Save the Date: World Bonsai Day - May 8, 2021

Join our celebration!

May 8, 2021

Bonsai is an opportunity to separate from the anxieties of the world – a chance for bonsai artists or those admiring trees to pause, collect and practice mindfulness.

In many ways, we have been operating with this same mentality throughout the global pandemic. This extra time has given us the space to reflect on what truly matters, engage with nature and reconnect with people in new ways.

To maintain the health and safety of National Bonsai & Penjing Museum staff and visitors, the National Bonsai Foundation will be celebrating World Bonsai Day 2021 online again this year. Read on for details about the festivities!

What is World Bonsai Day?

The World Bonsai Friendship Federation established this international day of celebration to pay homage to bonsai Master Saburo Kato's mission to promote peace and friendship through the art of bonsai. The day is celebrated on the second Saturday of May each year, which this year is May 8th!

NBF's online celebration

On World Bonsai Day, head to bonsai-nbf.org for tons of activities, videos and gifts! Here's a sneak peek of what we have in store:

- World Bonsai Day trivia

- Greetings & garden tours from bonsai collections around the world

- An at-home World Bonsai Day scavenger hunt

- Bonsai & floral origami lessons

- Zoom backgrounds & phone wallpapers featuring gorgeous scenes from the Museum

- Delicious food & drink recipes

We'll also share social media posts with #WorldBonsaiDay2021, so start posting now!

Enter our contest to win this bonsai book!

We're gifting THREE signed copies of Ann McClellan's Bonsai and Penjing book to help people connect with bonsai and the Museum and celebrate World Bonsai Day! For details on how to enter, read our post on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.

Remembering Barbara Hall Marshall

Photo courtesy of Hallmark

The National Bonsai Foundation (NBF) is saddened to announce the passing of one of its most steadfast supporters, Barbara Hall Marshall. Mrs. Marshall died April 21, 2021, in Kansas City, Mo., at age 97.

A lifelong philanthropist, Mrs. Marshall had a keen interest in the small and precise that led her to grow bonsai and become a founding member of the Bonsai Society of Greater Kansas City. She later joined NBF and served on the NBF Board of Directors for many years, eventually being appointed Honorary Director in 1998. 

Mrs. Marshall was a most generous benefactor to NBF and the National Bonsai & Penjang Museum at the U.S. National Arboretum. Donations from Mrs. Marshall provided critical marketing, administrative and programmatic support to NBF over the years, including an internship program, an assistant curator position and the establishment of the John Y. Naka North American Pavilion.

“Barbara’s dedication to bonsai and NBF was truly second to none,” said James Hughes, Chair of the Board of Directors. “Her presence is deeply felt throughout NBF and the Museum, and we would not have reached such great prominence nationally and internationally without her support. It has been an honor and a privilege to have her as an important member of the bonsai community.”

Mrs. Marshall (L) attends a reception at the Museum in 2009. Also pictured: Marybel Balendonck (NBF Longstanding Board Member), Harry Hirao and Mr. Hirao’s daughter.

Mrs. Marshall’s love of art and the people who create it formed the basis for her lifetime of supporting arts education. She became a nationally recognized collector of miniatures and in 1982 co-founded the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures, where her personal collection remains on permanent exhibit. She was involved with many other organizations in and around her hometown, including the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City Symphony, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, where she led efforts to construct a research facility in 2018.

The second child of renowned Hallmark Cards founder J.C. Hall and his wife Elizabeth, Mrs. Marshall was involved in the Hallmark Company for more than 50 years. She was a member of the company’s product review committee and later became part of a group charged with making acquisitions for Hallmark’s renowned art collection.

According to her official obituary, Mrs. Marshall attended Bradford Junior College and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1945. She was predeceased by her husband, Robert A. Marshall, and is survived by three daughters, two grandchildren and one great-grandchild, among other family members. 

Like many bonsai and penjing enthusiasts, Mrs. Marshall was fascinated by the grand stories we can capture in miniature form — whether through a fine-scale dollhouse or a small tree in a pot. We will always be in awe of Mrs. Marshall’s dedication to the arts and deeply proud that she chose to share her generosity with NBF. Her influence and passion for bonsai will live on through NBF’s mission and the beautiful trees in the Museum’s national collection. 

Seated: John and Alice Naka. Standing (left to right):  Marybel Balendonck, Kay Komai, Barbara Marshall, and Cheryl Manning. The group gathered at a luncheon organized by the Japanese government to honor Frank Goya (one of John's first students) in March of 2004.

Assistant Curator’s Blog: Collecting Moss and Creating Top Dressing

As bonsai practitioners, we are always thinking about the past, present, and future aspects of our trees and the environments in which they live and grow. We constantly plan and prepare for the next step in the wonderful journey of bonsai and penjing. One preparation that can be completed any time of the year and is extremely important for the repotting process is collecting moss and creating top dressing. 

Bonsai and penjing are commonly grown in small containers with inorganic substrate, or the layer of matter that helps trees grow and obtain nourishment. The substrate National Bonsai & Penjing Museum staff uses consists of the Japanese clay substrate called akadama, pumice, and lava rock, although substrates like tree bark and perlite could be used.

This well-drained substrate retains water to provide to the tree while allowing oxygen to flow through the soil, keeping the containerized tree healthy. To ensure the health of bonsai and penjing, a practitioner must constantly check and carefully manage watering to maintain the delicate balance of oxygen and water.

Moss is cultivated on the substrate surface by applying a layer of top dressing. This dressing is composed of local mosses typically collected from places like parking lots, driveways, or a nearby forest. The mosses may be mixed with high-quality sphagnum moss for larger tree collections. The live and sphagnum mosses are then ground to a smaller size, and soil and fine particles are removed.

All you need to collect moss is a container, a scraping tool and scissors, shown here. 

The ideal moss is tight and low growing. Species that spread and climb will create issues when the moss grows up the trunks. This is especially problematic on rough bark trees, which will need to be sprayed carefully with vinegar to kill and remove the moss.

Once collected, place the moss in trays to dry, allowing for the soil and other fines to easily be sifted when grinding.

After the moss has dried, use bonsai substrate-sifting screens that are one-quarter, one-eighth, and one-sixteenth size. Take the moss and rub against the screens, starting with the one-quarter size. It may not be necessary to grind past the one-eighth size screen, depending on the size of the bonsai substrate, and the one-eighth screen can be used to remove the smaller particles.

The top left image shows the sphagnum moss before and after grinding. The top right image shows the locally collected moss before and after grinding. The bottom image shows both the ground sphagnum moss and the locally collected moss separately, as well as after mixing both together with about a one-to-one ratio.  

Spread a thin layer of topdressing to cover the fresh substrate after repotting is complete. 

Applying top dressing to the surface of bonsai and penjing at the end of the repotting process provides multiple benefits. The moss establishes the aesthetic of the composition, increasing its value. The moss layer also holds moisture in the top portion of the media, which would dry out much faster than the lower portion if left uncovered. The moss layer also helps prevent breakdown and erosion of the substrate in the container. 

Once you collect moss, the empty trays can be filled with soil and a layer of top dressing. This allows you to propagate specific moss varieties and avoid having to collect moss each year from other sources.

As important as moss and top dressing is for bonsai and penjing, you also want to remember to follow and stay within specific guidelines. Although it may seem and sound harmless, it is not always legal to collect moss in every area you find, so be sure to always ask permission and obey trespassing signs if you are collecting!

Sincerely,

Andrew Bello
Assistant Curator

The National Bonsai and Penjing Museum
U.S. National Arboretum

NBF Celebrates National Volunteer Month

Museum volunteers enjoying the snow in 2017

In celebration of National Volunteer Month, the National Bonsai Foundation is paying tribute to the heartfelt, dedicated volunteers who assist the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum’s full-time staff in caring for the timeless and breathtaking trees in the national collection.

NBF is grateful for these volunteers who help make up the heart and soul of the Museum, infusing the spirit of bonsai into everything, from their technical duties to events and meetings that support the Museum.

But who are Museum volunteers, and what do they do? 

Volunteers assist with the maintenance of the Museum's bonsai and penjing collections. Their duties range from cleaning to pruning and wiring trees. Typically, the Museum receives the help of 10 to 15 volunteers annually, and they generally work 4 to 6 hours per week. While some volunteers come and go, others have volunteered for decades and have even been involved with the Museum since its inception. 

Museum Curator Michael James said past years have yielded an average of 2,000 annual volunteer hours. James said each volunteer offers the Museum a unique skill set and personal experiences in horticulture and the art of bonsai. 

“The volunteers are generous enough to give something so valuable as their time,” he said. “The stories they tell are like pages from a horticultural history book.”

Volunteers Janet Lanman and Jim Rieden join Hughes, Museum specialist Kathleen Emerson-Dell and other bonsai club members in a discussion about bonsai. Photos courtesy of Jim Hughes.

Jim Hughes, NBF’s board chair and a former Museum curator, said constantly maintaining the show-ready condition of bonsai for public display is very labor intensive. The volunteers’ many hands help full-time Museum staff make light work of the hundreds of trees within the Museum’s collections.  

“Volunteers help get the job done, week in and week out,” Hughes said. “As curator, I found them to be an invaluable resource that is skilled, dedicated and appreciative of their unique opportunity to work on these storied trees.”

He said some of his closest links to the local bonsai community during his time overseeing the collection from 2005 to 2008 were built around his weekly contact with Museum volunteers, who were bonsai club leaders and steadfast NBF supporters.

Volunteer Tom Inglesby helps Hughes repot the Ponderosa pine in the Museum’s grow out area. 

Hughes added that his role as NBF’s board chair provides him with a heightened awareness of the significant contribution that these volunteers make to the Museum and the U.S. National Arboretum, in lieu of paid staff. 

“Historically, in addition to their time and efforts at the museum, many of them are faithful NBF donors,” he said. “We are thankful to all of them for their hard work at the Museum and their philanthropic support of NBF's mission to promote the art of bonsai and penjing.”

A few of the volunteers Hughes worked with were original founders of the Museum and started their own local bonsai clubs that still thrive today. 

“I am thankful I’ve had the opportunity to personally meet and work with these individuals that established the Museum as a national showcase of this beautiful art form,” he said. “I hope we can do them the honor of continuing to safeguard the legacy we have inherited.” 

The Museum has been closed since mid-March 2020 and hopes to reopen soon, when it is safe for volunteers to return. Their enthusiasm for the national collection, bonsai and the related horticultural and artistic endeavors brings a vibrance to the Museum and NBF, and they have been greatly missed. 

While we have had many volunteers over the years and are grateful for their service and giving, our current list of active volunteers is below.

Jennifer Amundsen

Josh Berer

Ross Campbell

Jack Chapman

Sundara Chintaluri

Young Choe

Scott Clinton

Olivia Cook

Chuck Croft

James Dail

Elizabeth Dame

Robert Drechsler

LeAnn Duling

Matthew Ferner

Pierre Gerber

Brian Gottlieb

Joseph Gutierrez, MD

Richard Hammerschlag

James Haworth

Nia Imani

Tom Inglesby

Richard Kang

David Lieu

Stephanie Mark

Garret Miller

Lee Palmer

Theodore Pickett, Jr.

Julie Pascu

Mike Rainwater

Steve Smith

Akiko Sprague

Lori Sullivan

Janice Vitale

Alexander Voorhies

Richard Winchester

Historical Tree Spotlight: Quince forest planting

The quince forest planting, photo by Stephen Voss 2021

One alluring aspect of bonsai is the ability to recreate an entire forest from a far away place all in a single pot. In this month’s Historical Tree Spotlight, we draw attention to a planting of Chinese quinces (Pseudocydonia sinensis) at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum that does just that. 

Former curator Warren Hill began this arrangement in 1975, growing the centermost and now-largest tree from nursery stock to produce quinces – a yellow, apple- or pear-like fruit (pronounced “kwins”) that is usually not eaten raw but is used in desserts or teas. He then collected seeds from the fruit of that parent tree to grow the surrounding trees.  

Hill combined the parent and offspring trees to create the planting in 2002 and donated the arrangement to the Museum in July 2013. 

Museum Curator Michael James said the trees are relatively similar in age, but Hill grew them to different sizes and shapes by paying special attention to his thickening technique.

“It’s really about how much foliage each tree is allowed to have,” James said. “Allowing a tree’s branches to really extend before cutting them off allows the trees to thicken faster, but trimming branches fairly often keeps a tree smaller. 

Now that the forest planting is fairly developed, Museum staff keeps the foliage throughout the forest planting at a similar vigor to balance the leaf size with the trunk sizes and ensure the trees are proportional to each other. 

“Maintaining this difference in height and thickness really drives home the true representation of how trees look in a natural forest environment,” James said. 

He said the deciduous planting requires a lot of sun and a fair amount of water compared to other trees in the collection. The trees in Hill’s planting are some of the first to flower in the spring, and the quinces’ bark changes colors and textures throughout the year. But James said the planting peaks in the summer, when the bark exfoliates.

Warren Hill and the Chinese quince forest planting, photo credit to Walter Pall

“The smooth bark in the winter and early spring is a mixture of grays and tans and different browns, even greens,” he said. “But when that exfoliates and those colors flake off, it gives way to rosy oranges and pinks that look as if someone lit a match inside the heart wood.”

In the fall, if the flowers are pollinated, the trees grow their quinces, which are so large compared to their branches that Museum staff rarely leave more than one fruit on the composition each year. 

First Curator’s Apprentice Sophia Osorio said the planting is protected in the greenhouse during the colder months, so the quinces don’t always have access to pollinators. Museum staff have to manually pollinate trees, taking a soft, bristled brush from flower to flower to transfer the pollen. Osorio said they will pick a few flowers to enlarge throughout the year and eventually grow fruit, but that takes some extra planning. 

“We have to be careful that the branch we allow to flower is in the right place in the composition and will be able to support that fruit, yet not swell too much from developing,” she said.

Osorio added that the branch often has to be supported with wire because a fruit could easily snap a bonsai branch off by the time it matures in fall.

“The fruit draws tons of nutrients up from the roots, through the trunk, through the branch and to itself,” she said. “Due to that immense transfer of water and energy, the branch with the fruit is going to thicken a lot more than the others.”

Photo by Stephen Voss, 2021

Museum Curators: Warren Hill

Warren Hill at his one-man show at East Tennessee State University in the late 1990s. Trees (from left to right): American Hornbeam, Bald Cypress and Ginkgo Biloba, also known as Chi Chi Ginkgo

Not many people can recall experiencing a specific, life-altering moment. But Warren Hill attests that his personal and professional paths completely changed after he walked into a bonsai exhibition hosted by the California Bonsai Society (CBS) in 1960. 

For this final edition of Museum Curators, we spoke with Hill, who presided over the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum from 1996 to 2001. Though he didn’t practice bonsai growing up or in school, Hill always had a deep interest in Japanese culture and said he was immediately hooked on the art of bonsai after walking into the CBS show.

“I had no idea what I was looking at, but I knew it was magnificent,” he said of the exhibition.

But Hill’s adoration for bonsai didn’t come totally out of the blue. In college, he majored in engineering and horticulture, his affinity for which stems from his Scandinavian parents. His father was Finnish and his mother was Swedish and held a passion and talent for gardening. Hill was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which shares a cold climate with Scandinavian countries known for their appreciation of the arts, including horticulture. 

“Horticulture is in my background and my heritage,” Hill said. 

Left: One of Warren Hill’s Satsuki Azalea in Informal upright-bunjin, propagated by cutting

Right: One of his trident maples in the yose-ue style, propagated by seed

He was working in the engineering industry when he stumbled upon the CBS exhibition that piqued his interest in bonsai. Hill immediately started collecting business cards from professionals present at the event and got to know bonsai masters like John Naka through a mutual love for nature and Japanese art.

“There are many similarities between the cultures of Scandinavia and Japan,” Hill said. “Every place you go in Japan it’s all about the art. In the simplest house you’ll find it’s almost a shrine to the art, which is kind of the way the Scandinavians feel.”

He began to read everything about bonsai he could get his hands on and studied with Naka and other masters like Saburo Kato and Frank Nagata. In 1974, Hill started to teach and give bonsai lectures, demonstrations and workshops for local and international practitioners and groups. 

Left: Hill critiquing a black pine of Jack Fried, a former president of the Midwest Bonsai Society. Right: Hill helping a student at a bonsai workshop work on their Shimpaku Juniper. Hill traveled around the world to style trees at student workshops. 

After one class on trident maples, Hill was invited to tour around East Tennessee by a friend of his who needed someone to practice bonsai with. Hill was sold on the area and moved from California to Tennessee to work on trees and, coincidentally, meet his future wife.

Shortly after, he received a letter from the U.S. National Arboretum that the Museum curator position was open and they wanted him to apply. He sent in his application, interviewed, and secured the job as the Museum’s second-ever curator. 

“It was an honor to even be asked to be interviewed for the job,” Hill said. “It was a rich position, and I really enjoyed it.”

He said the nicest part of the position was meeting and working with the collection of Museum volunteers to take care of the Museum’s masterpiece bonsai.

“All those nice people who helped out all loved the art as I did,” Hill said. “You meet so many talented people like them and masters like Kato and Naka who were all special and of exceptional quality. When you know the background of people like them and know how gifted they are, you’re kind of in awe when you’re around them.”

California State Convention – Hill is holding a workshop for students in Anaheim, California. They are working with olive trees. 

After Hill retired from the curatorship, he and his wife moved back to Tennessee. He opened Tree-Haven, a bonsai school that taught students from all over the world, and he fell in love with teaching again.

“I like watching the students’ eyes light up when you tell them the answer to a question,” he said. 

For his years of excellent teaching, the Golden State Bonsai Federation awarded Hill the Circle of Sensei Award in 2013. Other distinguished recipients of the award include Ben Oki, John Naka and Harry Hirao. 

Hill remembers sharing with bonsai students that, to be a successful bonsai practitioner, you have to hold a deep love and passion for nature – that will guide you in the right direction. 

Warren used his own drawings of different bonsai styles to show students an idea of what the style looks like. This is Chokkan, which has a formal upright trunk. The majestic appearance represents a large, tall tree standing in the mountains or on a vast low-land plain. Usually the tree's outline is in a pyramidal form.

The Bonsai Board: Dr. Karen Harkaway

Harkaway pruning a deciduous pre-bonsai

The National Bonsai Foundation’s Board of Directors is full of people from different professional backgrounds that find common ground through their love of bonsai. In this episode of The Bonsai Board, you’ll get to know Dr. Karen Harkaway – a talented doctor and bonsai practitioner.

With degrees from Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Harkaway currently practices medical and aesthetic dermatology in New Jersey.

She is the Chief of Dermatology at Lourdes Medical Center of Burlington, a fellow of both the American Academy of Dermatology and the American Society of Dermatologic Surgery, serves on the Clinical Advisory Council of ThermiAesthetics and has aided in developing a successful skin-tightening procedure. 

Despite not growing up with a horticulture or tree-oriented background, Harkaway had always been drawn to the exhibits the Pennsylvania Bonsai Society constructed at the Philadelphia Flower Show each year. Intrigued by the bonsai, she bought a mallsai – or a more commercial, less formal “starter” bonsai – while in medical school and reconnected with the art on a deeper level later in life. Harkaway said she has had to study the horticultural aspects of bonsai, but she’s naturally drawn to the artistic element of training and designing trees. 

“I do certainly love plants, but I’ve learned to appreciate trees from my love of bonsai rather than the typical path of loving trees then bonsai,” she said. “It’s such a cool interplay because it’s not just an art, but there’s a living aspect to it.”

Harkaway’s passion within dermatology is largely aesthetic construction, which also requires the fusion of an artistic eye with the biology and scientific knowledge of Botox, fillers and lasers.  

“If you know horticulture, you’ll do a great job of keeping your trees alive, but it’s the addition of creativity that makes a great bonsai,” she said. “You have to be facile with both aspects in my business as well, so it’s fun to have that correlation between my professional life and my hobby.”

Harakaway has honed her bonsai skills with the guidance of prominent artists from around the globe, from Chase Rosade in America to Mauro Stemberger from Italy. She has hosted Ryan Neil of Bonsai Mirai at her home to lead mini-seminars on the art of bonsai. Harkaway’s award-winning trees have been displayed at the Pennsylvania Flower Show, the Mid-Atlantic Bonsai Societies’ exhibition and the Second U.S. National Bonsai Exhibition.

Harkawaway’s crape myrtle in full autumn display

She was first introduced to the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum through friends like the Rosade family and instantly connected with the compelling story of the Museum’s conception and purpose. 

“The Museum is such an American treasure,” Harkaway said. “People think of it as something that resides in D.C., but it was initiated as and has continued to be such a tremendous gift to all American people that I feel it’s very important that we continue to spread that word and have that inclusivity of understanding and recognizing the importance of these trees in our culture.”

Once hooked into the art of bonsai, she became increasingly involved with some of the biggest bonsai groups in the United States: Harkaway served as president of the American Bonsai Society and on the board Pennsylvania Bonsai Society, and she is actively involved with the Bonsai Society of South Jersey – in addition to serving as a member of the NBF Board of Directors. 

“It’s been great to get to know the people who are involved and the work that’s being done at NBF and the work that needs to be done,” she said. “I became much more aware of the need for the ongoing support for the Museum itself, the physical structure and bonsai in general. The camaraderie you feel as part of the group is a wonderful aspect of being a member of the NBF board.”

Bonsai Around the World: The Pacific Bonsai Museum

PBM’s exhibit, World War Bonsai: Remembrance and Resilience, on view through October 2021 Photos: Aarin Packard

Many of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum’s staff members have gone on to establish a great bonsai legacy for themselves. For this edition of Bonsai Around the World, we detail the Pacific Bonsai Museum through an interview with Aarin Packard, one of our former assistant curators who now leads PBM as curator.

Packard grew up in Southern California, forging a connection to nature while gardening with his parents on the weekends and watching his father work on bonsai in the backyard. He always held an appreciation for miniatures, like scale models, as well as Asian culture, particularly martial arts. Packard, however, only became interested in bonsai after several of his friends began the practice.

He started after buying a tree from the Orange County swap meet and tended to it as a hobby while studying anthropology at California State University, Fullerton. Packard read about the art and visited local nurseries and club shows. He started pursuing bonsai as a career after moving to D.C. to get his master’s in museum studies at The George Washington University and coming across the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. 

“On my first day as a resident in the District, I went to the U.S. National Arboretum and stopped at the bonsai museum,” he said. “Michael James was the assistant curator at the time, and I asked him, ‘How do I get your job?’”

In February 2006, Packard graduated from GW and was selected as the assistant curator for the Museum, a position he served until 2014. The year before Packard left the Museum, the Weyerhaeuser Company – one of the largest North American timber companies – donated its entire bonsai collection to a new nonprofit, The George Weyerhaeuser Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection, or the “Pacific Bonsai Museum.”

The nonprofit was looking for a curator, which Packard saw as a great opportunity to return home to the West Coast while heading the privately run but public collection. He was hired to use his museum studies background to curate exhibits for the new collection and lead tree care efforts.

“I was given the opportunity to create a vision for what this Museum could be,” he said. “I kind of had a blank slate to do what I wanted, so it was exciting to have that creative freedom to progress in my career, and it’s been really enjoyable.”

Rather than separating their trees into different collections, the museum displays a museum-wide exhibit each year with trees that pertain to the exhibit’s theme. The current exhibition is “World War Bonsai,” an idea Packard has been forming since working with bonsai artists and trees with intrinsic ties to World War II, like the Yamaki Pine. 

“I’ve been amassing research on this era throughout my career, and with last year being the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, I felt like it was an appropriate time to investigate the stories of bonsai and people within our collection that have a relationship with that time,” Packard said. 

Alcove depicting the scene when 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced to board trains and travel to live in barbed-wire detention camps displayed with a Bristlecone Pine bonsai originally created by Kelly Hiromo Nishitani

The exhibition primarily focuses on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war and how the years of fighting affected the art of bonsai both in the United States and Japan. 

“It’s been a well-received exhibit,” Packard said. “The exhibit sheds light on the cost of war on the art of bonsai and how it provided people in hard situations comfort and connection to cultural communities and extensions of self.” 

The museum's exhibits incorporate work from contemporary artists that connect the theme of the display to current events. World War Bonsai features an installation from a Seattle-based Japanese American artist who draws parallels from Japanese incarceration to current racial inequities in the United States. 

“That’s one thing bonsai has the ability to do – the art is not just limited to cute little trees and someone’s gardening curiosity,” Packard said. “Bonsai are objects of significance that have a lot of resonance and can tell stories that haven’t been told before.” 

Though the museum’s trees are displayed in an open-air gallery, the bonsai are still protected in the winter with their own small, cube-like greenhouses that are removed in the spring. About 60 trees are displayed at a time among the museum’s alcoves and benches, but Packard moves the bonsai around depending on the year’s exhibit. The museum’s tropical trees remain in a special conservatory throughout the year to keep them safe from the elements. 

Left: Aarin pruning the domoto maple; Right: Domoto maple (in training since 1850) in colorful, leafy state

A 9-foot-tall trident maple from the Domoto family is what Packard calls the museum’s “crown jewel.” The Domoto maple is one of the oldest bonsai in the United States, imported from Japan for the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1913.

Kanetaro Domoto, a Japanese immigrant who ran one of the largest commercial nurseries in California, bought the maple after the fair, and it was the only possession the family didn’t lose during the Great Depression. The tree survived alone during the incarceration period of World War II, but upon their release from captivity Domoto’s son found and cared for it until 1990, when he loaned it to the Weyerhaeuser collection. His descendants eventually donated the tree outright to the museum.

 “The maple tells the story of bonsai in the United States and the Japanese American immigrant experience,” Packard said. “Just to think of the story of this tree and how it survived hardships is kind of the flipside of bonsai during the era and is very rare to see.” 

Learn more about the Pacific Bonsai Museum and its beautiful exhibits here.