Jews love Jews who love trees
A conversation with Tiktok's breakout bonsai star, Tobin Mitnick.
Tobin Mitnick’s TikTok, Jews Love Trees, was one of the finds that pushed me to pursue bonsai. Unapologetically nerdy, self-deprecating, possessing a particular Jewish Dad Joke sensibility—it’s great internet. Once I decided to do Fire Escape Bonsai, I knew I had to talk with Tobin.
The following has been edited for length, clarity, and butthole chakras. Special thanks to Valerie Magan for the transcription.
Max Our mutual friend Michael told me you have a tendency to get obsessed with things. How’d that happen with bonsai?
Tobin My whole life, it’d be 18 months on something, then I’d bounce to something else. My parents knew if I wasn’t indulged in a particular thing I’d become a little asshole. So they figured out how to bounce well and buy me books on sharks, mineralogy, meteorology, and one of them was trees. Sequoias and redwoods took on a mythical status for me as a kid.
Two years ago, I was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder because I developed—and had also developed in the past—obsessions that weren’t healthy. It got to the point where it turned my life to pieces, and with that grab bag comes depression and anxiety and guilt and shame and all that fun stuff. I found a doctor who said, you need to figure out how to make sure the pie chart of your brain is 95% full. Because boredom is your worst fucking enemy, and if you don’t fill your brain with things you like to be obsessed with, you’ll fill your brain with things you don’t like to obsessed with.
Max I love how so much of the work in bonsai involves waiting and observing. I collect lots of things, but having something alive that you watch change imperceptibly over time, it’s totally different.
Tobin Right. And there's a constant judgment that your bonsai tree is pronouncing on you because you get to watch whether a move that you made was the right move. Oh fuck, the leaves or the needles are turning yellow. I was such an idiot.
Max I’ve struggled to articulate to people what it is about bonsai that’s so emotional, how trees communicate these feelings.
Tobin The best ones—especially the ones styled in a naturalistic sense—can give you an almost platonic sense of an entire species. And that makes me excited to see them in nature, because I’ve seen this incredibly well-wrought preview of them.
Max There’s this commitment to symbiosis. And to some extent I think everyone with a garden feels some connection to nature, but it’s so concentrated in trees.
Tobin Yeah, there's something magical about honoring the natural form of something, but also applying horticulturally-informed principles. The reason why there are so few bonsai masters is because it's so hard to do well.
Max We have an instinctual awareness of what’s beautiful about them, then figuring it out intellectually takes a lifetime.
Tobin It's changed the way that I live. I walk down a street now in my neighborhood and I look at the trees and say, what the fuck did I do before a year and a half ago? What was I doing? Was I not looking at the trees?
Everything changes. I don't know how to put it. Bonsai makes everything better. It makes you somewhat more irritating to other people, because I get obsessed with it and I can't stop talking about it. But the things that you can do, and the metaphors that you glean…you understand people better. As corny as that shit sounds, I do think it makes you a better person.
Tree reading
Many thanks to reader Matt Kronsberg for this review of Taming the Garden, a documentary about a Georgian plutocrat’s obsession with filling his arboretum with towering trees from around the world. [The Calvert Journal]
Meet Mamita. [TikTok]