It’s an ancient art, with a thousand rules and traditions, but somehow I wasn’t daunted. Or I was attracted enough to overcome the awe.
At first I grew tiny trees from seed, and clipped each new shoot and root as it emerged, nipping buds. I planted each seed in an orange skin, perforated with holes for the roots, and waited patiently for treehood. But as soon as I read about ‘found bonsai’, I wanted to skip the sapling stage and start working with ready-formed characters.
I was obsessed. I started searching everywhere I went. I wandered way off the paths in parks and reserves; trespassed in private gardens; and dragged myself up cliff-faces, over roofs, and into caves. I know you can buy bonsai—in supermarkets and suburban garden centres—but those are toys. There’s nothing wrong with a cutesy maple or flowering cherry, but a real bonsai forces a lurch in perspective that warps you into its scale, sucks you through to the other side of the looking glass. It’s not just about miniature leaves—a real bonsai makes you want to wrap your arms around the trunk.
I developed a sense for the elements that would force a tree to become a bonsai: an apple tree struggling for sun inside a privet hedge in Mount Eden; a pohutukawa in a wedge of sooty muck in the crevice of a chimney; a windsculpted manuka from high above the mouth of the Hokianga harbour; and a huddled group of kahikitea—white pines—from the mountain, right up near the snowline. The pohutukawa was the gnarliest: stunted and scarred and maimed by life. The apple tree was happier—fat with green sap, and always crawling with aphids, spiders and monstrous snails. But all of my finds were old souls; they had something I wanted to get to know.
With each tree, I would spend hours excavating the fragile root mass and levering it out of the ground. Then I would wrap the roots in sphagnum moss and sacking for the journey home. I planted the kahikitea together, as a small grove, in a moss like the alpine grasses I had found them with, and they conjured a whole landscape of wind and snowmelt. But two died from the shock, and after that I used to think about it—how they felt the change. These trees had grown in one place, with the arc of the sun, the prevailing wind, and the lie of the land always constant. What did they sense of me?
Every day I misted my trees with rainwater, and angled them for the first sun. I tried to learn the signs of mildew or blight or disease, even though they were all hardy survivors, and seemed oblivious to my attentions. I spent hours photographing and drawing them—trying to understand their essential natures, and read the way the world had weathered them. True bonsai aims to accentuate these signs. I would nurture some branches, prune or wire others, or even graft them in different places—not trying to change the trees but to refine them.
I persevered for years, but slowly the feeling grew that I was rooted in place with them; in my head I wanted other branches. So I replanted them, all five that had lasted, as near as possible to where I had found them. It took weeks, but I was good at the process by then. All are surviving still, or were last time I visited.
I’ll always wonder. What was it for them—just another growth ring? Did that time in my world make any impression on their lifespan? Or was it just a tic—a moment of discomfort?
Maybe. But in my head there is a whole haunted forest of trees that makes me feel like a giant.