Bonsai News: Bonsai masters and novices connect

15 January 2007

Bonsai masters and novices connect

HAYWARD — Kathy Souther was at Centennial Hall on Sunday obeying the orders of her sensei.

Souther, 54, of Danville last spring began to learn bonsai, the art of miniaturizing trees through a combination of potting and crown- and root-pruning. Bonsai has a large following in the Bay Area.

The eighth annual Bay Island Bonsai Exhibit, which ended Sunday, is one of the country's premier bonsai shows and allows amateurs such as Souther to get a look at more accomplished work.

'It's baffling,' she said, commenting on the shapes and designs of the trees in the exhibit.

She looked through the small leaves to the trunk of one cascading tree design, trying to spot where the artist made decisions to clip branches and shape the growth.

'It's really baffling, and you can see some of the scars on this where decisions were made and branches were taken off

in the past, what they have chosen to wire and the form,' she said.

Most beginning bonsai students believe the trick is to bend the plant to their will, holding it back by cutting and restraining its development. It's a common mistake, Bay Island Bonsai Club President Morten Wellhaven said.

"Someone who wouldn't have a lot of artistic ability would take the knife and rip the bark down the front and call the tree 'distant thunder,' and everyone laughs at the new student trying to do something like that," he said. "But a great artist can take what is already in the tree and improve on it a little bit to bring out the personality of the tree.

"And a bonzai master is not someone who masters a tree. The bonsai master is someone who masters his relationship with the tree," Wellhaven said.

A well-tended bonsai will tell a story and evoke a feeling in the person looking at it, Wellhaven said.

"To learn the rules of how to style a tree, that's easy," he said. "But to put a feeling into a tree, that requires experience and artistry."

Patience, if one does not have it, is a quality a bonsai artist must develop. The other, Wellhaven advises, is detachment, because one day the tree will outlive its master, he said.

"That tree over there is over 250 years old," he said pointing at one of the larger displays in the hall. "And you will never be 250 years old, so in the end you will give it away or it will be given away for you."


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