Appreciate the beauty of the natural world seems to be almost a national trait in Japan. Think of the unsurpassed serenity of a Japanese garden: think of ikebana (flower arranging). Think of the understated sumi landscape paintings.
Because Japan is crowded. And has been crowded from the earliest recorded history. The gardener often has had very little space in which to work. And so he has learned to capture the essence of a natural setting without exactly duplicating it. A Japanese tree garden in a postage stamp space may create the illusion of being the center of a giant forest. A Tokyo courtyard, separated from the street by a single wall, may contain all the serenity of a mountain glade.
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| Acer Palmatum Bonsai |
Perhaps because of crowded, the Japanese gardener characteristically focuses on details rather than on panoramas. In Japan, to capture the essence of one tree, a grouping of flowers and grasses, or even a single rock is to bring all of nature home.
The exact beginning of bonsai are lost in the clouds of time. Though some indications suggest that its origins may lie in the China of over 1500 years ago, the oldest surviving piece of evidence we have about bonsai is a famous Japenese scroll painting 700 or 800 years old, showing a dwarf tree in a ceramic container.
Early Japanese aristocrats displayed a fondness for unusual botanical specimens. Highly valued were the trees dwarfed by natural circumstances and weathered into unusual and sometimes fantastic shapes. Such dwarf trees were collected from all over Japan.
Wonderful old stories tell about men whose work it was to collect these trees. About the harrowing extremes to which they went, often clinging to the sheer walls of cliffs as they claimed dwarf trees growing there. These dearly-got trees were treasured and very expensive.
To this day the bonsai enthusiast prize above all others the tree dwarfed in the wild, perhaps a tiny pine growing in a crack of a granite boulder; a juniper in poor soil, robbed of light by its larger neighbours; or a windswept cypress on a rocky coast-line dwarfed and shaped by severe wind and weather.
What happened, of course, was that as enthusiasm for owning naturally dwarfed trees spread, the trees became more difficult to find. It was only a short step from the situation to the development of artificial dwarfing.
Sophisticated Japenese horticulturists took the next step after that as well, artificially shaping the trees.
Tree shaping went through many incarnations over the centuries before it became what we know today as bonsai. At one period, for instance, the highest goal of the art was to create the most grotesque, bizarre and unnatural shapes imaginable.
In the mid-19th century, today's esthetic principles (based on asymmetrical balance, as in a scalane triangle) took hold. But not until 1909, at in exhibition in London, did bonsai appear in the western world. Since then, interest in the art has increased enormously.
The first seriuos practitioners of bonsai in the United States were Japenese-Americans on the west coast who had brought the art with them from their mother country. These people continue to be invaluable resources for bonsai enthusiasts through-out the country, both because they are long-time masters of the art and because they are living links with the sources of bonsai.
Not that bonsai must cling rigorously to its past, the American chapters in the history and development of bonsai are certain to add new and distinctive marks. For one thing, a broader range of climates exists here, supporting different flora, desert or tropical natives, for instance, of which Japan has none.
Bonsai is practiced widely in the United States, not just on the west coast and by no means only by Japenese-Americans. Servicemen returning from Japan after World War II brought back an enthusiasm for bonsai, as have many of the hundreds of thousands of American tourist who have visited that country in the past 30 years.
Getting started in bonsai isn't difficult or expensive; it's not even time-consuming. And if you find yourself getting swept up by it, you won't have to travel to Japan to find all the resources you'll need to educate yourself and grow in skill and artistry.
Early Japanese aristocrats displayed a fondness for unusual botanical specimens. Highly valued were the trees dwarfed by natural circumstances and weathered into unusual and sometimes fantastic shapes. Such dwarf trees were collected from all over Japan.
Wonderful old stories tell about men whose work it was to collect these trees. About the harrowing extremes to which they went, often clinging to the sheer walls of cliffs as they claimed dwarf trees growing there. These dearly-got trees were treasured and very expensive.
To this day the bonsai enthusiast prize above all others the tree dwarfed in the wild, perhaps a tiny pine growing in a crack of a granite boulder; a juniper in poor soil, robbed of light by its larger neighbours; or a windswept cypress on a rocky coast-line dwarfed and shaped by severe wind and weather.
What happened, of course, was that as enthusiasm for owning naturally dwarfed trees spread, the trees became more difficult to find. It was only a short step from the situation to the development of artificial dwarfing.
Sophisticated Japenese horticulturists took the next step after that as well, artificially shaping the trees.
Tree shaping went through many incarnations over the centuries before it became what we know today as bonsai. At one period, for instance, the highest goal of the art was to create the most grotesque, bizarre and unnatural shapes imaginable.
In the mid-19th century, today's esthetic principles (based on asymmetrical balance, as in a scalane triangle) took hold. But not until 1909, at in exhibition in London, did bonsai appear in the western world. Since then, interest in the art has increased enormously.
The first seriuos practitioners of bonsai in the United States were Japenese-Americans on the west coast who had brought the art with them from their mother country. These people continue to be invaluable resources for bonsai enthusiasts through-out the country, both because they are long-time masters of the art and because they are living links with the sources of bonsai.
Not that bonsai must cling rigorously to its past, the American chapters in the history and development of bonsai are certain to add new and distinctive marks. For one thing, a broader range of climates exists here, supporting different flora, desert or tropical natives, for instance, of which Japan has none.
Bonsai is practiced widely in the United States, not just on the west coast and by no means only by Japenese-Americans. Servicemen returning from Japan after World War II brought back an enthusiasm for bonsai, as have many of the hundreds of thousands of American tourist who have visited that country in the past 30 years.
Getting started in bonsai isn't difficult or expensive; it's not even time-consuming. And if you find yourself getting swept up by it, you won't have to travel to Japan to find all the resources you'll need to educate yourself and grow in skill and artistry.
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