N.C. Arboretum Adds Bonsai Garden

BENT CREEK, N.C. — Ask Arthur Joura about bonsai, and you won't hear much about Japan, where the art of training trees to grow in small pots first took root.

		Arthur Joura tends to a pond cypress bonsai as he prepares for the opening of the new Bonsai Exhibition Garden.
		John Fletcher, Asheville Citizen-Times

"I don't speak Japanese. I don't own a kimono. I don't do tea ceremonies," Joura said. "All these plants were not touched by Japanese hands."

While the mystique of miniature trees may have originated a millennium ago in Asia, bonsai has gone native at the N.C. Arboretum with the opening of the new Bonsai Exhibition Garden earlier this month.

"It's an Appalachian art form now," said Joura, the arboretum's bonsai curator. Arboretum and tourism officials see the new $1.8 million garden as another key to attracting more tourists, and their dollars, to the area.

"This is going to be one of the finest bonsai gardens in North America, if not the world. Bonsai is so relevant to what we are, and our mission of connecting people with plants. It's a very traditional art form, but it's a very energetic art form, and we are at the forefront in design and the use of natural plants," said George Briggs, arboretum executive director.

The Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority saw the potential for more visitors, contributing $750,000 toward the project in 2003. Money for the new garden was raised from private sources, Briggs said.

A horticultural art form that originated in Asia about 1,000 years ago, bonsai has taken root in America in the past 50 years. Unlike dwarf plants, which grow only so tall according to their genes, bonsai are plants and trees carefully trained to remain small as they grow.

The tops are pruned regularly while rootballs are typically trimmed and replanted each year in shallow pots. Branches are trained with copper wire to give certain shape to the tree. Bonsai are not necessarily old trees, although they may look ancient.

Many of the plants in the North Carolina Arboretum have been grown from seed in the last 10 years.

Briggs said the arboretum averages about 250,000 visitors a year but could add a half million more with the opening of the bonsai garden, along with an improved outdoor amphitheater and education center under construction.

The arboretum has played host to the Southeast's largest collection of bonsai since 1992, when the Staples family of Butner donated the first trees and other bonsai enthusiasts began sending their plants to Asheville.

For the past decade, the plants have been stored in the arboretum greenhouses, which are closed on weekends.

With their root balls carefully trimmed and branches coaxed into shape by wire, trees that would grow 100 feet tall in the wild thrive at only a few inches tall in shallow pots. Joura groups individual trees into small groves and stands reminiscent of views along the Blue Ridge Parkway or at Graveyard Fields.

Using juniper and azalea, he re-creates the rhododendron and hemlocks atop scenic Roan Mountain.

"You can go inside these landscapes. It's like you make yourself that size and walk right in," he said.

It's hard for Joura to pick out his personal favorite among the 100 or so plants in the collection. That's like picking out a favorite child in a family.

But he does have fond memories of a particular piece called "Yoshimura's Island," a grove of American hornbeam already starting to show the gold of autumn foliage.

Joura watched his teacher, Yuji Yoshimura, "the father of American bonsai," create the grouping with plants raised from seed in Asheville. It was Yoshimura's last bonsai project before his death in 1997.

The garden itself has been specifically designed to highlight the artistry of the plants.

Mike Oshita, a classically trained Japanese garden designer, worked hard to blend Asian tradition with a more contemporary Appalachian feel.

"I didn't want to make just a Japanese garden," Oshita said.

He designed a stone garden, handpicking rock from nearby mountains, and placing them just so in a flowing pattern, much like trout heading upstream.

"They all point to the mountains," he said.

Bonsai builds a bridge between the Appalachians and Asia, which share certain plant species found nowhere else in the world, Joura explained.

There are fringe trees and tulip trees, for example, that only grow here in the Southeast Appalachians and in China and Japan.

Building one of the nation's best bonsai garden here bodes well for the Arboretum and Asheville, Joura said.

"Asheville is a little quirky, a little different for most people. We have our own unique character. To add something like bonsai is a perfect fit, it will be one more feather of a different color in Asheville's favor."

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