What is bonsai, and why am I doing this?
A preamble to a tree blog.
Bonsai is the Japanese art of dwarfing a tree’s development to shrink its proportions down to a tiny specimen in a shallow pot. There’s a lot to unpack from that sentence. There is no such thing as a “bonsai tree”; any plant with a woody stem can be made into a bonsai. “Tree” as a concept is also less coherent than you think—a maple tree is more closely related to a sunflower than a pine. What’s more, while bonsai’s origin is rightly credited to ancient Japan, it owes itself to an even older artistic tradition from China called penjing. Japanese bonsai usually concerns itself with harmonizing the elements of a singular tree: the trunk, the outline, the proportions. Penjing plantings render whole landscapes in miniature, conjuring the earthly elements to transport you to a scenic vista.
This is what I’ve found to be the case with bonsai. You try to find a definitive answer to a simple question and before you look up it’s three hours later and you’re yammering about mountain spirits.
The goal of this newsletter is to share my bonsai journey with readers interested in horticulture and hubristic failure. Weekly dispatches will be short, 400 words max, because we all have things to do and vanishingly thin attention spans. I’ll be documenting my experiments with live trees on my Queens apartment fire escape, as well as exploring the rabbit holes of bonsai concepts I’ve fallen down. And I really want to know what resonates with you. I’d love to make this an active low key space to nerd out about plants, especially now, while we’re all locked away in our cupboards.
Why am I, a notorious black thumb with zero experience in gardening doing this? I’m not sure yet. But I think it’s good to suck at things and learn how to suck less. I’ll have more thoughts on this, and its Philosophical Ramifications, in the weeks ahead. I’m so sorry.
Tree reading
A legendary ficus in Kenya is in a fight for its life. “This particular tree is a symbol of Nairobi,” Ms. Dharani said in a telephone interview. “I have never seen anything like it. We should keep it as a national heritage.” [New York Times]
Kashyyyk, the home planet of Star Wars’ Chewbacca, is covered in wroshyr trees that live upwards of 50,000 years. [Wookieepedia]