The Art of Bonsai

by Perrin

        I had just started to doze off, not sleeping-dozing, but looking-blankly-into-the-distance-dozing. He had started up on one of his random stories about how he could make a 70% profit off of his special bamboo trees whose sections were so uniquely short that they could sell at a good price.

        I had listened pretty carefully for 2 hours already and had learned a lot, but now I was getting tired of listening. Half of what he was saying was in Chinese and half was in English which made the talking even more repetitive. Suddenly, I woke up from my trance to his voice saying, “Ok. Lunch break! Be back by 1:00”. I realized that I was hungry so my mom and I walked out of the market and up the street to a little dumpling restaurant squished in next to a 7-11.

         After we had had a simple but yummy lunch of dumplings, we walked back through the flower market to our class. The class we were taking was a bonsai class and this was our second session. I had become interested in Bonsais from a book at my grandparents’ house that showed pictures of tiny lemon trees with tiny lemons to go with it, little maple tree forests, and miniature flowers. I loved how they looked like they came right out of a dollhouse. The class we were taking took place every Sunday from 10AM until 4:00PM at the Taipei Flower Market.  My Mom was taking it with me.  We weren’t able to go to every calss because a lot of weekends we were travelling, but we tried to participate in as many as possible.  The class went for the whole day but the first two hours before lunch was when our teacher, Jack, explained a special bonsai technique.

         After lunch was when we made our own bonsais. This was by far my favorite part and, lucky for me, we got to do it for the majority of the day. We each were given our own tiny pine trees like the 6-inch tall saplings that are all over the New England forests. Then, we were told to exercise them. This means holding the base of the trunk firmly, grabbing the tree and bending it over a whole 90˚ and then rotating it. Imagine doing hip circles in an exercise class, except instead of making you thinner, it is supposed to make the trunk thicker and look older.

        A bonsai is a tree that has been shaped in a number of ways to look old and twisted. They start as regular baby trees, and when their roots and branches and leaves are cut, they will age but never grow big. The very old and beautiful ones can be extremely expensive, like a work of art. Bonsais originated from China and then the Japanese perfected the art.

         I had always imagined bonsai making as being taught by an ancient Japanese man who lives in a secluded house in the forest, doesn't speak any other language than his own tongue and spends his days wasting away, carefully snipping the leaves away one by one. Well, this is definitely not what we did. For example, later in the day when we were told to cut all the leaves off our maple tree, our teacher came over to us and said, “To make it faster, just do it this way.” and he grabbed up my tree, held the base of the trunk with both hands, and striped the tree of all it's leaves by running his hand along it, just like that. Also, our teacher has a green card and spends a month in America every year.  He speaks practically fluent English and he definitely does not “snip the leaves away one by one”.

         I have learned that trees are a lot tougher than everybody thinks they are. There are 6 bonsai trees sitting on our porch right now, and 4 of them have not one leaf on them. The other two are pine trees and they still have most of their needles although they are sticking out in every direction. We cut all the leaves off because if you want the tree to look miniature, then the leaves have to look small too. Cutting off ALL the leaves makes a tree scared so instead of making big leaves the tree grows smaller ones. Even if you leave one leaf, the tree will put all its energy into growing that one leaf and no other leaves will grow.

         The second part of the class started by Jack giving us our first trees, baby pine trees. To make a bonsai look like you want it to, you wrap wire around the trunk and then twist the tree into any shape you want.  We folded a piece of very thick but flexible aluminum wire in half and stuck both ends into the bottom of the thin, plastic pot and then threaded the wire through so there were two wires sticking out of the soil next to the trunk of the tree.

        Then we took one of the wires and started wrapping and twisting it around the trunk of the tree. Once we got to the top, we wrapped the other wire, following exactly the same path of the first wire so that they were touching at all the way up.

Then, we bent the whole tree down so it was parallel to the ground, and wound the trunk in circles so it looked like a spring. The trunk didn’t break because our teacher hadn’t watered them for three days before the class so the trunks would be more flexible. We were all stunned at what you can do to a tree without killing it. You can twist, break, cut, and starve it of water, and usually, it doesn't die.  After the tree was all wound up in a little coil, we were able to pull it up so it was a little taller, or we could shape it however we wanted. I made mine so that it looked like it was drooping down and then twisting because I had seen another one like that and it was beautiful. 

        The next tree we got was a very small maple tree. It was much taller than the pine tree but the trunk was about the same width. We wired this tree the same way as the pine tree except only with one wire because the tree was thinner at the top so if we had used two it would have been too heavy. Then we made them different shapes. Some were drooping down, some looked like a twisted old maple tree, and some people made tons of loopty-loops. When I did my first tree, I had finished and was checking with our teacher to see if it was OK. When he tried to bend it a little more, it broke! I was disappointed but we fixed it with some "magic medicine" which will hopefully help the tree.  I had done one better tree that only had one break so that was the one that I brought home.

         One of the worst things about making bonsais here is that we can’t bring them back to the US because of import laws so we will have to give them away, but I hope to make some more out of trees that I find in the woods at home.

This is my worst attempt at wiring a tree.  The blue spots are where I broke it and had to put some medicine on that will hopefully heal it.

These are some young bonsais that Jack had already made.