Missing: Pink camellia
Bonsai and the problem of public space.
Last Sunday, I visited my trees at the restaurant to find that my camellia was missing. It’s been raining so much I haven’t dropped by to water recently, so I can’t say when it disappeared, but it looks like someone walked off with it. To what end, I have no idea. Maybe the flowers caught their eye.
I’ve known this was a possibility since I first planted my trees at the restaurant. Staff there have seen people vandalize plants in full view in the middle of the day, uprooting them from their beds and tossing them like weeds. If you wanted to steal a plant to establish somewhere else, you’d be more careful about preserving the rootball. These antics appear to be for their own sake.
Factor in shipping and the loss of this plant is a little less than a hundred dollars down the drain. I can live with that. Better this camellia get nicked than my 50-year-old ponderosa pine or my stately dawn redwood. I hadn’t had much opportunity to work on the camellia and wasn’t sure what to do with it. At home I have another camellia growing indoors, a less developed camellia sinensis, the tea plant.
To deter potential theft I’ve loosely wired my tree pots into their planter and covered them with mulch. But the pots still peek out from the soil—they have to, in order to give the roots fresh air—and most of the wire is easily removed. So I could anchor the pots tighter in the planter, however, inaccessibility to thieves is also inaccessibility to me. I don’t want to haul out wire cutters every time I want to dig up and work on a tree.
This is the hazard of any personal property that exists in public space. There’s always potential for theft, vandalism, or accidental damage. For this reason most bonsai artists keep their trees in inaccessible private gardens. They might even have insurance policies on expensive specimens. If I remember right, I didn’t bother wiring in this camellia at all. Maybe even the suggestion of security was enough for the other trees, and leaving this one untethered made it too tempting a target.
What to do about this conundrum? It’s not like I have another space for these outdoor trees. I could install a security camera, but grainy footage after the fact wouldn’t do me much good, and my trees aren’t expensive enough to insure. There won’t be any retributive justice for them or me.
Most private landscaping projects in public space respond to this problem by planting conservatively. They favor hardy varieties that can withstand the elements and pollution from life around cars, and are readily available from garden centers. As a result, hedges across the world are lined the same few species of boxwood, cypress, and juniper, irrespective of local growing conditions or aesthetics, let alone native ecosystems. The trees themselves blend together and become cached background information; planted to be noticed but never encountered. And that’s all we’ll get if we rely on the likes of real estate companies and Home Depot corporate buyers to design public green spaces.
When I first planted my trees at the restaurant, I took pleasure and a little pride in the thought of disrupting this arboreal sameness. Bonsai are meant to be looked at, and this restaurant provided an opportunity to take advantage of public space without asking the public’s permission. Over the week I’ve wondered about the subtler implications of this social contract. What rights do I have as a hobbyist to the security of my work in public? What conditions do I accept by doing so? What about my neighbors? Who gets to plant in the first place?
If you have any answers to these questions, please share them, because I’m fresh out of ideas. A little discouraged, but bruised, not beaten.
For now the trees will remain where they are. I’m bringing new mulch this weekend.
Tree reading
“I became fascinated with how, like us, plants find new homes, and how our words for plants and people are so often the same: migrants and natives, a language of threat.” [Catapult]
Who wants to come with me to visit the Alley Pond giant, the tallest tree in New York City? [T. M. Rives]
this is a TRAVESTY, and there is a special circle of hell for someone who would steal such a precious earth object. i'm trying to think of a comparable situation in which someones is digging up tulip bulbs from the front "yard" of someone's brownstone—and it's perfectly incomprehensible! notions of "private property" aside, it feels like the breaking of an unspoken rule: "thou shalt not dig up a plant on unknown territory." it's also hard to imagine someone appreciating the beauty of a bonsai camellia in bloom, but who could not or would not value the sense that someone had carefully cultivated it, and might like to keep on doing so. speaking of "social contracts," this person BROKE IT. it's not you, it's them.
Have you said what the restaurant is in previous posts?