Bonsai

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Over the years we have visited various museums — I have mentioned the museum in Chicago that, I think, really captured the attention of our daughters. Sometime on one of our trips to the LA area we visited the LA county museum. Mostly what I remember about that visit were the dinosaur bones, I guess from various places and bones and reconstructions of animals found in the La Brea tar pits (I think we have also visited that site in reality).

There was however on the same visit a show of bonsai trees and it was this exhibit that started my interest in this subject which has continued ever since, though without notable success. Subsequently Jean gave me the first tree of this sort I ever had, a Catlin elm. She bought it someplace in the East Bay.

While we were in El Cerrito I also added to my collection of deodar and a Japanese maple. These plus a few others made the trip to Houston, but the Catlin elm didn’t survive. The deodar and the Japanese maple came to Oregon but one year my collection virtually all died, for what reason I’m not sure, though I may have fertilized them too much or incorrectly. Never despairing, I have a new assemblage but more of the trees are very old.

Twice when we have been in Washington, D.C., we have visited the bonsai exhibit there — the first time we were taken there by Roy and Beverly Milton (1977) and the second time Dave and Palma took us there on our most recent visit (1991). Both times I have been entranced by the trees in the exhibit, particularly those sent from Japan to the U.S. at the time of the bicentennial.

When we were at the exhibit the first time the trees from Japan had been in this country only a relatively short time. Most of them were on display but one or two were still recovering from the transfer from Japan to the U.S. The regulation was that no soil could be brought in which meant that the soil in which they had grown for a long time had to be removed and the trees shipped “bare-root.” Doubtless this was hard on some of these old trees and some took awhile to recover.