little trees

i have kept and created bonsai trees for the last 20 years. i still have the first one i ever bought, a mini boxwood grove from a roadside stand in florida.
i have the very first one that i made myself from a seedling.... it is now a lovely ,open -style
pink- flowered crabapple that presents with tiny red fruit every couple of seasons.  early on, my focus was just on collecting....finding nice trees and adding them to my benches.
i have four "really good" specimen trees that i purchased from growers or other collectors. 
these can be quite expensive, and these trees are older and grander as they've aged; they have
served  as templates for my first attempts at shaping m.y own trees.
just  learning their care and cultivation was enough to absorb when i started out with bonsai.
they are little trees, hardy and rugged, treated the opposite of most "common knowledge" about
growing plants.

as i began to make my own trees, i was astonished at all the little details involved in guiding
their growth progress, their shape and their  small branches.
one must develop good pruning and specific repotting skills, as well as practice the ability to visualize the end result and the path needed to get there.
the process of making and tending bonsai is one of much time and many tiny cuts, always looking,
considering and studying the form of each tree.

my "eye" for trees improved during my first experiments, as did my confidence. i began digging things up in the woods, a cow-chewed american holly with a wide trunk, eaten down to 7"tall,.a small but old azalea that a neighbor wanted to get rid of....a rooted branch off the big chinese quince in my backyard....
each with its own little puzzle to work out, with no real right or wrong way to put it all together.
i learned a valuable piece of advice from an old bonsai friend--"always follow the shape
and growth of the natural tree"--- if it is bowed and bent by nature, by all means make a crooked tree.
do not try to make a cascading tree from an upright  young hardwood.

Bonsai is an art form as creative and fascinating as any other means of self expression.
the one major difference is in the element of Time.
a painting or a collage takes perhaps a day, or two......a photograph an even shorter period.
with the advent of digital technology, we can now have whatever we want with one click...

tending bonsai teaches patience.....for nature gives to each its season....and time passes in
its annual procession through every time of the year.
no super-fertilizer or pulling on their roots will make them grow faster or better.  each tree has its own timeline and grows slowly
into its own unique shape, forming and turning with the years.    the act of creation is an ongoing progression....it changes and changes, but never comes to an end,  for as long as there is life
left in the tree.

it is in the 'making' and not in the 'made' ... where we fully enjoy the bonsai. like the natural
world around us, they reveal such beauty in the cycles of the earth.