A view of the Bonsai Exhibition Garden in the North Carolina Arboretum. All photos courtesy of A. Joura/NC Arboretum.
For our next Bonsai Around the World blog, we’re back in the United States at the North Carolina Arboretum. We spoke with Curator Arthur Joura who has grown the arboretum’s “Americana-style” bonsai collection largely on his own over the past few decades despite having no prior bonsai experience.
In 1992, Joura was a utility worker at the arboretum – then a single empty building and no gardens – when he was assigned to take care of about 100 bonsai the arboretum had received as a donation from a woman in central North Carolina. Joura said the woman had been terminally ill and therefore was unable to take care of her trees. Many had already died or were not salvageable before the arboretum received her donation.
“All of the bonsai were badly out of shape, and a lot of them had bugs and disease and so forth, so it was a real shambles to begin with,” he said.
Joura was originally resistant to take care of the trees, a task he didn’t think would be interesting. But he said he was “strongly encouraged” to take the job as a potential career opening. Joura previously bore no knowledge of bonsai or interest in the art, but he said his life changed after he took charge of the initial donation.
“It was one of those things I could never have guessed at or arranged – it just happened, and I was in the right place at the right time,” he said.
Joura eventually studied at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum – where he formed a close friendship with former Arboretum Director Dr. John Creech – as part of an experience with the Nippon Bonsai Association and trained in New York State under Yuji Yoshimura. Joura said bonsai perfectly combined two main threads of his life: his educational background in fine arts and his personal interest in plants, horticulture and nature in general.
“Bonsai is truly a visual art form, a way for me to be personally expressive through creativity, working with plants as a living medium,” he said. “To me, bonsai doesn’t need the props of foreign cultures to make it better. It’s good enough just as something people can do with plants that allows them the freedom of personal creative expression.”
Arthur Joura, bonsai curator at the North Carolina Arboretum.
One temporary staff person waters the North Carolina Arboretum’s bonsai garden on the weekends and during the growing season, and three volunteers work mostly in the maintenance area, but Joura is the only one who works on bonsai styling. He pulls ideas from the trees he sees while he walks around his town or hikes in the mountains and woods near his home.
“Sometimes I’m driving down the road, I stop and take my camera and say, ‘What is it that I like about that tree that makes me want to look at it so much?’” Joura said. “I try to break it down in my mind’s eye to understand how it got to be that way, and that’s what informs my work at the arboretum – the study of trees, both visually and biologically, how they function and what shapes them.”
The exhibition garden trees are saplings Joura has grown himself, bonsai that have been collected from nearby wilderness and some that people have donated after working on the trees for 30 years. The majority of the bonsai are less than 50 years old, but Joura said the design of the bonsai should be more important than their age or monetary value.
“Our trees speak to people’s souls, their sense of poetry and appreciation of the living breathing world all around them,” he said. “That’s what we hang our hats on. I wish more people would see it this way.”
A display of eight bonsai at the Bonsai Exhibition Garden.
About 40 bonsai are on display at a time in the garden. Joura said Asheville, the city in which the arboretum is located, was not a bonsai hotspot, so he didn’t have any bonsai authority figures to develop the garden with. Instead, he led a group of about 10 people in the design and fundraising for the garden over the course of about seven years. Joura said the garden was built entirely on donated funds, which was the ultimate sign of support from their community.
The garden is designed with the intent of creating a home for the plants on display with access to water and other amenities needed for horticulture but also to produce an environment that would transport guests to another place.
“At first the plantings were all small and young but 15 years later, it’s really come into its own,” Joura said. “The whole garden is a meditation piece.”
The exhibition garden includes a range of native trees and typical bonsai species, like Japanese white or black pines and gingko trees, but Joura said the collection represents strictly American bonsai. Joura maintains that the bonsai garden presents an experience incomparable to any other bonsai institutions that might contain bigger or older trees or bonsai trained or designed by famous bonsai artists.
“Our purpose is to represent our own place and time right now in western North Carolina and not anywhere else,” he said. “We have no intention of trying to connect to any other culture but our own. We don’t want to be anything else than what we are, and we’re not trying to pretend to be something we’re not.”
Two tray landscape displays – Left: “Aunt Martha’s Magic Garden” and right: “Mount Mitchell”
Joura said the most popular attractions within the arboretum’s bonsai collection are the tray landscape pieces, which he started to extract maximum effect out of plants that were too young to stand alone. Some displays represent spots in North Carolina places while some are simply generic Southern Appalachian expressions.
“The trees in the landscapes weren’t old enough or didn’t have enough presence or character to be displayed as individual single-tree bonsai and by mashing them together using stones and groundcover and whatnot, we could create a scene and more visual interest,” Joura said.
He said visitors tend to find the landscapes appealing because they intuitively understand how to interact with the pieces, placing themselves into the scenes.
“The idea is you shrink yourself down and put yourself into that picture, but for a lot of folks it’s difficult when the only information they get is just a single tree,” Joura said. “But give them a group of trees, some shrubs and stones and such, now they have an environment they don’t have to create so much out of their imagination.”
He said hearing visitors’ comments about their ability to relate to the landscapes and trees daily is gratifying rather than just listening to people wondering about how old a certain bonsai is or how much a display might cost.
“If someone’s asking those questions, they’re getting blocked out by their preconceived notions about what’s important,” Joura said. “But the people who go in there and say, ‘That reminds me of that place we saw in California,’ that’s great – they’re completing the scene, taking what we’re presenting and adding their own experience and that makes it personal to them.”
Left: Eastern Redcedar, Right: Red Maple