flatwhite.net

Marketing calls it the city of sails, but this city is about soil. You can smell it when you arrive, crumbling and moist, even above the steam rising from the asphalt.

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.