A Grow-er, Not a Show-er

“So how many do you have?” That’s one of the first questions people ask when they find out I’m doing bonsai.

These days, after some careful thought, I just say, “None.” It’s a learned response. And it’s true.

Oh, sure, there are hundreds of plants. What I literally have is a bench — benches, actually — of trees in various states of becoming something resembling a bonsai. Trunk lines I like, apexes I’d never defend in a competition, nebari still finding itself. None of it “bonsai” yet. Just raw material.

•••

We beginners start with dreams of a specimen on day one — full nebari, some ancient-looking thing you could point to and say, “See that? That’s mine. I made it.” It’s the whole reason showing looks like the job from the outside. I wanted that too.

But then came the actual doing of it. Not years — a single, dense year, but one where I paid enough attention that it felt like more. A scale infestation I didn’t catch in time. A jade that split at the base because I watered it like it was still in the nursery pot. Those effing spider mites! And fungus gnats! Cuttings that never took — for reasons I still can’t explain. A trunk chop I was sure would kill the tree and somehow didn’t. 

You don’t live through that stretch, even compressed into a single season, still believing the tree owes you immediate gratification. You come out the other side understanding the tree a little, and yourself a little more. Bonsai is time. That has really been this year’s lesson. And I was learning it the slow way, which is the only way it actually teaches you anything.

That’s not resignation. It’s closer to relief. The payoff was always further down the road than I wanted it to be at the start — and somewhere in the pests and the deaths and the mistakes, I got all the way comfortable with that.

•••

This is what I am: A grower, not a shower. The show is a different job, for a different season, and maybe with a tree I don’t even have yet. My job? Putting one in the ground, or the pot, and giving it what it needs to become what it will, on its own schedule, without asking it to perform in the meantime.

There’s a slowness in this that I didn’t know I was starving for until I found it. A kind of grace lives in that arrangement — the tree keeping its own time, me finally letting it.

My dojo