How We Started

The love of trees was a prime factor in my seeking employment at The North Carolina Arboretum back when I was hired in the spring of 1990. Even so, when the Arboretum accepted the unsolicited donation of a bonsai collection two years later and I was offered the job of caring for the little trees, I tried to turn down the assignment. I was happy doing what I was doing at the time, which was often manual labor out on the Arboretum property, thinning out overgrown sections of the woods, fighting back invasive exotic plants, and building what would ultimately be known as the Natural Garden Trail. But another component of my job description was working as a nursery assistant. The Arboretum had a large production nursery operation then, producing woody plant species from all over the temperate world and specializing in southeastern natives. Taken in its entirety, my work was a priceless experiential education in ecology and horticulture and I was quite satisfied with it. I was “living the dream”, as people now are fond of saying. The idea that I should give up all that so I could spend my time dithering around with strange, stunted plants stuffed in fancy pots, didn’t hold much appeal.

That particular aspect of my bonsai story is a fairly rare anomaly. All the other people I’ve met in bonsai, whether professionals, avid long-term hobbyists, or eager newcomers, seem to have been strongly attracted to the art when they first encountered it. These people came across bonsai one way or another and were immediately drawn to it. In my case, bonsai came to me and I tried to push it away.

Part of the reason for my reluctance to engage with bonsai at first, beyond the fact that I liked what I was already doing at the Arboretum, was a lack of any real understanding of it. I had never seen bonsai before except in photographs, and it was always depicted as an artifact belonging to a foreign culture. All those peculiarities about bonsai I’ve previously mentioned – that it involves taking trees out of nature, keeps them perpetually small and in pots, and has no roots in Western culture – combined to foster in me an image of bonsai as an oddity from another world. I loved trees, yes, but I loved them as natural beings, wild and free.

The idea of keeping them containerized, dwarfed, and clipped into unnatural shapes was, in a word, disagreeable.

It didn’t help that the first bonsai I ever saw in person were those given to the Arboretum in the initial donation, the ones I was being asked to care for. They were not the best representatives of bonsai art.

What follows are some images made of bonsai specimens received by the Arboretum in that initial donation. That collection arrived in November of 1992 and these photographs were taken in March of 1993, so by then the bonsai we inherited had been cleaned up considerably. They had arrived in a most overgrown and unkempt condition:

You who are reading this right now probably have a better understanding of bonsai than I did back when I first saw the trees pictured above, even if you know very little about the subject. I knew nothing. I knew the plants I was being asked to care for looked miserable, but I thought they looked that way because they were bonsai trees. I thought the act of making them into bonsai is what made them miserable; get them out of those cramped little pots and quit cutting on them all the time and maybe after a while they might recover and look good again.

It is worth describing all this for the sake of establishing exactly how humbly bonsai at The North Carolina Arboretum began. Our first trees were of compromised health and poor aesthetic quality. The person who was ultimately tasked with caring for them and developing them into something better knew nothing about them, and did not welcome the prospect of learning about it. Add to that the fact that Asheville wasn’t even on the bonsai map at the time, meaning there was no good local source for expert guidance, and the resulting picture is not one of particular promise.

But as it turned out, although no one could have predicted it at the time, all the necessary parts were perfectly in place for something extraordinary to happen.