NBF Welcomes Jim Hughes as Incoming Chair

Jim Hughes

The National Bonsai Foundation is pleased to announce Jim Hughes as our new Chair of the Board. 

Hughes oversaw the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum as curator from 2005 to 2008. He has served as an NBF board member since 2009 – briefly holding the treasurer position – and is a member of many other bonsai groups, including the Minnesota Bonsai Society, Brookside Bonsai Society and the Potomac Bonsai Association.

He has contributed greatly to the Museum in the past, leading the fundraising efforts for the renovation of the Japanese Pavilion, taking care of our prized collections, holding bonsai demonstrations and writing articles for our former communication outlet: the NBF Bulletin. Hughes has also represented NBF on the Friends of the National Arboretum (FONA) board for three years.

Hughes was born in Minnesota and graduated from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota with an undergraduate degree in English and a minor in education. He taught for 10 years at various high schools in the Minneapolis suburbs before returning to school to study computer programming.

Hughes first came to Washington, D.C. in 1996 and soon became a volunteer at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. In 2002, he was chosen for the assistant curator position working under Jack Sustic, leading him to assume the curator position three years later.

 Hughes was a key member of the planning committee for the symposium on The Art of Chinese Penjing sponsored by the U.S. National Arboretum and NBF. He studied rock and tree penjing and the origins of bonsai at the Shanghai Botanical Garden.

NBF welcomes Hughes as the new head of the Foundation and looks forward to many years of collaboration and support for the Museum with the U.S. National Arboretum and the collections of beautiful bonsai and penjing.

WE INVITE YOU TO COMMENT BELOW TO WELCOME JIM!

NBF Co-Presidents to Step Down After Two Years of Joint Leadership

As of August 20, Jack Sustic and Felix Laughlin will be leaving their roles as co-presidents of the National Bonsai Foundation.

Jack Sustic

Felix Laughlin

Laughlin has been an inspiring and dedicated member of the bonsai community. He was one of six founders who formed NBF in 1982 and became president in 1996, with Sustic joining as co-president in 2018.

Since NBF’s founding, the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum at the U.S. National Arboretum has become a world-renowned center for the art of bonsai, penjing and related art forms. During that period, the Museum has expanded from a single pavilion displaying the 53 bonsai given in 1976 to the American people by Japan as Bicentennial Gift to include multiple pavilions, exhibition buildings and courtyards presenting North American bonsai, Chinese penjing, tropical bonsai, and viewing stones.

Sustic began his bonsai career as a Museum intern in 1996. He then served as curator twice – from 2001 to 2005 and 2008 to 2016 – and has served on the NBF Board of Directors for 19 years. Sustic has spent many long hours caring for some of the most prized parts of our collections, including the Yamaki pine. 

 As co-presidents, Sustic and Laughlin have led many projects and improvements to both the Museum and NBF operations. Under their supervision, the Museum was voted “Best Place To Take An Out-Of-Towner” and “Best Museum Off The National Mall” in multiple Washington City Paper Best of D.C. polls.

 The pair have both demonstrated their personal commitment to the spread of bonsai appreciation through their various leadership positions in national and global organizations, like the World Bonsai Friendship Federation and WBFF’s North American regional representative organization, the North American Bonsai Federation.

Laughlin served as chairman of the World Bonsai Friendship Federation from 2001 to 2005, and organized the 5th World Bonsai Convention held in Washington, D.C. in 2005. Sustic served as the chairman of that successful World Bonsai Convention. Sustic is currently serving as the North American Bonsai Federation president and a WBFF director.

Sustic and Laughlin have been driving forces of peace and friendship who amplify the voices of bonsai novices and artists around the world and helped pave the way for bonsai care and appreciation for years to come. NBF is incredibly grateful for the co-presidents’ leadership and dedication to the Museum and the art of bonsai.

Through their combined work in the bonsai world, Sustic and Laughlin have instilled a lasting legacy of goodwill and love for bonsai. NBF wishes the two the best in their endeavors and thanks them for being an asset in the world of bonsai.

Learn more about NBF’s new leadership here.

WE INVITE YOU TO LEAVE A MESSAGE ABOUT FELIX AND/OR JACK BELOW!

Bonsai Around the World: The North Carolina Arboretum Bonsai Exhibition Garden

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

Museum Curators: Robert Drechsler

Bob Drechsler, as curator of the bonsai collection, poses in 1987 for a picture in front of the juniper bonsai that inspired the design of the National Bonsai Foundation logo.

Welcome to our special blog series profiling the wonderful curators who have led us since the inception of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum! Our first edition highlights the very first person to oversee the care of the Museum’s collections: Robert Drechsler. 

Drechsler began working at the U.S. National Arboretum in 1959 as a plant technician under Dr. Don Egolf. When Arboretum officials started planning a special celebration for the United States’ bicentennial that involved bonsai, Drechsler took a class at the Potomac Bonsai Association to become familiar with the art. 

He said the Arboretum originally asked someone else to take care of the incoming trees, but the person ended up not wanting the job. A government shutdown at the time meant nobody new could be hired to positions at federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which the curator role falls under.

Drechsler was already an Arboretum employee, so Director Dr. John Creech agreed he could serve as the first curator. But just because Drechsler hadn’t previously worked on bonsai didn’t mean he wasn’t prepared to take on his new role. 

“Trimming bonsai is an artistic form, and I had done flower arranging and such as a florist to work my way through college, so I had some idea of the artwork,” he said. “Plus, I had 17 years of work raising, trimming and caring for plants at the Arboretum.” 

Drechsler worked diligently to learn about bonsai, even spending six weeks training in Japan in 1977. He said Ruth Lamanna, a prominent member of the bonsai community, was especially helpful in developing his bonsai education. 

Drechsler helps unpack the newly-arrived crates of Japanese bonsai at the quarantine station in Glenn Dale, MD in April 1975.

Drechsler helped the two ladies care for the bonsai quarantined in Maryland, which used to house the U.S. plant introduction station. He worked on both the Japanese collection – the trees that started the Museum collections – and the trees U.S. President Richard Nixon brought back from his trip to China in the 1970s. 

Bonsai Master John Naka often stopped by to suggest bonsai care tips, like how to preserve deadwood on bonsai and penjing. 

“I took the ladies’ recommendations, and I gained more and more knowledge about the care of the plants, like repotting and soil techniques,” Drechsler said. “It was a learning experience I gained as the curator, rather than being knowledgeable about bonsai before the collection came.”

Former Arboretum Director John Creech speaks at the dedication ceremony for the Japanese Bonsai collection on July 9, 1976. Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, is seated in the middle/right spot. Drechsler said this was one of the most memorable and impressive moments in his curatorship.

Drechsler said the best part of serving as curator was his ability to transform a group of unassuming plants into well-trimmed bonsai to present to the public. He said the ability and cooperation of volunteers was essential in maintaining excellent and appealing bonsai. 

Drechsler added that he loved to see groups that entered the Museum chatting loudly instantly quiet down in awe after setting their sights on the bonsai and penjing collections.

“Young kids would come in with their teachers, and they were thrilled that these ancient plants were that old,” he said.

Drechsler retired in 1996, after nearly 21 years of service to the Museum as the very first curator. He said he wanted to dedicate his free time entirely to leading the local masonic chapter. 

He occasionally volunteered at the Museum until a 2015 heart operation put him out of commission for volunteering. Drechsler has since focused his time on leading and partaking in the freemasonry fraternity.

LEFT: Drechsler hand-pollinates hibiscus in the Arboretum’s research greenhouse in 1964 when he worked as a research technician. RIGHT: Drechsler trimming a bald-cypress in the Yoshimura workroom in 2007 as a weekly volunteer.

“Bonsai brought the joy of working in an art form and the opportunity to enjoy an activity I’d like to do, but I was also paid for it, so I could make my living and have a retirement,” he said.

NBF honors Drechsler each year by funding the First Curator’s Apprentice program, which the Foundation created in 2011 to celebrate the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum’s 35th anniversary and to pay homage to Drechsler’s legacy as the original curator. Our 2019 apprentice Andy Bello now serves as the Museum’s assistant curator, and our 2020 apprentice is Sophia Osorio. 

“They knew I didn’t like my name on things, that I didn’t want it to be the ‘Robert Drechsler Apprenticeship,’” Drechsler said. “They did it as a nice gesture and a sort of thank you.”

NBF is grateful to Drechsler for taking the helm of the Museum and his incredible support of the bonsai community since. Our next profile will highlight his successor, Warren Hill, who oversaw the collection for the following five years. 

Bonsai Donors & Their Trees: Haruo “Papa” Kaneshiro

Kaneshiro works on a juniper group planting on a volcanic slab in Seattle, July 1984. Photo: ABS Bonsai Journal

When Jane Nakama reflects on the momentous legacy her father Haruo “Papa” Kaneshiro left behind, she most fondly remembers the people she met during his impressive life as a bonsai master.

Whether she traveled alongside her father to another part of the world or helped her parents entertain fellow bonsai lovers, including those who started as strangers, Nakama met wonderful artists from Europe, Australia and Asia and beyond.

“The bonsai community is filled with just above-and-beyond good people, and I totally appreciate that connection with people even today, 25, 30 years after dad’s passing,” she said. “It’s mind boggling to think all that connecting happened by word of mouth. It’s just amazing what bonsai brought to their lives.”

Christened “Papa” by the bonsai community for his father-like persona, Kaneshiro is touted for his unselfish and inclusive teaching and lifestyle. Kaneshiro was one of the founding members of the North American Bonsai Federation, a branch of the World Bonsai Friendship Federation.

But Nakama said her father didn’t truly develop his bonsai artistry until his mid-40s. In fact, Kaneshiro spent much of his early life working in restaurants and retired in his early 50s.

He met his wife, Masako, while working for her older brother who ran a fine dining and dancing restaurant. Nakama said her father had been waiting tables at elegant hotels in Hawaii, but he decided to open his own restaurant where his wife ran the front and waited tables as he baked pies and made soups from scratch with a wood-burning stove. 

“He’d purchase these logs, place them in the back of the restaurant and his friends would come over and chop them to fit the oven,” she said. 

Nakama said Kaneshiro’s interest in bonsai first sprouted when he was younger and traveled every so often to visit a friend who had bonsai in their backyard. But he really explored his passion for the art after he retired from being a restaurant owner and started subbing as a manager at an upscale restaurant when the current manager would go on vacation.

The six Kaneshiro siblings and their mother Masako at dinner to celebrate the dedication of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum’s Haruo Kaneshiro Tropical Conservatory in 1993. Photo from Jane Nakama.

Kaneshiro’s Teaching Style

Nakama noted that there was an absence of organized classes or demonstrations when Kaneshiro was learning and first teaching the art of bonsai, so he had to order textbooks from Japan. 

“He was really self taught through experience,” she said. 

But her father’s influence as a master did not hinge on rigid teaching plans of bonsai rituals and traditions as an exact science with strict styling rules. Papa Kaneshiro believed that, just as every person is different, every plant is different; therefore bonsai should be each person’s own expression of how they think a tree should look in nature. 

“He shared a lot of this philosophy, too, so I think that’s why bonsai flourished in Hawaii,” Nakama said. “He tried to emulate nature in its most natural forms. He always said, ‘The plant will tell you how it wants to grow – you just guide it.’” 

After Kaneshiro passed, his widow Masako donated many plants to the National Bonsai Foundation, and an auction on the family’s property raised more than $10,000 to fund the creation of the Haruo Kaneshiro Tropical Conservancy at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. 

“I’m very grateful that Mom and Dad were into bonsai as much as they were,” she said. “It was more than a shared hobby – the people we met were just incredible and changed their lives forever.”

One of Papa’s trees at our Museum: a Chinese Banyan. Read more about the bonsai in our Historical Tree Spotlight.

Working Under Papa Kaneshiro

David Fukumoto, the owner of Fuku-Bonsai Cultural Center in Hawaii, said he was lucky to have Papa Kaneshiro as both a friend and a mentor who defended his amateur bonsai efforts. 

Fukumoto said Kaneshiro understood the differences between the horticultural and ethnic cultural principles that dominate "traditional Japanese bonsai" as well as the greater Hawaiian multi-cultural values and tropical trees.

“He was a gentle non-conformist who politely praised everyone's bonsai efforts and did not try to impose his values on anyone,” Fukumoto said. “Because of him, Hawaii bonsai is family oriented and the friendships are probably more significant.”

Many bonsai teachers who came to Hawaii taught training techniques like cutting off aerial roots, creating  single trunk and training flat branch tiers to adhere to bonsai “rules” codified in the 1950s. Papa Kaneshiro trained his black pines in this manner, but he trained his other bonsai with “natural style,” Fukumoto said.  

When Japanese bonsai artists were given opportunities to teach bonsai in Hawaii, they tended to train ficus banyan bonsai by cutting off aerial roots, creating only a single trunk, and training flatten tiers of branches.  

“He encouraged each of us to follow natural tree structure, to be creative and create beautiful potted plants,” Fukumoto said. “Although bonsai was a large part of their lives, the Kaneshiro’s generous and thoughtful hospitality was legendary.”

The Kaneshiro family and bonsai community after the auction of Papa’s trees, the proceeds of which went to the U.S. National Arboretum. Photo from Jane Nakama.

Bonsai Around the World: The National Bonsai & Penjing Collection in Canberra, Australia

The national collection on display in Canberra, Australia. Photos courtesy of Leigh Taafe.

For our next Bonsai Around the World blog, we’re taking you to the land down under. 

The National Bonsai & Penjing Collection of Australia is home to 120 bonsai, an amalgamation of donations and loans that have been trained and grown 100 percent by Australian artists. We spoke with Curator Leigh Taafe about his personal connection with bonsai and the development of the bonsai collection in Australia’s capital, Canberra. 

Taafe said his journey from a bonsai hobbyist to the top position at the collection kicked off after he watched the original Karate Kid film, which uses bonsai as an archetype for the inner peace and symbol of what karate should be. He opened a commercial bonsai nursery in 2000, running classes and workshops and renting out bonsai to local offices and restaurants for about 13 years. 

The main influence on Taafe’s bonsai styling comes from Harry Tomlinson’s Complete Book of Bonsai, which was his sole source of inspiration and information before the internet became a prevalent bonsai resource.

“Once I became a professional I learned to just focus on what I was doing rather than anyone else,” he said. “I am a gatherer of information, but outside of maintenance and techniques, I tried to create my own style.”

Taafe, right, working with Assistant Curator Sam Thompson, left.

In 2010, Taafe officially joined as an assistant curator for three years then rose to the curator position. While the collection technically opened to the public in September 2008, the trees were located on a premise separate from its current location, which was established in 2013 at the National Arboretum in Canberra. 

“We started from the ground up,” Taafe said. “We started collecting trees in 2007 for the purpose of a national collection – it wasn’t a collection to begin with.” 

The arboretum, which was constructed as a monument to the people and homes lost in brush fires that decimated miles of land in the early 2000s, contains approximately 100 forests as well as gardens, playgrounds and a visitor center. The bonsai display area features about 70 trees ready for show but also a small area for trees undergoing various maintenance stages. 

Trees that need to keep warm in the winter, like bougainvillea, are stored in glass with heaters to prevent subzero temperatures at night. Taafe said Canberra temperatures can reach minus 8 degrees Celsius (or about 17 degrees Fahrenheit).

LEFT: A smooth-barked apple (gum tree) native to Australia and nearby islands that dates back to 1959.

RIGHT: The box leaf privet, dating back to 1880.

The displays in the National Bonsai & Penjing Collection are arranged simply in an aesthetic and appealing manner, not limiting trees to areas for specific artists or regions. Every tree has been styled and grown by Australian artists, as Australia imposes strict quarantine requirements for imported goods. 

“From the outset we decided the collection was going to be a representation of the art of bonsai in Australia,” Taafe said. 

A loans program, through which the collection harbors trees from artists around the country for periods of up to two years at a time, keeps the wider Australian bonsai community involved and provides for “a dynamic, ever-changing arrangement of bonsai and penjing,” he said. Occasionally, artists from different countries will stop by for demonstrations and events, but the collection doesn’t contain any trees that artists visiting Australia have styled from raw materials. 

The oldest tree in the collection, which dates back to 1880, spent approximately 100 years growing in a hedge, and the youngest tree is only about 18 years old. The oldest non-living display at the collection is a petrified wood stump that is 165 million years old. 

Assistant Curator Sam Thompson extensively trained in Japan. Taafe said he performs great work on older trees.

Taafe said Australian bonsai artists tend to be influenced by their surrounding landscape, particularly when styling native species. But their techniques are also molded by Japanese and European artists. 

“Some of our early learnings date back to the 70s, when the likes of John Naka came for workshops and such, so we do have that Japanese influence,” Taafe said. “But when I look at my collection, it’s not overly stylized. It’s quite a natural appearance.”

He added that the collection is a partnership between the Australian bonsai community and the ACT government. Approximately 60 volunteers put in about 140 hours of work each week to ensure the collection is up to par for the 175,000 visitors the collection receives each year. 

Taafe said his relationship with bonsai has changed over the years, from a fascination with the art of creating miniature trees to the commercial route, which was a means to provide for his family. He’s the only one in his family that really got involved with bonsai – the interest was not passed down throughout generations.

But when he became curator of the Australian national collection, his focus shifted to making the art readily available to everyone. 

“I just wanted to share bonsai, not only what we have here on display but also the knowledge,” he said. “Hopefully I’m sparking an interest in other people who might get involved in bonsai.” 

LEFT: A penjing styled the Lingnan way starting in 1994, representing a mythical dragon.

RIGHT: Petrified wood stump more than 165 million years old.

Influential Bonsai Masters: Yuji Yoshimura

All photo credit: Bill Valavanis

Summer 2020 is officially the summer of the bonsai blog series! We’re launching another string of blogs to highlight the fascinating history and teachings of some of the most influential bonsai masters. For our first edition, we spoke with Bill Valavanis, a National Bonsai Foundation director and bonsai artist, about his time training under Yuji Yoshimura.

Valavanis dubs Yoshimura his “Japanese father” from whom he learned on the weekends while studying horticulture during college in the 1960s. He said Yoshimura felt like a god to him when they first met, as Yoshimura’s book The Japanese Art of Miniature Trees and Landscapes – later reprinted as The Art of Bonsai: Creation, Care and Enjoyment – is considered a “bonsai bible.” The book is the first authoritative source for bonsai artists written in English.

Yoshimura began his bonsai work under his father’s tutelage. He and Alfred Koehn, a notable authority on Japanese art, organized and produced the first beginner’s bonsai course at Yoshimura’s family nursery in Tokyo in 1952. 

The first bonsai instructional class in 1952.

Yoshimura’s father, who rekindled the craft of classical bonsai, was the most influential person in his bonsai career. Valavanis said Yoshimura’s family remained anchored in Japan, but he wanted to spread the art of bonsai around the world. He traveled to Australia, Hong Kong, England and across the United States, where he and his family lived for many years.

But Yoshimura sacrificed the stability of his relationships when he left home. One of his younger brothers took over his garden after he left, Yoshimura’s wife and one daughter eventually moved back to Tokyo and Yuji was highly criticized in Japan for teaching the “Yanks” in America – but Yoshimura loved the United States. 

“He found Americans very friendly,” he said. “He went through a lot of students but he would take care of them, tell them extra things, treat them nicely and encourage them.” 

Yoshimura’s daughters and granddaughter with the U.S. National Arboretum director.

Yoshimura took Valavanis to Japan to meet other influential bonsai figures. Upon returning to the United States, Valavanis lived with him for almost a year to study the classical Japanese style of bonsai. He said Yoshimura would personally demonstrate wiring or care techniques, unlike many current apprentices learning bonsai in Japan, who are often left to grasp concepts by themselves. 

“He taught me the basics and introduced me to the Japanese fine quality classic bonsai,” Valavanis said. “He showed me where I can improve, get more information and how to study.”

Former U.S. National Arboretum director John Creech and Yoshimura in 1973.

Yoshimura relied on old, historic books – some of which he took from his father in Japan – for bonsai knowledge and left Valavanis his library when he retired. He is known for his strict teaching style, adhering to traditional Japanese designs – his father’s influence – and curt lessons. 

“Once when I was cleaning the kitchen floor, I put back our two chairs and went out to do something, but my chair was missing when I came back,” Valavanis said. “I put it back two or three times, but finally I got the hint time for me to leave.”

Yoshimura attending a bonsai convention.

Even after the two parted as roommates, Yoshimura routinely visited Valavanis’ garden, helped him establish a bonsai magazine and remained a teacher and friend until he died in 1997. 

Valavanis said the most important takeaway from Yoshimura’s teachings is to do what he thinks is right and avoid too much influence from other artists. He took that advice with him to start the first American bonsai exhibition, the highest level show in the United States, which is now in its seventh year. 

“He told me to stand on his head or shoulders to take the art higher,” Valavanis said. “He wanted me to use what he had and go improve.”

For more on Yuji Yoshimura, you can head to Valavanis’ blog posts here and here. If you have any personal stories or memories with Yoshimura, tag us in them on social media: Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Historical Tree Spotlight: The Mixed Forest

The forest planting as it stands in the Museum today.

Uncertain times provide many reasons to look toward nature for calm and healing. Myriad research has pointed to how natural environments, especially trees, can benefit our health and overall well-being. 

But as this month's Historical Tree Spotlight shows, nature also provides the inarguable fact that diversity is not just important but fundamentally essential to life. This month’s focus is an unorthodox forest planting, often referred to as “The Mixed Forest,” located in the Japanese Pavilion. 

Donated by Nobusuke Kishi, a former prime minister of Japan, this planting has been in training since 1935 and is part of the group of trees that established the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum’s collection in 1976.

The planting consists of various tree species – including hornbeams, Japanese white pines and Japanese beeches – collected as seedlings from Mount Fuji and Mount Ishizuchi in Japan. Museum Curator Michael James said plantings of multiple species are rare because the grower has to incorporate all of the individual care needed for each species, instead of providing the same care to the whole pot. 

But James said mixed plantings are actually a better representation of the natural world – forests aren’t monocultures but complex systems home to copious varieties of plants and organisms.

He added that even though the planting is home to different species, each tree has the same needs: air, water and nutrients. 

“We care for these forests in a way that accommodates the different needs of each species and allow them to all be healthy in the same environment,” James said. 

The planting featured in a 1975 publication.

Helping a Mixed Forest Thrive 

Tending to each tree’s growing requirements is somewhat of a balancing act. James said the pot contains two soil types in separate areas to cater to the different species’ watering needs. 

The middle of the pot, where the pines are planted, is filled with a mixture high in pumice, which helps the soil dry out faster as pines tend to thrive in drier soils. The pines are situated on the top of a small slope, which allows the soil to drain more easily, James said.

But the beeches and hornbeams – deciduous trees – require a bit more water than pines, so the trees are planted in a wetter mixture. James said Museum staff mainly water around the edges of the pot, where the deciduous roots are concentrated, to help control the wet and dry areas.

 Learn more about different soil and fertilization techniques in our Bonsai Basics blog. 

James added that pruning care also differs among species. The white pines are single-flush trees and require branch shortening without losing any candles, or new growths. 

“We also pluck needles to balance the strength of the pines,” James said. 

But the apices and higher branches of deciduous trees have to be pinched and frequently pruned to allow sunlight to filter through to lower branches. 

“They’re all competing for a limited amount of resources like sun, nutrients and water,” James said. “Without that thinning process, the lower branches end up getting weak and less dominant trees will die.”

A picture of the forest planting taken in 1977.

Benefits of Mixed Plantings

James said this planting is exemplary of the many benefits to diversity, both in naturally occurring forests and in human society, as each part of the small ecosystem contains instances of mutualistic relationships.

“This forest has a lot of symbolic meaning right now and is a good metaphor for the importance of diversity not only in plants but in people,” he said. 

 Mycorrhizal fungi, found in the root systems of plants, facilitate plants’ water and nutrient absorption. Plants in return funnel down carbohydrates formed during photosynthesis. 

James said the fungal web also serves as a method of chemical communication between plants, creating a bond throughout plantings or forests. 

“If one plant is attacked by an insect, plants on the other side of a forest through that fungal connection can tell that the plant’s being attacked and can produce chemicals to protect against the attack before the insect gets to it,” he said. 

James added that upper canopy trees also use the mycorrhizal network to provide carbs and nutrients to trees below that are deprived from sunlight and sugars. Additionally, the pines stretch toward the sun, giving needed shade to the deciduous trees – analogous to a natural forest. 

“The different species, fungal organisms and animals all benefit from diversity,” James said. 

Bonsai Teaches Us Respect for All Life

Dear Friends of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum,

In this time of global pandemic and awakening to end racial injustice, we look forward to the reopening of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum so again we all can walk among the majestic and inspiring bonsai and penjing waiting for us there.

Our hearts are heavy for those hurting around the nation and the world, and we hope that you and your family are safe and healthy. We give thanks for those bonsai masters like John Naka, Yuji Yoshimura and Saburo Kato who were instrumental in creating the Museum and taught us the true meaning of bonsai. As Saburo Kato once said:

“From bonsai we receive peace of mind, health, and a life’s pursuit. We can also learn generosity, patience and even philosophy about life. We have also had the good fortune to make friends of all nationalities and races with whom we share a mutual trust and respect. This is all thanks to bonsai.”

The core values of bonsai, which we strive to uphold at the National Bonsai Foundation, are rooted in promoting and fostering world peace and respect for all life. Together we can take comfort in the art of bonsai to encourage inclusivity, empathy and peace throughout the world.

In Solidarity,

Felix Laughlin and Jack Sustic
NBF Co-Presidents

Bonsai Around the World: The Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego, California

The Inamori Pavilion at The Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego. Photo credit: Dominic Nepomuceno

Museums might be closed and traveling restrictions are still in effect, but that won’t keep us from sharing the art of bonsai. Welcome to our new blog series, “Bonsai Around the World,” where we highlight different collections around the globe. 

For our first in this new series, we talked with Neil Auwarter, the bonsai curator at the Japanese Friendship Garden since 2018, about the collection he oversees in San Diego.

A lawyer by profession, Auwarter’s love for bonsai began in about 2008 after he helped his daughter take care of a bonsai he gave her as a birthday present. He said he relied on online instructionals from bonsai artists like Graham Potter and Bjorn Bjorholm until he discovered local bonsai outlets and organizations, like the San Diego Bonsai Club.

Auwarter took a volunteer position at the bonsai pavilion in what used to be known as the San Diego Wild Animal Park (aka Safari Park), which houses one of the club’s bonsai collections. He was soon promoted to oversee the club’s collection at the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park. 

A stream at The Japanese Friendship Garden. Photo credit: Dominic Nepomuceno

First opened in 1991, the Japanese Friendship Garden is a nonprofit that participates in the same Sister City program as the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. Its sister city is Yokohama, Japan. 

Auwarter said the garden originally just put a few bonsai out for show on an indoor tokonoma and maintained a separate growing area for the trees they were grooming for the display. But about 15 years ago the growing area became its own attraction, and staff began crafting a traditional three-scene Japanese garden to show off the bonsai. 

Auwarter said the garden and bonsai collection now receive about 200,000 visitors a year. 

A pomegranate in the collection at The Japanese Friendship Garden. Photo credit: Dominic Nepomuceno

A few standout trees

The Japanese Friendship Garden scenes reflect the features of and species grown in San Diego’s Mediterannean-like climate, including a stream, two koi ponds, a water feature and a new pavilion.

“It’s a very elaborate and beautiful Japanese garden,” Auwarter said. 

The most recent bonsai donation is an old, twisted pomegranate from Bruce and Yaeko Hisayasu, very active members in the bonsai community. One of Auwarter’s favorite trees in the collection is a 200-year-old California juniper donated by Sherwin Amimoto. 

“I love the fact that it’s a California native,” Auwarter said. 

Auwarter working on a California juniper donated by Sherwin Animoto at home.

The garden also boasts a femina juniper forest bonsai composition, similar to the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum’s famous Goshin. Auwarter said Larry Ragle, who studied under Goshin’s creator, John Naka, worked on the arrangement at a two-day festival at Disneyland, then donated the display to the garden.  

“It’s a beautiful composition,” he said. “It’s massive, very well done and so reminiscent of Goshin. The influence of John Naka makes the display special to me.”

While the Japanese Friendship Garden is not currently open to the public because of the COVID-19 pandemic, staff members are evaluating how to safely return to operations. Keep an eye out on their website for announcements, and if you’re ever in Southern California, be sure to stop by!