Bonsai: A Look Sideways

National Bonsai Foundation Board Member and professional photographer, Stephen Voss, brings us his latest photo blog.

Revisiting the same subject over many years time allows one’s appreciation of it to deepen and be imbued with complexity and nuance. But sometimes, we will glance over a tree, having seen it many times before. I’ve sometimes found myself struggling with how I might photograph these trees after having done so many times in the past. Sometimes, changing your visual tools can be an effective way to force yourself to see the trees anew.

Tilt-shift lenses have been used by architectural photographers to make images of buildings appear perfectly straight, with no distortion. What’s interesting about the lenses to me is that they can also be used “wrongly” to pinpoint a small bit of a scene to be in focus. The name of these lenses literally comes from their ability to tilt and shift in relation to the digital sensor on the camera.

On a warm spring day at the museum, I spent some time wandering around, try- ing out this new way of seeing that seemed to bring a little abstraction to the more “straight” photography I’m used to doing. Focus in a picture is a way of directing the viewer’s eye, of making choices about what is important and what is not.

Typically, this has a lot to do with the distance of an object to the camera, but with this specialty lens, one can up-end that idea and create images where focus is a more nebulous concept. Trees take on an ethereal quality, the softness pulls the scenes out of the present and gives them a timeless feel that feels fitting for bonsai.

On a technical note - tilt-shift lenses can be extremely expensive, but there are many less expensive alternatives. Pictured here, I purchased a tilt-shift lens mount adapter that fit onto my Sony camera and could take Pentax lens with screw mount adapters. The whole setup cost less than 1/10 the price of a native tilt-shift lens and worked great.

A PBA Spring Show Recap from Aaron Stratten

On May 6 through 8, after a two-year pandemic hiatus, the Potomac Bonsai Association (PBA) Festival returned to the U.S. National Arboretum and National Bonsai and Penjing Museum. The festival included an exhibition of bonsai, formal bonsai displays, vendors, workshops, demonstrations, and more! It was a rainy weekend, but that didn’t stop bonsai enthusiasts from taking advantage of the return of this annual event.

PBA bonsai display in the courtyard of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum

PBA is an umbrella organization (no pun intended) serving and consisting of several smaller bonsai clubs and societies in the Washington D. C., Maryland, and Virginia region. Club members were able to display their trees on tables surrounding the museum courtyard. This allowed visitors a rare opportunity to see the bonsai of local hobbyists alongside specimens that are part of the world-class collection at the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum. In addition to the courtyard display, which was open to the sky and rain, some bonsai were exhibited inside the display wing of the museum in a more formal setting.

PBA members discussing the arrangement of formal displays in the display wing.

Two event tents were erected on the lawn just across from the museum. The larger was filled by bonsai vendors from across the country who offered all manner of bonsai related items for sale. Both long-time bonsai enthusiasts and the newly-bonsai-curious were able to peruse and purchase bonsai and pre-bonsai plant material, bonsai pots and tools, and other related art and display accents. Especially during the rainy parts of the weekend, the vendors tent was a wonderful place to escape the weather, catch up with old friends, and feel immersed in the bonsai experience all at once.

Guest bonsai artist Mark Fields was present all weekend to share his expertise with participants. Mark has practiced bonsai since his childhood and is the owner of Bonsai by Fields, LLC – a bonsai nursery in Indiana. He is the current president of the American Bonsai Society, and member of the National Bonsai Foundation Board of Directors. He presented a bonsai demonstration on Saturday morning and led intermediate and advanced bonsai workshops on each day of the festival.

Mark Field beginning the bonsai demonstration.

For those with less experience, PBA also hosted beginner workshops in the smaller event tent. Members of the public and bonsai beginners of all ages were able to register for the workshop which included a small plant, training pot, soil, wire, and – most importantly – guidance from PBA members through the process of styling the plant material into the beginnings of a bonsai that will bring enjoyment for many years to come. Participants were given hands on support and information for the continued care and training of their new bonsai. 

With two years away and a weekend of chilly rain, it might be tempting to think that few would show up, but the bonsai community and the bonsai-curious showed up in force to make the weekend a great success. It seems the pandemic invigorated the appetite for bonsai rather than dampen it (pun intended)! For more information about PBA and its member clubs, check out https://potomacbonsai.com/.   

For information on the National Bonsai Foundation and ways to help the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum check out https://www.bonsai-nbf.org/.

Spring Flowering Bonsai

Prunus mume 'Kobai' flowers blooming at the entrance to the Dr. Yee-Sun Wu Chinese Pavilion at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. Photo by Steven Voss

It is peak cherry blossom time in Washington, D.C., and the beginning of a new growth ring. The birds, the bees and the humans are all swarming at the National Arboretum. The flowering cherry tree is the pinnacle angiosperm– that’s a fancy word for “flowering plant.”

The United States National Arboretum is a Clonal Germplasm Repository for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. Let’s just say it is a plant DNA library, but instead of books on shelves there are collections of plants in Arboretum gardens. 

The U.S. National Arboretum has more than a thousand cherry trees in their prime for viewing. While their twigs are still naked of leaves, hard wood branches are covered in delicate blossoms. Bees wiggle between the petals and pull out clutches of gold pollen. Humans put their backs against the flowers, smile at cameras, and click. Eagles are soaring and songbirds sing above it all! 

One exceptional specimen of cherry tree DNA is in the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. Check it out by strolling past the masterpiece bonsai and penjing in the Museum’s central courtyard, behind the massive red doors of the Yee-Sun Wu Chinese Pavilion. Rising from the corner, with branches that partially eclipse the moon gate entrance, is a cherry tree named Prunus mume ‘Kobai’. Less than a month ago icicles were dripping from its hot pink petals. 

This spring, the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum is displaying collections of flowering plant DNA in the form of bonsai and penjing. The Museum’s azalea bonsai special exhibit will be May 21st to June 5th. Some other spring flowering bonsai to admire are quince, maples, crabapples, firethorn, pomegranate and privet. The maple flowers will be small and subtle. They are often too high to see in the wild, so they are overlooked in the landscape. When viewing the blossoms in the Museum’s Japanese Pavilion, they are accessible, a perfectly sized ornament for miniature trees. There is nothing subtle about the flowers on azalea bonsai. Branch pads are pruned to such exaggerated forms that individual plants sometimes appear to be dancing for attention. Within the John Y. Naka North American Pavilion, when the breeze is right, perfume from privet bonsai flowers may be smelled before they are seen. 

One reason bonsai trees appear to be so small is because the size of leaves can be reduced by human intervention. Humans may withhold water or fertilizer to decrease their size. Or large leaves may be plucked and grow back smaller. Roots are constrained by high fired glazed earthenware, but the size of flowers cannot be reduced. Their function is to make future plants. As reproductive elements of plants, where and when they form on bonsai is controlled by reproductive hormones. 

In 1920, two United States Department of Agriculture essential employees named Garner and Allard discovered that many plants flower in response to changes in day length. So, some of the bonsai flowers being adored this spring first began to grow almost a year ago. Last summer and autumn when the days were getting short, spring flowers were microscopic. They were hidden within sheaths of dormant buds for their protection. Growth slows in the winter, but it rarely stops. As flower buds endure the chill they swell faster with every increasing degree. 

Specimens prepared for the Museum’s spring flowering bonsai displays receive countless judicious pruning sessions between flower formation last year and peak spring bloom.  Established silhouettes have been preserved with care not to revert century old bonsai back into a flower-less juvenile state. The common bonsai technique of pinching, or as an arborist would call “header cuts,” are used with reservation. The resulting branch ramification may not allow enough sunlight into canopies to disinfect the diseases flowering trees are prone to. The culture of masterpiece flowering bonsai by pruning is both selective and reductive. The strongest branches are often removed while leaving the little phototropic lateral ones. Those lateral branches, or “spurs,” as an orchardist may say, are where flowers are born. 

With all the help they are receiving from birds, bees, and humans at the U.S. National Arboretum the flowers are sure to be pollinated this spring. Another growth ring will form, flowers will become crabapples and exhibitions will change. This year, the Museum’s fall fruit and foliage special exhibit will be held from October 29 through November 13th. It will highlight bonsai and penjing from the collections at peak autumn color and ripeness. The seasonal nature of bonsai ensures that there is always something to look forward to.

The Ever-Evolving Art of Bonsai

The centuries-old craft is thriving as both a hobby and an art form, with contemporary practitioners around the world asking what lessons it can impart today.

In 1913, A shipment of plants from the Yokohama Nursery Co. in Japan arrived in the port of San Francisco, among them a seven- foot-tall trident maple destined for the Japanese Pavilion at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to be held two years later. More than a century old, the tree was an exemplar of the Imperial style, a type of bonsai developed for shoguns and feudal lords and named after the Imperial court during the 19th-century Meiji Restoration, an era of cultural transformation that arose following the country’s 214-year-long period of isolation. Evenly spaced branches reached out from a trunk twisted into gentle contrapposto, its clusters of spring green foliage suggesting the outline of an isosceles triangle. Like most bonsai from that time, the maple expressed an ageless ideal of the natural world wrested into equilibrium.

When the exposition ended, the maple was purchased by Kanetaro Domoto, a Japanese immigrant who arrived in Oakland, Calif., in the 1880s and co-founded with his brothers what would soon become the largest Japanese-owned plant nursery in the country. When the Domotos lost their property — which once spanned 48 acres — during the Depression, Kanetaro’s eldest son, Toichi, brought the trident maple to his own nursery in nearby Hayward, but by 1942 the family was imprisoned at Colorado’s Amache internment camp.

In the camps, bonsai artists — those forced, like the Domotos, to give up their collections — made trees and flowers from paper and wire, makeshift manifestations of their own heartbreak. After the war, when the camps were closed, those practitioners started local clubs as private spaces for Japanese American hobbyists, eventually welcoming a broader public fascinated by Japanese aesthetics. Toichi Domoto returned to his nursery, which had been left in the care of an employee, and began the long process of restoring his family’s prized maple. In his absence, the tree had grown scraggly, its wooden container rotted and its roots broken through into the soil below.

In the decades that followed, the Domoto Maple, which now stands nearly nine feet tall and is a centerpiece of the permanent collection at the Pacific Bonsai Museum outside Tacoma, Wash., became a living symbol of struggle and survival — and an inadvertent precursor to a new movement of contemporary bonsai. By training native species into sculptural forms that express their unique ecological and cultural climates, bonsai artists from East Asia to South America are proposing a new, expressionist style that both questions and embraces the constraints of this centuries-old botanical tradition, exploring the immensity not just of nature but of human experience itself.

A Rocky Mountain juniper created by Ryan Neil of Bonsai Mirai outside Portland, Ore. Chris Hornbecker, © Bonsai Mirai

The Practice of miniaturizing plants is thought to have come to Japan from China sometime around the seventh century, when the two countries formally established diplomatic ties. By that point, Chinese gardeners had likely been creating potted landscapes, or penjing (“potted scenery”), for hundreds of years, bringing nature into the homes of political elites, painters and calligraphers. Penjing, as it developed over the centuries, didn’t idealize nature but rather portrayed — or, as some bonsai scholars suggest, exaggerated — its strange, expansive beauty. Until the 1970s, when the Chinese government began codifying five regional schools of penjing, each with its own approach to styling local species through cutting, wiring or pinching, there were few rules: Early guides published in the 16th and 17th centuries suggested that practitioners should attempt to imitate values like vigor and austerity represented in classical landscape painting, says Phillip E. Bloom, the 38-year-old curator of the Chinese Garden at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. Often, the principles were abstract — an artisan might have aimed, Bloom says, “to somehow create heaven in the tree” — which left penjing open to poetic interpretation.

As early as the 12th century, Japanese craftspeople and monks had likewise evolved the art into a controlled, observational form that later came to be known as bonsai (“potted planting”); while the term itself had existed for centuries, it was not until the Meiji era (1868-1912) that it took on its modern meaning. By then, scholars had begun to classify elements like trunk shapes, branch placement and preferred species — any locally grown, woody-stemmed perennial with true branches and relatively small leaves, including pine, maple, juniper, beech, elm, cherry and plum. Bonsai could range in size from just a few inches tall to Imperial trees that could exceed six feet. Regardless of size or species or age, each tree distilled the sublime beauty of an ancient forest. Today, the Kyoto-based bonsai curator and scholar Hitomi Kawasaki, 41, compares the ideal form of classical bonsai to the kamae posture of Noh theater, with the actor’s knees slightly bent and arms held away from the body. “If you’re in that stance, it’s the most stable point, and if you can let go, it’s almost like floating,” Kawasaki says. “With bonsai, it’s similar: There’s a point of balance, you strengthen that point and everything comes into being.” When practitioners succeed in this, their trees can outlive them by centuries, their growth slowed, but never fully halted, by confinement; if the specimens are off balance, they eventually wither. Poised between control and abandon, creation and destruction, life and death, the art is, as Kawasaki writes in a forthcoming essay, “an attempt to find a middle way out of dualism.”

Though European missionaries encountered penjing and bonsai as early as the 16th century, these crafts were then practiced exclusively in East Asia by masters who largely tended the collections of aristocratic patrons or government officials. But during the Meiji period, bonsai specimens were displayed at world’s fairs in cities like Paris,

Vienna and Chicago, helping spark a craze for the aesthetic movement known as Japonisme, which influenced the French Impressionists and countless European fine jewelry and furniture companies. By the mid-20th century, though, both bonsai and penjing temporarily stalled in their home countries; in Japan, most nurseries were asked to grow food during World War II, and in China, the discipline was purged in the Cultural Revolution as a relic of the feudal past.

Neil’s Yatsubusa elm for Bonsai Mirai. Chris Hornbecker © Bonsai Mirai

Neil’s vine maple for Bonsai Mirai. Lani Milton © Bonsai Mirai

Despite that, the art form flourished in the West thanks to teachers like Yuji Yoshimura, who taught bonsai to foreign diplomats and American G.I.s stationed in Japan after the war, and the charismatic, Colorado-born John Naka, who introduced the practice into households across the United States. Working in Southern California from 1946 until his death in 2004, Naka made extensive use of native trees such as California junipers and coast live oaks, a departure from traditionally favored Japanese species like black pine, cedar and maple. He published a pair of seminal technical guides and mentored students around the world, inspiring new clubs to form in Australia and South Africa and across South America. Though Naka’s trees were formal — in his most famous work, a miniature forest of 11 Foemina junipers held at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum in Washington, D.C., tufts of foliage levitate around a cluster of pin-straight trunks — his cosmopolitan view of bonsai set him apart from some of his peers who, in the 1950s, argued that bonsai should be taught exclusively in Japanese. “There are no borders in bonsai,” Naka once said. “The dove of peace flies to palace as to humble house, to young as to old, to rich and poor.”

Then, in the 1980s, the Japanese practitioner Masahiko Kimura, now 81, rose to global prominence with large Shimpaku junipers contorted into clouds of foliage swirling around ghostly deadwood bases. If Naka described bonsai in the utopian language of 1960s California, then Kimura, who often gave workshops in Europe, espoused a vision for bonsai that was as vivid, muscular and ego-driven as Modernist painting, recasting the master not as a craftsperson but as an auteur.

A bantigue tree created by the Filipino bonsai artist Bernabe Millares. Courtesy of Susan Lee

Today, Naka’s and Kimura’s students continue to redefine the field: Take, for instance, Ryan Neil, who founded his studio, Bonsai Mirai, outside Portland, Ore., in 2010 after a six-year apprenticeship at Kimura’s garden in the Saitama prefecture, home to Japan’s most venerated bonsai nurseries. Neil, 39, combines his teacher’s formal daring with Naka’s open, idealistic approach, sculpting Rocky Mountain

junipers into pale white streamers or rugged bursts of deadwood reaching out from plumes of foliage. These trees, he says, “allow people to see their place in the native environment.”

On Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, Marija Hajdic, 45, celebrates seasonal transformation with wild plum trees that blister with pale pink blossoms in the spring, and deciduous hornbeams that drop their leaves each winter to reveal branches that seem to claw at the air. Like Neil, Hajdic works principally with foraged trees — known as yamadori in Japan — often gathering ones that are dynamic and wild rather than calming or geometric. “When I go to nature, I want my heart to start pounding,” she says.

In Japan, where classical bonsai still predominates and young people view the craft primarily as a hobby for the elderly and the rich, the 40-year-old artist Masashi Hirao, based in Saitama, has turned public demonstrations in which he plants, prunes and wires his trees for live audiences — a common source of income for bonsai professionals — into performance art, complete with live music, a practice that traditionalists have denounced as antithetical to bonsai’s meditative intent. In his displays for retail spaces and fashion shows, Hirao has suspended wispy junipers in tiered ceramics and trained variegated landscapes over precarious stacks of stone. “The trees themselves are not about self-expression. I’m a servant to the tree,” he says. “The way I put the trees together is how I express myself.”

Then there are Filipino artists, like Bernabe Millares, who work with the mangroves that fringe their archipelagic homeland, while their counterparts in Brazil, like Mário A G Leal, work with fruiting pitanga trees from their country’s tropical coast and gnarled calliandras from the northeastern bush. In China, WeChat groups dedicated to penjing have proliferated, introducing species and styles from regions that previously had no formal tradition, while a new generation of oligarchs has spent small fortunes collecting penjing, sometimes investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single plant. The venerable Seikouen nursery in Saitama teaches hobbyists to make playful, accessible bonsai using inexpensive materials — similar to the “pop bonsai” described by the author Lisa Tajima in her 2004 book of the same name — while the increased exportation of classic species, says Kawasaki, the Kyoto-based scholar, has led young artists to experiment with nontraditional plants like gajumaru, a banyan from the island of Okinawa, in the south, that is rarely used by older masters.

For enthusiasts who have taken to bonsai during the Covid-19 pandemic — Bonsai Mirai saw a 27 percent increase in registrations for online classes from March through May of 2020 alone — the art form has become a ready metaphor for days spent in confinement and has offered solace from the monotony of modern life, much as it did for its early practitioners. In a world shadowed by death, it proved that life would carry

on, even under difficult circumstances. “When I look at a tree, my troubles are gone,” Kawasaki says. “Humans worry. The tree keeps growing.”

Source: The New York Times

The Beauty of Bonsai: How Artistic Potential Inspired a Lifetime of Bonsai Appreciation

Sketches courtesy of Mary Ellen Carsley

Bonsai has great artistic potential both as an art form itself, and as an inspiration to other artists. Artist and teacher Mary Ellen Carsley exemplifies this potential by developing a thoughtful connection between bonsai and her artistic practice. A life-long visitor of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum, she has frequented the Museum since its inception in 1976. She maintains this bond by engaging with bonsai to cultivate mindful artistic experiences both for herself and her students.

The National Bonsai Foundation spoke with Carsley about her connection to the Museum and how her appreciation for bonsai is exemplified through her career.

Carsley sets the example for individuals seeking to pursue their passions. A trained architect, she left her own practice to begin a career as an artist and teacher. Carsley illustrated eight books before taking on a job as a full-time educator. She now shares her appreciation of bonsai, penjing and Asian art with her students at Severn School, where she remains a practicing artist.

Carsley fully embraces the opportunity to use artistic expression to stimulate cross cultural experience and personal reflection. 

“In the Western world, we're going really fast all the time, and there are some aspects, particularly in Asian techniques, for drawing, painting and printmaking, as well as calligraphy, that slow people down and make them more introspective about themselves and their process,” she said.

She and other instructors at her school began bringing students to the Museum’s collections to paint images of the trees and write poetry on the bonsai of their choice. After conducting the program for six years, Carsley and her students were interrupted following the Museum’s closure during the pandemic. She has since returned to bringing more of her students to experience the natural artistic beauty inherent in the Museum's collections.

“I really love making that hand-eye-mind-heart connection through the art for the students to give them that quiet, safe place, and time to contemplate and be in nature,” Carsley said.

While the museum remained closed, Carsley felt the absence of the place she had connected to nature and sought respite in since childhood. She frequently checked on the Museum's reopening status in anticipation of her return, not only to enjoy the reflective atmosphere of the collections but also to continue her work illustrating the bonsai.

“I was so starved for bonsai during the pandemic, I actually started my own collection,” Carsley said. 

Beginning with a tree gifted by a student, Carsley and her husband, Perry Carsley, now maintain a small collection in their home. She began her bonsai practice in isolation, studying bonsai books and making the insightful connection between creating conventional two-dimensional art and cultivating bonsai.

Photo courtesy of Perry Carsley

“As an art teacher, we teach using the elements of art and the principles of design,” said Carsley. “As I was reading these books, they actually used almost the exact same elements and principles in bonsai as I do when I teach drawing and painting. The whole artistic mindset is there, but the actual material of the art is alive and that's really fascinating.”

Carsley’s upcoming project involves tracing the progression of trees at the Museum that inspire her through the changing seasons (keep an eye out for her future works to find out which bonsai will be featured). Her artistic depictions of bonsai reflect a deep appreciation for shape and form, as well as Asian culture, with a skill she refined throughout her lifetime.

“When I'm thinking about my trees, my attitude towards them considers not what I wanted them to be but how to encourage them to be their best selves,” said Carsley. “There is something to be said for how you approach bonsai and teaching because your investment doesn't come right back to you right away. You hope to help both the students and bonsai grow into their authentic selves.”

You can enjoy more of Mary Ellen Carsley’s portfolio of work on her website www.maryellencarsley.com.