administrative support. The first nine iterations of the Carolina Bonsai Expo, not coincidentally, featured a sizable display of Arboretum trees. These displays were highlights of the event and very well received, but they were a tremendous amount of work and lasted for exactly two days per year. If nothing else, the Arboretum's Expo displays proved our bonsai were show-worthy and warranted formal accommodations for showing them.

This need for visibility was attaining critical mass, yet the solution was proving elusive. At play was the same lack of full institutional commitment that had for years been suppressing the overall bonsai program. It was going to take a push from outside the institution to get the ball rolling, and a curious old man named Felton was about to provide it.