Building the Program

1995 was a foundational year for the bonsai program at The North Carolina Arboretum.

"The bonsai program" became a convenient phrase to use for representing all bonsai activity not directly concerning the care, maintenance and development of the bonsai collection. There was a distinction to make between the two. All aspects of the collection part of the equation were activities I felt most desirous of doing — the horticultural appeal of growing a diverse assortment of decorative plants, the artistic appeal of shaping those plants to be beautiful, creative expressions, and the intellectual appeal of building a bonsai collection that would have its own distinctive identity.

Activities related to the program, on the other hand, were of a different sort. For the sake of simplicity, those activities can be characterized as the political side of the equation. The program, in all its dimensions, was ultimately concerned with people, and required me to put myself out in the public square to an extent I never had before. If I was to have the fulfillment of creatively working with plants and building the collection, I had to be politic and create the environment in which I could do that kind of work.

Education was at the heart of the bonsai program. Mr. Yoshimura had advised me to strive for making the Arboretum a center of bonsai activity in our region, and one means of achieving that goal was by inviting notable bonsai professionals to the Arboretum to provide public educational programs. Guest artists could present bonsai demonstrations and classes, appealing to both the general public and bonsai people living within a reasonable distance. The first time we did this was in autumn of 1995 when the Arboretum reached out to Chase Rosade, a popular bonsai teacher and professional from Pennsylvania. For the next twenty-five years the Arboretum would bring in some of the most acclaimed national and international bonsai figures to provide educational content. 

In addition to helping establish our credentials as a regional center of bonsai, these guest artists often used plant material provided by the Arboretum for their demonstration programs, resulting in new bonsai which then remained in our collection. Chase did that in 1995. He also went through the collection with me one afternoon and offered his informal consultation, without making it a service requiring additional payment. Money was tight for my program, so the pro bono consulting was welcomed. For Chase, it was an opportunity to help a new public bonsai venture, which he was glad to do. Over the years other guest artists did the same, and that became a way for me to talk shop with, and have my work reviewed by, knowledgeable bonsai professionals.

Also in 1995 and prompted by another of Mr. Yoshimura's urgings, I began teaching a beginners bonsai class at the Arboretum. This required coming up with a teaching method, generating informational handouts and finding a source of suitable plants, pots and other necessary materials. It meant writing up a class description and advertising for students, then finding out if there was any substantial public interest in learning how to make a bonsai. The response to the first beginner bonsai class in spring of 1995 was overwhelming and we easily sold out. The next year we offered two classes and quickly sold them out. Before long I was doing an intermediate class as well as the one for beginners, and we were offering classes in both spring and autumn. I continued conducting those classes at the Arboretum for ten years, ending them only after the bonsai garden opened in 2005 and I could no longer keep up with the demands of teaching.

A different form of education consisted of outreach to bonsai clubs. In spring of 1995 I did a demonstration program for a meeting of the local Blue Ridge Bonsai Society, a group of about fifteen members at the time. The meeting place was in Asheville but not at the Arboretum, so this was technically the first time I took my act on the road. Later that year I would receive invitations from both the Bonsai Society of the Carolinas in Charlotte and the Triangle Bonsai Society in Raleigh, the two largest bonsai clubs in North Carolina, to visit them and present programs. I would repeat the visits to these three groups annually for the next twenty-five years. Over the course of those same years, I found myself doing off-site bonsai programs for many different bonsai clubs and other clubs of various description, as well as for school groups, community resource centers, civic organizations and, honestly, anyone who asked. This educational outreach started locally then went statewide, eventually taking me to places all over the United States. At every one of these hundreds and hundreds of programs I was a representative of The North Carolina Arboretum — an ambassador. My primary purpose was to make the Arboretum's bonsai activities known and attract supporters for the bonsai program.

Some of the club people I met along the way became supporters of the Arboretum bonsai program by making donations of plant material to the collection. The very first such donor was Dorothy Wells from Asheville, a charter member of the Blue Ridge Bonsai Society. (Ms. Wells' story can be found in greater detail in the Journal entry: Golden Heart.) Ms. Wells contacted me in August of 1995 and invited me to come look at her collection and essentially said Take anything you want. A woman named Helen Davis, whom I met when I went to the Triangle club in Raleigh, made arrangements for me to come see her collection in November that same year and told me the same thing. It amazed me that people were so generous. Their only motivation, so far as I could see, was to be helpful. They were supporting a new arboretum that was trying to start a new public bonsai collection, and if anything they had could be of use in that effort, they were happy to give it to us. In all honesty, the trees these earliest donors had to offer were not accomplished works. That didn't matter because our collection at the time was nothing much to speak of either. What was particularly valuable in these transactions was the establishment of a process by which the Arboretum's bonsai collection could be increased and improved without the expense of purchasing trees. That set the precedent for a practice that was to become ever more beneficial in the years ahead.

Doing those outreach programs for the three bonsai clubs in 1995 brought to my attention other established bonsai clubs in North and South Carolina. An idea started to form. The previous year I had organized an event that brought members of the club in Charlotte and another club in Columbia, South Carolina, to the Arboretum to see what we were up to with bonsai. Now I was thinking about doing a similar event but expanding it to involve more clubs from a larger region. The objective was to host a gathering of bonsai people who were already somewhat organized, and through their various organizations produce a regional bonsai show to be staged at the Arboretum. This was thinking big, just as Mr. Yoshimura had encouraged me to do. I wrote a proposal and sent it up the ladder to Arboretum management. The annual Carolina Bonsai Expo wouldn't fledge until 1996, but the idea was hatched in 1995.

All this bustle of activity was in support of building a bonsai program from the ground up. That's why I describe the year as being foundational. Even so, when I think back on 1995 my primary bonsai memory from that time doesn't concern new initiatives or early political maneuvers. My memories from those days are dominated by the presence of Mr. Yoshimura. My study time with him in January had set me on a course that proved fortuitous, but he was not done with me yet.

This was the letter of acknowledgment sent to Ms. Wells for her 1995 donation, the first addition to the Arboretum's original bonsai donation. I was surprised to see the title “Bonsai Curator” used after my name. That must have been a little editing work on the part of the office person who typed the letter for me, back before I learned how to type for myself. The same is true for the reference to Ms. Wells as “Mrs. Wells.” Dottie was nobody’s “Mrs.” — she was her own person.