A tray landscape originally designed by bonsai great Yuji Yoshimura commands a great deal of attention in the Bonsai Exhibition Garden every May, because it looks like this:

The public loves flowers! The blooming "tree" in this planting is an azalea, one of the Kurume hybrids named 'Christmas Cheer' (Rhododendron X 'Christmas Cheer'). Most of the rest of the shrubs are Kingsville Dwarf Boxwood (Buxus microphylla v. compacta), with the exception of the largest shrub on the right side of the planting. That one is another azalea, although the variety is unknown. It blooms after the 'Christmas Cheer' azalea is finished and has large pink flowers which somehow do not work at all in the context of this landscape, so its buds are clipped off each year to prevent it from flowering. Although the prime time for this tray landscape is when it is in bloom, it looks good all through the year thanks to a nicely conceived design. The white gravel in the middle of the arrangement suggests water while the rocks delineate the edges of land masses on either side. This is one of several pieces in our collection that has a poetic name, this one being known as "River of Dreams."

I started out by attributing this tray landscape to Mr. Yoshimura, which is technically correct as it was he who first put it together in a demonstration sometime in the 1980s. It was part of a program he did for the Triangle Bonsai Society in the Raleigh, NC area, just one of the countless such presentations he made during the 30-some-odd years he traveled all over the United States and elsewhere in the world educating the public about the art of bonsai. At the end of his demonstration the piece looked like this:

What a difference time makes! Only, it takes more than simply the passage of time; it takes time plus skillful care, persistently applied. Mr. Yoshimura worked on this piece only once, and that was during his demonstration, which we might assume to have been a couple or 3 hours in duration. Fortunately for this piece it went home with a man named Howard Kazan. The late Mr. Kazan was a longtime member of the Triangle group and a semi-professional bonsai artist, and later became an avid supporter of bonsai at the NC Arboretum. Mr. Kazan donated this tray landscape to our collection sometime in the very early 2000s. This photograph was taken not long after the piece was given to us:

Obviously, a great deal of change occurred between the time when Mr. Yoshimura created the landscape and when Mr. Kazan donated it to the Arboretum. Some of this difference is a direct result of the plants having had a couple of decades to grow and mature, but there are other differences beyond that. You will notice in the original image there is a variegated plant on the left side of the planting that is no longer there in the later image. Several other plants also appear to be missing, or moved. Mr. Kazan informed me that the azalea originally used on the right side of the landscape died some time shortly after the piece was put together, and he replaced it with another he had on hand (the one with the large pink flowers.) Also, the configuration of the land masses is different. The stones may have been rearranged or the position of what is viewed as the front of the composition might have been rotated slightly clockwise in the container, but somehow the configuration has been changed. Let us also contemplate that part about "the plants having had a couple of decades to grow and mature." During the 20-something years they were doing that, who was holding the scissors? Whose mind made the choices about where to cut and what to remove?

The original image represents what was accomplished by Mr. Yoshimura during a two or three-hour demonstration. The next image represents what Mr. Kazan accomplished over the course of more than two decades, working off the starting point of Mr. Yoshimura's original design.

So, is this tray landscape a Yoshimura piece, or is it a Kazan piece?

Before you answer that question, consider the changes that have taken place in the look of the landscape since Mr. Kazan donated the piece to the Arboretum. For starters, it is in a different container now (the original container cracked). The position of the stones on the right side is slightly different, too. Plus, all the plants are larger, fuller and different in feeling due to the way they are pruned. I think Mr. Kazan, if he were alive today and could see the piece, would say that everything needs a good thinning out. You might think that, too, and you may be right. If and when the time comes that the plants in the "River of Dreams" tray landscape get strongly headed back, I will be the one holding the scissors. Mr. Yoshimura might be looking over my left shoulder while I work and Mr. Kazan might be looking over my right, but neither one of them will have much say in the matter. I will make the cuts where I think they should be made. In the end, I will make the piece look the way I think it looks best, just as Mr. Kazan did, and just as Mr. Yoshimura did before him.

This is all as it should be, because this is bonsai.

When a painter puts the last stroke of the brush to the canvas, very rarely does anyone follow behind and paint over the work. The same is true for a work of sculpture, or a piece of writing. So when we say, "This is an O'Keeffe painting" or "This is a Calder mobile" or "This is a Hemingway novel," we are talking about a piece of work done by a single person. They may well have been influenced by others, but the finished piece is their original work and it stays the way they made it.

In bonsai, because the medium is alive and growing, constantly changing, it is not possible for the work of any one person to remain intact over any great length of time. The person who has a John Naka tree, for example, can in fact only have a tree that was once shaped by him. Even if Mr. Naka had the tree for 30 years and the person who has it now is keeping it strictly to the same design that Mr. Naka gave it, the tree is invariably changing. It has to. Every time we take scissors to plant we make choices, and these choices reflect our own mind and no one else's. So, what about the person who buys a tree from, say, Walter Pall, and then every year hires Mr. Pall to come and trim the tree and repot it and give advice as to how it should be handled. Is that not a Walter Pall tree? Perhaps it is, for the time being. But it will someday have to be shaped by somebody other than him, unless it dies first... or he lives forever.

In bonsai, every piece that has been around for any substantial length of time has been influenced by each and every person who has grown it. Bonsai is a collaborative art form, not only in the sense that multiple people can and do influence any given piece, but also in the sense that the living plant material contributes its own individual nature, as well. Is there such a thing as interspecies art? That might be an interesting topic in its own right, but it will have to wait for another day.

“Whose mind made the choices about where to cut and what to remove?”

Whose Art is it Anyway?