It Takes a Bonsai
For a child, raising a bonsai can offer profound lessons
It’s springtime in New Zealand at the moment and the bonsai nursery is growing mad. Conifers are pushing out volumes of new, tender growth, and the leaves of deciduous trees are bursting from the buds of winter dormancy. Aphids are busy too.
That so much can come seemingly from nothing, and out of nowhere, is a perennial reminder of the hidden workings of nature. Of course, you don’t need bonsai trees to see this. Any shift in season leads to sudden, visible changes in the flora outside your home, even if you’re in Hawaii! There are differences, though, and the recent appearance of spring here in NZ has left me wondering about this.
I’m often told stories of someone’s childhood and their experiences with bonsai trees. Maybe a parent or grandparent dabbled in bonsai, or perhaps even they had a go themselves as a child. Ryan Neil, one of the premier bonsai professionals in the US, got his taste for bonsai trees at the age of 12 after encountering them at a country fair; formal study began soon after.
I hear stories like this often enough that I suppose I shrug them off as a bit cliché. But I shouldn’t. The virtues of having a handful of bonsai trees to cultivate on the back porch are one thing. But I have something else in mind. Growing one or a few bonsais can offer profound lessons and experiences for a child or adolescent, not just about nature, but about many aspects of living in the world around us. Subtle perhaps, but enduring nonetheless.
Let’s have a look…
Any lesson a bonsai tree has to offer will come from hands-on experience — it’s not intellectual. Nevertheless, a thick description of this experience cannot be avoided if it’s to be communicated.
Mastering a Method
There’s no end to what activities a child might engage in to achieve confidence and success, from a musical instrument to drawing to basketball. Does working with bonsais offer anything unique or different? I think it does.
For starters, bonsai trees sometimes die. There’s no denying it. My first bonsai died, what can I say. That’s why you don’t pay $4500 for your first bonsai, no matter how amazing it looks. You might forget to water it one hot, sunny day and, like a person, there’s no reviving it. A houseplant, maybe, but potted trees are less forgiving when taken to the extremes.
Better yet, if kids are involved, don’t buy a bonsai at all, as that can be confusing. We want to make a bonsai from scratch, not adopt one already underway. So buy an appropriate garden-centre specimen and have a go (Google, or your local bonsai club can advise). Yes, a very young specimen already in a basic bonsai pot would also be fine. If it dies, you can use that pot for the next one. Remember, it’s not failure that’s the problem, but rather the giving up afterwards. As Maria Montessori wrote, “It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose, which it truly has.”
One of the most overlooked aspects of bonsais is how ordinary is the entire enterprise. This is good news, not because bonsais collapse just like any other trees, but because it means that the requisite knowledge and skills are common to other aspects of plant and garden care. Indeed, counter to common belief, bonsai trees are not some kind of dwarfed hybrids special to bonsai. They are just regular trees (or shrubs; one of the most popular species for bonsais is not a tree at all: the juniper procumbens).1
Bonsai practitioner Graham Potter said this in an interview:
I still love to work with garden plants and nursery material. Most of us have a fairly limited range of [wild] species available to collect in our own areas. Garden plants offer much greater diversity. Some of my best-known and successful bonsai have come from this type of stock. In general garden plants lack the magic of yamadori [wild trees]. But rather than a negative I believe this to be a positive attribute because it gives the bonsai ‘artist’ a near blank canvas to be truly creative.
Many of these trees, moreover, can be styled with a simple method of ‘clip and grow.’ This refers to the basic process in which cutting leads to new shoots, and as these so-called shoots shoot in various directions, the ones going in less suitable directions are cut. This way you direct the growth and thus eventually the shape. Hence the phrase, ‘clip and grow.’
Basic pruning techniques can take you far in bonsai, especially as you acquire knowledge of how trees grow. Again, this is not special knowledge specific to bonsai, but rather general knowledge about plants.
I often encounter adults who are quite hesitant (even afraid) to prune a leafy houseplant, let alone a tree. No the plant will not die, and what is more, it will respond in interesting ways: Cut the top quarter off a tree, for instance, and it will grow a new leader and carry on. The tree is shorter now, but importantly, it’s also bigger. How so? The answer is simple: big is relative, or more precisely, proportional. If you consider a one-inch thick trunk on a six-foot tall pine, it makes for a spindly thing. If, hypothetically, you chop that same trunk down to six inches, now the trunk is one-sixth the height of the tree. Suddenly, what was a wimpy trunk is now a grunty, fat one. This is clear in the bonsai above: while the trunk would be narrow for a standard tree, here it looks impressive. Sometimes smaller is bigger.
But I digress. The point I’m wanting to make here is that creating a bonsai means entering into a unique if not special kind of relationship. You act, the tree reacts, then you react in turn; on it goes. Meanwhile, you learn and adapt, for each tree is unique and each poses its own challenges. I think that ‘relationship’ is the right word here. Far from being cruel or unusual, tending to bonsai trees means giving them enormous attention, to which they usually reward us with great vigour and health — and beauty.
Process, not Product
Nature has much to teach us, especially about life cycles and change, often reflected in the seasons. What bonsai trees offer is a close-up view of this process unfolding, reflected in a cumulative way. The changing colours in autumn are an annual process and thus represent a full circle. With bonsai, as the circle turns, the tree evolves, season by season.
A juvenile bonsai tree comes into maturity, taking on more definition and eventually shape. The dramatic transformation that occurs over decades doesn’t occur as such, but rather as individual moments of growth, in foliage, in branching, in the trunk, and in the surface-roots at the base (what the Japanese refer to as nebari). These are the observed moments in bonsai care, and it is these experiences that lend meaning to the activity and propel us forward. Bonsai master John Naka once noted, “Bonsai is not you working on the tree; you have to have the tree work on you.”
Which brings us to another theme: this is about process, not product. The tree mentioned above might be thirty years old and while the result is impressive to behold, the end result would have only been theoretical for much of this time. It would seem obvious that the joy of bonsai would be in the eventual aesthetic achievement, but I doubt this is even true for artists like painters (who might complete a work in days or weeks), or for fine carpenters (who might complete a work in weeks or months). The joy of bonsais, including the sense of accomplishment that their cultivation brings, is in the fine detail — the making. It’s in the practice and the immediate rewards this brings.
Interviews with bonsai enthusiasts suggest this. Reflections tend to dwell on the hands-on enjoyment that the trees have provided over the years — companionship — with little showboating over the ‘master’s’ grand collection. I have a nonagenarian friend who’s been cultivating bonsai for fifty-plus years. If you ask him how it’s going, he doesn’t reflect on his body of work, remarking on this award or how magnificent some pine tree might be looking at the moment. He regales in stories, rather, of how he had reworked this tree, or revived that tree. All process.
To quote another practitioner:
I find the joy is in the daily care for my trees, serving them the best I can to bring them forward.
And not least; just sitting and watching. Studying the details of the bark, branch formation, roots surface and leaf structure. Observing the shifting seasons through the trees. Finally. Learning that you can’t speed up anything with bonsai. It’s all about time and patience. From this you learn about a life.
All of which is not to say that achievement is unimportant. Indeed, for a child, it’s especially important. We don’t engage in something for no apparent reason. We don’t set out on a journey with no destination in mind. The lesson, rather, is this: the experience of achieving something materially rewarding flows from a process. It takes a process and you have to commit to that process over time to achieve something worthwhile. At the same time, it’s vital that there’s joy in the journey. In the realm of bonsai, I think there is.
Life in Real Time
Any bonsai that looks the part will be a testament to the passage of time. A tree grows, it’s pruned back, a new branch grows, it’s pruned back; meanwhile, the body of the tree continues to grow and evolve, leaving the signature of time.
Bonsai as a Japanese tradition is full of established techniques, but most importantly, bonsai is the product of a culture that has a unique appreciation of time. It’s a patient culture. This can be seen, for example, in the apprenticeship system where, in the case of bonsai, a person is expected to work all but three days per month for five years (with a small stipend) to receive a certificate. Afterwards, at least historically, the graduate would be expected to work in the profession patiently for a lifetime, slowly carving out a meaningful existence, perhaps becoming a ‘master’ of their trade.
I’m not extolling the virtues of such a system. Rather, I’m suggesting that bonsai practice stems from a culture in which time stretches out long into the future, almost indefinitely. Expectations of how quickly things will unfold are learned, and in Japan these delayed expectations are inculcated from myriad sources in a highly traditional society. There is no special hurry. There is plenty of time. Nothing good can come from anything before its time.
In this sense, time is not a fixed thing at all. Even the western example of rural versus urban reflects this: people living on a farm have a quite different sense of time from, say, urban, day-traders. You often hear this even from weekend campers. When we leave our hectic, city lives to slow down in a natural setting, what’s most jarring is not so much the departure from one’s hectic life, but the return to it. Slow down enough and you can have trouble re-adjusting to the pace of what was your own life only several days or weeks previously.
What I’m suggesting about Japan is that this is a society with an entirely unique temporal sensibility. Not just patient but reflective and meditative. Bonsai practice, historically, derives from this. It’s not only an activity where time slows down, the entire horticultural practice is premised on a willingness to initiate a project that stretches out not just years but decades, even a lifetime. So while the emphasis with creating bonsai trees is on process, there is something temporal happening in the background which can also influence how we ourselves grow.
You might say that ‘bonsai’ teaches a slower and more encompassing attitude towards time.
Time, in the Arnold Arboretum’s Bonsai and Penjing Collection, is dictated not by the soundless flip of an iPhone’s digital minute or the breathy turn of an analog calendar page, but by the long evolution of one season into the next and the needs of the collection’s 43 breathtaking, miniature trees.
For individual trees, marking time means different things. For the last four years, what’s mattered to a 167-year-old cherry tree is getting healthy.
Reduced to not much more than a fist-sized stump, it landed in the narrow, airy bonsai hospital, a wooden slat house with long tables along each side. Removed from its constricting ceramic pot and wrapped in an “air pot” of stiff plastic with holes punched in its circumference, the cherry — already more than twice as old as most of its full-sized relatives — rebounded. Today, it boasts a dozen young, whiplike branches, festooned with green leaves. (source)
There is something to be gained from putting passive engagement aside for something unplugged that requires you to be actively engaged. Even after a single growing season, the bonsai tree observably grows and changes. Over longer stretches of time, more profound changes occur. If these whole-tree changes are documented in sketches or photographs, a child can mark their tree’s progress — a rewarding experience. Whether consciously or not, the goal is for a child to arrive at an appreciation of what the accumulation of time can offer, if they invest in it.
The lesson is far reaching: the confidence that comes from creating something at a young age can have a lasting impact. Few meaningful achievements happen overnight. Experiencing this first-hand, children learn to engage in projects with no immediate endpoint, knowing from experience that the reward is in the making.
Of course, not all types of trees are suitable, either because of the local climate or because the foliage is too large to make a suitable subject.
Having recently moved to my own place for the first time, the thought of trying out bonsai-making passed my mind at some point (before being overwhelmed by the discovery that I suck at buying furniture). Do you have any resources you would recommend for an apartment-dweller that would like to get into it?