While I tend to regard all my trees as somehow feminine (my bias - it doesn't mean anything to the trees), there are definitely mountain trees and valley trees.
When reporting in northern Spain on the region's cider, one maker essentially said to ignore the 50something named varieties and think in terms of coastal apples and inland apples.
What a great insightful article. I often try to avoid gendered language when describing/analyzing a bonsai but I love the idea of using it as a framework and acknowledging its fluidity and non-binary nature. Some of my favorite trees have masculine and feminine characteristics, just like me. Thanks for your insight.
This is my only Substack subscription that I read as soon as the notification drops. Sometimes I save it up but usually I read it as soon as I have a free minute. Today’s essay is exactly what I’ve come to look forward to. I’m not a bonsai practitioner but I want to follow you around that world. And I also see gender as a heuristic: a shaggy mass with many possible centers, difficult to define, and many tendrils and expressions and excrescences. And, I puzzle over how human definitions and language get mapped onto non-human life, like trees. I think about this all the time. Gendered bonsai both makes perfect, useful sense and also is a rough, wonky imposition on non-human physical life. I like to walk along these avenues, looking at the trees, the long game of that bonsai vision and progress, and think alongside the path created here, even if it closes over behind me. Thank you.
While I tend to regard all my trees as somehow feminine (my bias - it doesn't mean anything to the trees), there are definitely mountain trees and valley trees.
When reporting in northern Spain on the region's cider, one maker essentially said to ignore the 50something named varieties and think in terms of coastal apples and inland apples.
What a great insightful article. I often try to avoid gendered language when describing/analyzing a bonsai but I love the idea of using it as a framework and acknowledging its fluidity and non-binary nature. Some of my favorite trees have masculine and feminine characteristics, just like me. Thanks for your insight.
This is my only Substack subscription that I read as soon as the notification drops. Sometimes I save it up but usually I read it as soon as I have a free minute. Today’s essay is exactly what I’ve come to look forward to. I’m not a bonsai practitioner but I want to follow you around that world. And I also see gender as a heuristic: a shaggy mass with many possible centers, difficult to define, and many tendrils and expressions and excrescences. And, I puzzle over how human definitions and language get mapped onto non-human life, like trees. I think about this all the time. Gendered bonsai both makes perfect, useful sense and also is a rough, wonky imposition on non-human physical life. I like to walk along these avenues, looking at the trees, the long game of that bonsai vision and progress, and think alongside the path created here, even if it closes over behind me. Thank you.
I so very appreciate this note, and thank you for sharing your thoughts as well!
this article made me realize that there are gender as well in plants, what about binary of fluid lol ? jokes aside nice article.